Is there not any wisdom to giving rural areas a counterweight to heavily populated urban areas?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...
The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate.
This is known as the Connecticut Compromise[0] and, if it had not been adopted, we likely wouldn't have had a Constitution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecticut_Compromise
Edit: Added detail WRT the Connecticut Compromise.
The wisdom of the Senate was quite literal--30-year minimum age limit, 6-year terms, and an expectation that states would send elder statesmen as it was legislatures that selected their senators. As Alexis De Tocqueville described it,
> At a few yards' distance from this spot is the door of the Senate, which contains within a small space a large proportion of the celebrated men of America. Scarcely an individual is to be perceived in it who does not recall the idea of an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.
> The founders thought so. It's called the US Senate.
No, they were trying throw a bone to states like Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey, which were land-locked out of Western expansion. It was the more 'rural' states that actually preferred to balance Congressional power on population.
[ed: As the more rural states saw their own populations likely to increase over time. The Senate's existence had absolutely nothing to do about balancing rural vs urban interests].
As GP said above -- a counterweight to to heavily populated areas. Which the more rural areas were at the time.
The more rural states (like Virginia at the time) had most of the population, which is why they preferred representation based on population.
The argument was one of population (whether current or expected), as writings by all involved in it will tell you explicitly.
Regardless, the US Senate was created with two senators from each state provided equal representation to each state in that house.
Which was and still is, a counterweight to heavily populated areas. Rural or urban really doesn't make a difference.
Edit: Clarified rural vs. urban importance WRT US Senate representation.
I think there's a lot of wisdom in protecting the rights of various minorities of all sorts of types, but a) that's a general problem we should solve, and I don't see why urban/rural is a special case b) that's generally solved by either adding supermajority requirements or adding structural protections for certain groups, not by weighting people's votes and flipping who's the majority and who's the minority.
It has nothing to do with urban/rural. The United States is a federation of separate legal jurisdictions (states). The House of Representatives has seats aligned with “one person, one vote” and the Senate is aligned with “one state, one vote” in an attempt to balance these interests.
The obvious consequence is that federal legislation will only move forward when most states and most people are in agreement — which I think is the intended outcome. This is often framed as “rural voters have more influence” but this is over-simplified: you need agreement from both houses to legislate. Rural voters can’t push their agenda any more than urban voters, but less populous states effectively get a little extra veto authority.
Besides, states are quite free to exercise their authority and many have large, active governments. Californians may be happy with their state government, but I’m not sure many smaller states would agree that their large population entitles them to impose their will on other states.
The fact that this manifests in the electoral college is weird, but that’s a separate issue from the core argument.
We have a two party system, it's a matter of a controlling majority seeing the advantage in DC and PR being states like they did with AK and HI.
If you haven't been to DC or looked closely at a map, it might surprise you that the vast majority of it is an ordinary city with residences and shops and schools, and the seat of federal government is a pretty small area. I didn't actually realize that until poking at a map and talking with friends who have lived in DC - I had the impression that DC was already small and most non-federal stuff was across the border in Virginia or Maryland, but that isn't actually true. DC is larger in area than SF!
(Also, federal districts like DC are relatively rare: most other countries don't have them. The hypothesis may not have changed since the founding, but we have a couple of centuries of experimental data now. Even the UN has buildings in Manhattan that are part of Manhattan and the US and not a separate UN exclave - I can and do bike down First Avenue, with UN buildings on both sides, without going through a border crossing.)
Are you under the mistaken impression that DC Statehood would give DC undue influence over the Federal government?
The reason this is a difficult question is that, while the US is a federation of states, there's no real guidance on what a state should be. The idea of "one person, one vote" is pretty clear. We can debate what the voting age should be, whether non-citizens should vote / what type of residence status you should have, whether your right to vote can be rescinded as a criminal punishment, etc., but we're starting from a common framework. Even in cases where we know that certain sub-populations have higher birth rates than others, there's no serious proposal to try to "correct" for that effect, because it's not seen as incorrect.
The principle of "one state, one vote" has no corresponding mental model for us to follow. If the US had no states, and someone said "States are a good idea," how would you draw the boundaries? Why would you draw a line across the Dakotas but not across California? Why would you separate Wyoming and Colorado? Why would Manhattan and Long Island be assigned to New York?
(Note that residents of a state have very limited ability to have opinions about their state boundaries - new states require "the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Concretely, if Californian voters wanted to split North and South California, but senators from other states said no because it would change the balance of power in the Senate, it wouldn't happen.)
And again - what is special about rural voters and only rural voters that they need this system? Why not give renters an extra veto, or the working class, or people in service industries, or racial minorities, or religious minorities, or field-of-employment minorities, or whomever? You can do this straightforwardly by having a Senate with either elected or appointed members from specific constituencies.
Hong Kong, for instance, elects half its legislators from "geographical constituencies" and the other half from "functional constituencies": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency_(Hong_... These are generally industries, but one of them is specifically a representative of rural interests.
Because of specific sectarian conflicts, Lebanon's legislature is divided equally between Christians and Muslims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Lebanon#Allocati... And they have a concrete reason to want this (it was negotiated as part of a peace settlement after a 15-year civil war). I don't think the US has anywhere near as strong of a reason to privilege rural voters.
Also - the current system doesn't even privilege rural voters. It privileges rural voters in states without significant numbers of urban voters. There are tons of rural voters in states like New York and California who do not get to control their state government because major cities are more populous. California is even the biggest agricultural exporter among the states, so it's hard to say that the current system actually does give rural voters extra veto authority.
All it does is what you said - it gives less populous states extra veto authority. This is the same axis as "one person, one vote," just in the opposite direction. So what's the reason for it?
If we start considering the people living in an area as the likely maintainers and experts of their field, I could imagine that we might want to assign the importance of votes based on the total importance of the "produced goods" in that area. That way these "maintainers" have a say in politics relative to their actual importance in society. I guess?
I don't have a good sense of how well this works in practice, and of course it is confounded by Hong Kong being a very unusual jurisdiction to start with. But yeah, I think it would be a more principled approach than having this one feature in our government to nominally give extra voting rights to rural populations in particular. It's difficult to figure out what those importances really are and it's unlikely everyone will agree, but I think everyone can agree that the answer is not that rural voters are the only special constituency.
Alternatively, there's a simpler argument - those things that are important in society are important because everyone cares about it, and therefore an urban legislator is unlikely to say "We don't need farms," because the urban legislator needs to eat. If the agricultural constituency says they need some measure, they already have the ability to convince the general voting public in proportion to their importance in society.
(Also, it's not like our current system effectively gives rural voters an additional voice. California is our top agricultural exporter, but it tends to vote in the opposite way from the smaller-population states. And even if you did give a specific voice to California's agricultural interests, it's highly likely that they'd disagree with the policies advocated by smaller-population states to reduce immigration and increase deportations, for instance.)
Who decides what's important? Who decides the relative importance of "maintainers?"
Even if that were a good idea (I don't think it is), there's no reasonable way to make something like that work.