We analyze the optimal size of a congress in a representative democracy. We take an epistemic view where voters decide on a binary issue with one ground truth outcome, and each voter votes correctly according to their competence levels in $[0, 1]$. Assuming that we can sample the best experts to form an epistemic congress, we find that the optimal congress size should be linear in the population size. This result is striking because it holds even when allowing the top representatives to be accurate with arbitrarily high probabilities. We then analyze real world data, finding that the actual sizes of congresses are much smaller than the optimal size our theoretical results suggest. We conclude by analyzing under what conditions congresses of sub-optimal sizes would still outperform direct democracy, in which all voters vote.

翻译：我们分析代议制民主国家的大会的最佳规模。 我们从迷思的角度来看待选民决定一个二进制问题,有一个地面真相结果,每个选民的投票都按照他们的能力水平正确进行[$0,1]$]。假设我们可以对最好的专家进行抽样,以组成具有代表性的大会,我们发现最佳的大会规模在人口规模上应该是线性的。这一结果令人吃惊,因为它即使允许高层代表以武断的高度概率来准确度。然后我们分析真实的世界数据,发现实际的大会规模远远小于我们理论结果所显示的最佳规模。我们最后通过分析在什么条件下,低于最理想规模的大会仍然会超过直接民主,让所有选民投票。