“One person, one vote” is often the rallying cry for democratic reform, suggesting everyone should get an equal say in their government.
Yet in some of the oldest and largest democracies, some votes are worth far more than others by design. A Wyoming voter, for instance, is significantly overrepresented compared with a California voter. Each state has two U.S. senators, but California has 66 times more people.
How much does it matter? According to a recent study of decades of data, from the U.S. and eight other countries, it matters a lot when it comes to money.
“Other things being equal, the most overrepresented states or provinces can expect to receive more than twice the federal funding per capita as the most underrepresented states or provinces,” according to Tiberiu Dragu, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois who studied the issue with Jonathan Rodden, of Stanford University. In some examples from South America, they found a funding difference of five to one.
Their study, “Representation and Redistribution in Federations,” is one of the few to examine the issue over multiple countries.
The authors used three decades of data from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.S. All are democracies structured as federations, in which partially self-governing states or provinces are united under a central government.
They account for numerous other factors that have been suggested as contributing to the imbalances in federal funding—among them population density, poverty, economic development, location, and past political power.
The relationship between representation and per-capita funding, however, “cannot be explained away,” Dragu says. In all nine countries, “the story remains the same: Representatives of overrepresented provinces are able to bargain for a disproportionate share of the budget,” he says.
Or as the authors write: “Our analysis indicates that the rules of representation are indeed highly consequential. Controlling for a variety of country- and province-level factors and using a variety of estimation techniques, we show that overrepresented provinces in political unions around the world are rather dramatically favored in the distribution of resources.”
The study focused on established federations because they almost always involve some form of unequal representation, often resulting from the political bargain struck at the nation’s founding, Dragu says. The imbalance therefore is accepted by the citizens and “shrugged off as a quirky and perhaps inconsequential legacy of a proud history,” he says.
The study, however, “might have important implications in a wide range of settings where the foundational bargain is neither old nor widely revered,” Dragu says. They also could challenge assumptions that such unequal representation is necessary as a “pathway to peace and stability,” such as in Afghanistan and Iraq, or the European Union, he says.
“An important open question is whether the stability of such federations is threatened if citizens of underrepresented regions—or ethnic groups, or countries—must provide large, permanent subsidies to those with greater representation.”
