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A hypothetical situation; An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated. The amendment prese
by zaroth 7y ago
A hypothetical situation;
An amendment is proposed on the floor of the House to change the formula in a bill for how funding is allocated.
The amendment presents a pro-urban allocation which provides a greater share of funding for larger cities compared to a baseline per-capita allocation.
Urban center representatives stand up and argue how their cities need a higher reimbursement rate because the issue at hand is costlier to fix or more prevalent in their environment.
Rural representatives stand up and argue they need the baseline funding to run an effective program.
A vote is taken, and 54% of votes approve the amendment, urban center reps effectively pooling their votes to enact the funding paradigm that most benefited their constituents.
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The moral of the story is that it’s a lot more complicated than 1 person 1 vote.
Often times policies may benefit a rural area over and urban environment or vice versa. One type of community benefiting and the expense of another. Cities already carry a massive voting advantage, because, that’s where most people live!
When bills pass on a majority vote, urban already wins over rural every time. The rural areas maybe can form blocks to help push otherwise divided city reps one way or another, but policy debate is already dominated by urban voters, despite the claim of urban votes “counting less”. The simple math belies the reality that urban center reps vote for pro-urban national policies and the rural states with 1 rep sit on the sidelines.
The last place these votes matter, even in the slightest, is in the EC in a closely contested election, and in the Senate. Frankly I’m not convinced more populism is any benefit, or that cities are particularly hurting from a lack of representation.
- positr0n 7y agoThe thing I've never understood about this argument is why the urban/rural divide is so special that it needs special rules? There are a bajillion other types of ways to categorize people that there is a majority and a minority besides the population density of their state.
- adamson 7y agoRight? As I was reading GP, all I could think is that there are a million other instances of an issue having two interested but opposed parties, one being larger than the other, and in advanced pluralistic democracies, we generally find ways to balance the two interests that don’t involve completely hosing one party. I recognize that the Electoral College was developed in a context where people were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, but it’s a drastic solution to a not altogether exceptional problem.
- krapp 7y agoThe city/rural divide in American political rhetoric is mostly a populist dog-whistle for the conflict between secular progressivism and Christian conservative identity politics. There are legitimate issues with agricultural funding, infrastructure and whatnot that fall along those lines but mostly when people say they don't want "small state X run by California" or "New York" what they mean is they don't want Federal laws passed which force those small states to adopt more progressive or leftist policies than their local culture would be comfortable with.
- zaroth 7y agoIt’s a hypothetical, of course it’s contrived. Thankfully things break down much more chaotically than just an urban/rural split! That’s not to say there is not a general effect present. Here’s another way to think of it. How many congressional votes does Los Angeles get before it’s people are adequately represented? Right now I believe it’s 18. Even at that level their vote per capita is technically 3:1 less powerful than a person in WY. But whose interests are being served better in Congress? Is the population of LA really disenfranchised in Congress due to WY getting a representative, or because LA didn’t get 30? There’s a power effect which is very much non-linear due to the individual votes in Congress being decided on a win/loss by majority or super-majority and this effect already greatly benefits these so-called “disenfranchised” voters.