Rural Legal Scholarship: Power and Powerlessness in Local Government: A Reply to Professor Swan

Here are the first few paragraphs of Prof. Ann Eisenberg's article in the Harvard Law Review Forum, 135 Harv. L. Rev. F. 173 (2022): 

Are rural communities powerful or powerless? This question arises regularly in today’s national public and scholarly discourses. The collective interest in the issue of rural power stems in large part from hotly contested national and state elections in which strong, polarized political preferences play out along geographic lines. Election maps show us how consistently sparsely populated regions, in which people live in small towns or remote counties, emerge an indignant-conservative red. Big cities, by contrast, predictably materialize with the forbearing-liberal blue. Especially with ever-polarized public health measures implicated by the ongoing pandemic--which has affected matters as intimate as whether face masks are required or not and where--we are all acutely cognizant of whether we live in a red state or a blue state, or a red county or a blue municipality.

These enduring, polarized political patterns have drawn attention to an “urban-rural divide” in politics, prompting inquiries into how the nation arrived at this point and what the implications are. One central implication is the inordinate power that residents of sparsely populated regions wield in various political bodies, including the Electoral College and legislatures at the federal and state level. For instance, because of the distribution of electoral votes per population in the Electoral College, “one Wyoming voter has roughly the same vote power as four New York voters [in presidential elections].” In this sense, more sparsely populated communities are powerful to a degree that threatens representative democracy itself in a disturbing system of rule by a predominantly older, whiter, more conservative minority. Commentary focused on this aspect of the question of rural power tends to conclude that rural communities are indeed powerful--and dangerously so.

Yet, while the political urban-rural divide reveals the rural as dangerously powerful, the economic urban-rural divide reveals the rural as the underdog. Larger cities dominate the economy.

The article to which Eisenberg is responding is Prof. Sarah Swan's, "Constitutional Off-Loading at the City Limits."