World Parliament: The "Numbers Game"

Actually, the question of global representation is not a game. Quite to the contrary: like in any modern-day democracy, it is one of the most important and far-reaching decisions that has to be taken when weighing the relative "voice" given to each individual person, country, region, continent. 

When one tries to work out a balanced distribution of global representation, however, the task quickly turns into a never-ending "game" of compromises and alternatives. 

In 1950, The People's World Convention was conceived as an assembly of national delegations elected on the basis of "one delegate per one million inhabitants". Today, with over 6 billion people living in the world, this would add up to a mammoth parliament of over 6000 delegates! This wouldn't work. Worse still: more than fifty percent of the delegates would come from the ten most populous countries alone - nothing that we would consider very democratic or representative nowadays. 

On the other hand, it' s also quite inconceivable to grant the same number of delegates to each modern nation-state, irrespective of the size of its population: nobody would dream of putting the relative strength of, say, the Chinese population, on an equal footing with dozens of tiny island-states. 

What about the question of territorial size: does it have to be taken into consideration as well? 

And what about economic and/or military strength: are some mighty countries going to accept an equal representation with some "underdeveloped" poor nations? 

Even before going into such tricky details, a crucial question will be the overall size of a functional World Parliament: how big can a group of people be and still debate and parley in a reasonable, sensible fashion? To take a few examples of today's biggest working National Parliaments, or "Lower Houses": in the United Kingdom there are 659 MP's, in Germany 656, in Italy 630. So, for all practical purposes, and judging from these modern-day examples, around 700 Members of Parliament would be about the upper limit of what a World Parliament-to-be should consist of. 

One way of getting closer to a balanced global representation is the so-called Penrose Square-Root Method: You take the number of a country's population in millions - and its square-root gives you the number of representatives that country is entitled to. Based on the national population figures (taken from Wikipedia "List of countries by population"  as per May 2010), this method would add up to a total of 744 representatives - or, when allowing for the smallest countries to be represented by at least one representative, to 763. There would still result a certain number of inequalities - this time stemming from the fact that regions with a large number of countries (irrespective of their overall population) are over-represented in comparison to regions with only a few countries. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa, with 48 nations and some 830 MIO people, would have twice as many representatives as the whole Indian sub-continent, which consists of only 8 nations but has an overall population of well over one billion people. For the same reason, China and the U.S.A. would be grossly under-represented. 

To smoothen out this new inequality, all the present nation-states could be grouped into nine more or less homogeneous World Regions (homogeneous in respect to their common culture, history, religion, and geographical affinity) - with each of the World Regions having right to 81 representatives in total. (As to this "weighted" allocation of seats per nation, see attached calculation.)

The nine regions in turn could then be grouped into three World Groups (with a total of 243 representatives each) - with each World Group acting as a voting block within the World Parliament (see attached voting example).

The nine Regions and three Groups could be the following: