Apportionment in the United States


Authors

Taylor Savell is a policy and research analyst at the National Conference on Citizenship. Taylor is a 2020 graduate of Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and a former Beeck Center Student Analyst. Taylor contributed most of the archival research for this project, collecting and cataloguing a wide array of primary sources pertaining to the history of congressional apportionment. Follow her @TaylorLSavell.

Kevin Ackermann is a research assistant at the Disinformation Action Lab at Data & Society. Kevin is a 2020 graduate of Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology masters program. He created the USApportionment.org website and provided supplemental archival research and writing for the project. Follow him @keviriah.

Nora Ma is a Beeck Center Student Analyst and will be graduating from Georgetown University in May 2021. Nora contributed supplementary research for this project, examining historical changes in the size of the House, the underlying legislation that drove these changes, and state admittances into the Union.

Advisors

The project was done under the mentorship of Dan Bouk of Colgate University and Data & Society and Denice Ross of the National Conference on Citizenship and the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Emily Karavitch of Data & Society for her help organizing the primary sources page of the USApportionment.org website and Kevin Soo of Civis Analytics for creating the site’s data visualizations. The authors would also like to acknowledge the contributions of the following individuals for their input and feedback while producing this site: Jeffrey Wice, Margo Anderson, Steve Jost, Terri Ann Lowenthal, Cori Zarek, Indivar Dutta-Gupta, Jae June Lee, and Cara Brumfield. They would also like to acknowledge Katherine Mollan and the Center for Legislative Archives at the National Archives, Lynn Smith and the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, Randy Sowell and Laurie Austin of the Harry S. Truman Library, Lindsay Hagar and the Tennessee State Library & Archives, Kayla Barrett and the Georgia Archives, and the California State Library.

Please contact Taylor Savell (tls99@georgetown.edu) and Kevin Ackermann (kevin@datasociety.net) with any questions.