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The House of Representatives has 435 normal representatives, and the Senate has 100. I think that deliberation and decision-making should happen in small groups. Now, it is true that in the present system, actually most of the discussion and deliberative decision-making happens in smaller groups; in congressional committees, and among the senior members of each political party. But the way this is accomplished is no good, because the voters don't get to choose who gets on the committees or which politicians will be in charge of the parties. So you end up with situations like when some issue that you care about is being decided by a small senate committee, none of whose members are your representative (and who won't even read your emails because you are not their constituent). So, I should add that I think that decision-making power should reside in small groups who are directly chosen by the voters.
So, I think we should replace things like the House of Representatives and the Senate with small groups of size close to 11 people.
There are two main benefits to this. First, you'll get better deliberation. With only 11 representatives in the House, each representatives would have time to spend many hours each month talking to each other representative. They would be able to have discussions with one another about political philosophy; they would be able to go into great detail during discussions; they would get to know each other's points of view very well.
Second, the citizens will pay more attention to the legislature. Right now, there's only about 11 or so congresspeople who are consistently talked about in the national media anyway. So, it seems like the people's attentional focus only has "room" for a few congresspeople. In addition to making it easier to follow the legislature, small groups will make the citizens more interested in the legislature. Once the public gets to know the personalities of those 11 people, everything will seem more dramatic -- the doings of congress will become interesting in the same way that a soap opera is, that is, because it is interesting to hear about arguments and changing alliances between people whom you know a lot about. So, both because it is easier and because it is more interesting, with small groups, the people will pay more attention to the legislature.
