The Constitution of 1965

By Herbert F. Janick

In the final chapter of his standard history of Connecticut published in 1961, Albert E. Van Dusen, the state historian, noted what he regarded as Connecticut's most serious contemporary problems. At the top of his list of critical issues was an archaic system of legislative representation that permitted a tiny minority of rural voters to dominate the General Assembly. Approximately ten percent of the state's voters who lived in small towns could elect a majority of the seats in the Lower House of the General Assembly. The Senate, though not so severely distorted, had districts that varied in size by almost 100,000 population. "Certainly," Van Dusen concluded, "the present system in both houses makes a mockery of the word 'democracy.'”

Five years later, on January 1, 1966, a new Connecticut constitution that mandated equality of representation was put into operation. The road to more equitable apportionment had been a long and difficult one. The Constitution of 1818, which disestablished the Congregational church, had survived with minor changes for 150 years. Based on a system that assigned one or two representatives in the Lower House to each town or city regardless of size, the Constitution gave inordinate power to Republican-dominated rural areas—where population had been steadily in decline in the nineteenth century. An extreme example of the inequality of this arrangement was the ability of the town of Union, with a population of barely 300 to cancel out the votes of Hartford with a population of 200,000. The most serious effort to alter this imbalance, a constitution drawn up by a special Convention in 1902, was subsequently rejected by Connecticut's voters.

The Supreme Court of the United States, via several key decisions in the early 1960s requiring state legislatures to comply with the "one man-one vote" principle, was the catalyst for reform in Connecticut. Raymond Baldwin, former governor and Supreme Court justice, headed a bipartisan Convention of eighty-four members—forty-two from each party—which met during the summer of 1965 at the Old State House in Hartford. The Convention's product, the Constitution of 1965, was overwhelmingly endorsed by the voters. The Constitution set the number of senators at thirty-six and representatives at 177—reduced to 151 after the 1970 census. Each Senate District contained approximately 84,000 people, while every member of the Lower House represented a population of about 20,000. For the future, a variance of more than one percent in the population of legislative districts was not permitted. Furthermore, annual sessions of the General Assembly were decreed.

Ironically, reapportionment has not benefited Connecticut cities. For decades, when the bulk of the state's population resided in urban centers, the legislature was dominated by rural towns. Now Connecticut politics are dominated by the suburbs, where population has skyrocketed in the past thirty years. According to the census of 1970, fifty percent of the House districts and fifty-nine percent of the Senate districts are predominantly suburban in character.

For Further Reading

Duane Lockhard devotes two chapters in New England Politics (Princeton, New Jersey, 1959), to Connecticut legislative deficiencies before the Constitution of 1965. Neal R. Peirce has a solid section on Connecticut in The New England States (New York, 1976), appraising the governmental changes that have taken place since the Constitution of 1965 was adopted.

* Entry under revision.