Is data available on how many congressmen served in each of the sessions of congress? When did we start having 535?
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Do you want the answers to include representatives from the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico? These representatives have official status, but cannot vote in full-house votes.– JasperSep 30, 2015 at 19:32
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2 Answers
The size of the senate has changed with the number of states included in the union. The first congress had 26 senators, the second had 29 (one seat from Pennsylvania was vacant). After trawling through those Wikipedia entries (as well as a good one on the History of the United States House of Representatives), I was able to put together the following data:
Year # Sens. # Reps. Total
1789 26 65 91
1791 29 69 98
1793 30 105 135
1795 32 105 137
1803 34 141 175
1811 36 141 177
1813 36 182 218
1815 38 183 221
1817 42 185 227
1819 46 187 233
1821 48 213 261
1833 48 240 288
1835 52 242 294
1843 52 223 275
1845 56 225 281
1847 60 227 287
1849 62 227 289
1851 62 233 295
1853 62 234 296
1857 64 237 301
1859 66 237 303
1861 55 178 233
1863 52 183 235
1865 54 191 245
1867 66 193 259
1869 74 243 317
1873 73 293 366
1875 76 293 396
1883 76 325 401
1889 88 330 418
1891 88 333 421
1893 88 357 445
1895 90 357 447
1897 86 357 443
1899 88 357 445
1901 89 386 475
1903 90 386 476
1909 92 386 478
1911 95 391 486
1913 96 435 531
1957 98 435 533
1959 100 436 536
1961 100 437 537
1963 100 435 535
I have omitted years where the number of senators / representatives remained unchanged from the previous session. Some senate seats were left vacant for the entirety of some sessions; if so those seats were not counted (they were counted if they were not vacant at any point during the session). I did not bother counting any vacancies in the house, instead I relied solely on the numbers reported on the linked Wikipedia article.
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In some years, the number of House representatives has been increased slightly to resolve rounding-error (or similar) problems in the Census.– JasperSep 30, 2015 at 19:34
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As Jeff Lambert noted, the number of seats in both houses have changed over time due to increases and new laws. The wikipedia sources he links are great but I also just wanted to add this breakdown from the house's actual website as well as this one from the senate's.
We discovered these sources while building these interactive seating charts because we wanted a way to verify that the politicians we had for a given year/session were the correct number. And, actually we do have data going back 1789 specifically for the US legislature and would love to extend the visualization (and exports) if people are interested!
