Certainly not larger than the 66-70 MPs it can have under the current system. Increasing it by 50% to over 100 or even by 11-15 as the PM would like to is out of the question. Justifying a bigger National Assembly (NA) because our population has doubled since 1968 is problematic for at least two reasons. One is that according to Google or an interpolation of decennial census figures the number of inhabitants in Mauritius has in fact increased by only 58%. Two is that the size of our NA rose by 75% between 1963 and 1967 while the number of citizens increased by a mere 9%. Interestingly using the 1963 as base year yields a parliament of 70 which is how big it is today.
It's way better that we compare our population/MP ratio to those of other countries. On this yardstick we do very poorly – more than 140 parliaments out of 195 do better than us. This is precious information as we can use it to find an optimal size for our NA. That's done in the chart and we've highlighted Denmark because 40 is kind of a natural number for us as this is how many MPs we sent in 1959 and 1963 when we had single-member constituencies.
The number of electors is not a useful measure either as this can increase with policy decisions – like it did in 1975 when the legal age was reduced by three years. Plus we shouldn't forget that the number of Indian electors increased by half a billion from 1977 to 2014 without any increase in the number of MPs. Besides we definitely don't want more MPs when we look at their average output especially when we know that each one costs us at least Rs2.6 million per year. What we need instead are recall elections.
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