Cube root law

This article is about a trend observed in national legislature sizes relative to the country's population. For the scientific law, see Square–cube law.

The cube root law is an observation in political science that the number of members of a unicameral legislature, or of the lower house of a bicameral legislature, is about the cube root of the population being represented. The rule was devised by Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera in his 1972 paper "The size of national assemblies".

The cube root law has been cited in proposals for legislative resizing in the United States and in the 2020 Italian constitutional referendum.

Large deviations between the data and the cube root curve, the inclusion of authoritarian governments in the data, as well as problems with how the cube root curve is derived from underlying postulates, have led researchers to question the cube root law.

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