Saturday, May 19, 2012

Farmers Didn't Like Big Cities: Corruption in the Capitals

John Sides at The Monkey Cage posts on a study which shows the level of governmental corruption is higher when the state capital is more isolated. One factor is there's more news media coverage when the big media are closer to the capital, therefore less corruption.

Thinking about our capitals, most of them are not in the principal cities of the states.  I presume it's because there was a tug of war between the rural districts and the urban areas.  The farmers didn't want to add to the power of New York City or Philadelphia or Boston by making it the capital, so the compromise, given the power of the rural areas, was to make a smaller city the capital.  Today we just think that Albany, Harrisburg, and Springfield are naturally the capitals, without realizing the path by which they got there.

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