I'd like to see that there is an effective communication going on between citizens and their representatives.
Right now, with the current system, I see a few ways to communicate.
Physical letter: form letter or nothing
Phone: automated system recording
Email: form letter or auto-subscribed to email list
Facebook: Ignored, form statement, or banned
Twitter: Ignored, form statement, or banned
What I do see that works is what lobbyists do: they have face-time with their legislators. The current contention rates of up to 500k people per representative makes that avenue nearly impossible currently. Unless you happen to get a glimpse at a talk, you have close to 0% chance of talking with your rep.
With a contention ratio of 30k to 50k/rep, would make meeting your representative much more likely. It would also reduce money effects, since now elections are a local thing instead of a moneyball contest.
As I said, that was definitely a devil's advocate position, and on this I very much agree with you in principle but not on approach. The approach I would rather see is to devolve power the federal government has managed to aggregate back down to the states, and hopefully even more local levels.
I've commented on this before; I'll just link those instead of repeating myself:
I'd like to see that there is an effective communication going on between citizens and their representatives.
Right now, with the current system, I see a few ways to communicate.
What I do see that works is what lobbyists do: they have face-time with their legislators. The current contention rates of up to 500k people per representative makes that avenue nearly impossible currently. Unless you happen to get a glimpse at a talk, you have close to 0% chance of talking with your rep.With a contention ratio of 30k to 50k/rep, would make meeting your representative much more likely. It would also reduce money effects, since now elections are a local thing instead of a moneyball contest.