Yes it does, at least in the sense that "rural" means "low population density" or "low ratio of population to Congressional seats".
>[T]he Senate may be the least democratic legislative chamber in any developed nation.
>In the last few years, 41 senators representing as little as a third of the nation’s population have frequently blocked legislation, as the filibuster (or the threat of it) has become a routine part of Senate business.
>In this country, the ratio between Wyoming’s representation and California’s is 66 to 1.
This means that if you are a software or computer engineer living in California, as is the norm here on Hacker News, you have 1/66 the Senatorial voting power as anyone at all who happens to live in Wyoming.
>This pattern has policy consequences, notably ones concerning the environment. “Nations with malapportioned political systems have lower gasoline taxes (and lower pump prices) than nations with more equitable representation of urban constituencies,” two political scientists, J. Lawrence Broz and Daniel Maliniak, wrote in a recent study. Such countries also took longer to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, if they ratified it at all. These differences were, they wrote, a consequence of the fact that “rural voters in industrialized countries rely more heavily on fossil fuels than urban voters.”
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/11/us/politics/de...
Emphases mine. But please, explain to me why the voting majority should be consistently denied implementation of their ideas just to cater to people who happen to live where there aren't many other people? That's before we consider the influence of money on elections.
There's a reason we're a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. Pure democracy would inevitably lead to a tyranny of the majority. Nine US states have over half the US population. Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
Why? "States" are arbitrary lines drawn in the soil. Should everyone who wants more power just secede and form their own state, ad absurdum?
Besides which, none of the actually existing countries with proportional-representation democracy have sent their rural regions to hell in a handbasket. You can't keep using a thought experiment as a reason to consider catastrophic outcomes from non-regionalist democracy plausible when the empirical evidence runs against it.
And, just to finish off, there's the issue that the current "states" don't even make sense as regional divisions. The citizens of rural upstate New York have far more in common with Vermonters, Western Massachussans, and even citizens of rural Pennsylvania and Illinois than they do with citizens of New York City. Yet because of the division into states, the interests of rural New Yorkers are neglected relative to those of Vermonters just because rural New Yorkers live on the same side of the completely arbitrary border as urban New Yorkers -- even tangential and immaterial association with cities is penalized under this system!
>Would it be fair for those few states to able to completely over-ride the interests of the other 41 states in the union?
This presumes that those nine states have completely unanimous elections. It is entirely fair that elections should be fought over the issues that matter to the largest portion of the people possible, that politicians should stand for election by putting forward the most appealing rational positions, rather than by catering to a disproportionately represented minority and deliberately neglecting the majority of citizens.
Despite the constant fear-mongering of antidemocratic political philosophers, majoritarian democracy, with the rule of law enforced, has never actually resulted in the predicted rounds of war, death, famine, and pestilence. To oppose democratic rule based on violent-mob rule being a bad thing is disingenuous.
It may seem like a historical relic now, but each state joined the union under the premise (and likely binding law/treaty) of retaining some sovereignty. Each state has it's own laws, courts, police, military, etc. It's a feature, not a bug, that rural states can prevent the cities from imposing a tyranny of the majority on them at a federal level via the senate. Just as the house of representatives based on population can prevent a bunch of rural states from imposing their will on the high population ones.
Take for instance Nevada. If the majority of the population of Nevada wants legal gambling, they should be able to have it. A pure federal democracy would allow 9 states to make a law banning gambling nation wide. That's far less likely to happen in the current system as low population states have reason to band together and prevent any federal over riding of the freedom of their state's citizens to self govern.
That's true of some of the states, such as the original 13 and Texas, but it's not true of most of them. Most states never had any form of sovereignty and were just arbitrarily created divisions of territory.
Which it completely fails to do.