We don’t move state capitals around in this country very often, or at least we haven’t since the 19th century. Wherever we planted a state’s flag in 1820 or 1880, in most cases that’s where it remains now, despite the occasional effort to create a new seat of state government.
So it’s interesting to notice that countries around the world are currently engaged in a round of capital relocation, a phenomenon carefully documented by Filipe Campante, an economist at Johns Hopkins University. Indonesia has inaugurated a brand-new capital city several hundred miles from the 11 million inhabitants of Jakarta. Egypt is creating a new capital city 30 miles from Cairo. South Korea is making similar plans.
All of these moves are reminders of the massive relocation Brazil undertook in the 1960s, abandoning its historic capital of Rio de Janeiro and constructing a new home for its national government hundreds of miles away in the sparsely populated interior. Brasilia hasn’t exactly been an unqualified success: Most of the millions of people who’ve lived there have complained that it is sterile and uninviting. But there it stands, and there it will remain.
Campante has some clear ideas about why governments do this even though it costs many billions of dollars. He speculates that their leaders want to escape a metropolis that has become overcrowded and difficult to live in. Creating a capital in the middle of nowhere is a way of jump-starting an underdeveloped region of the country. And he suggests that moving government out of the metropolis may be a way to avoid unrest and potential violent protest, creating “insulation from the pressures that large numbers of people place on government.”
But Campante has some more provocative conclusions about how this kind of political uprooting may affect the sort of government a polity gives itself. In a paper written with Quoc-Anh Do of Monash University in Australia, Campante offers the troubling hypothesis that placing the capital in a provincial backwater reduces the amount of information citizens can acquire about what the government is doing, and ultimately leads to increased malfeasance in the absence of a healthy flow of information: “Voters who live far from the capital are less knowledgeable and interested in state politics, and they turn out less in state elections. We also find that isolated capitals are associated with more money in state-level campaigns, and worse public good provision.”
Campante and Do tell us this is not just a problem for developing countries. “Isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across U.S. states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability,” they write. “Put simply, watchdogs need to bark louder when there is a higher chance that people are not paying much attention.”
This is a remarkable finding. Could it be true? Is there a reliable way of assessing the evidence?
The United States is actually a pretty good laboratory for investigating their theory. We’ve done capitals both ways, putting them in a state’s biggest city or sticking them in small towns in the boondocks. We’ve made capital cities out of Boston, Denver and Atlanta, to name just a few big ones. But we’ve also stuck capitol buildings in Jefferson City, Mo.; Tallahassee, Fla.; Springfield, Ill.; and quite a few smaller cities more or less like them. How much difference does this make?
Some of the secondary cities that become capitals turn into relative basket cases, such as Topeka, Kan., and Trenton, N.J. Some that seem poised to do well, like Michigan’s capital of Lansing, mysteriously fail to thrive. But other secondary capital cities do remarkably well. Austin’s status as a capital originally served the purpose of allowing the state of Texas to avoid choosing between the much larger Dallas and Houston. In recent years, Austin has been one of the nation’s biggest boomtowns.
Those are economic development questions. The governmental issues are perhaps more important. Here a little history is worth recalling. Back in the mid-20th century, before one person, one vote became a constitutional requirement thanks to the Supreme Court, most legislatures in this country were dominated by members who came from rural reaches of their states and a stretch of three or four months in a backwater capital was a chance to act like they were on vacation. They were, to exaggerate only modestly, a bit like conventioneers on an extended spree.
It wasn’t good government — it couldn’t be. These legislative sessions were largely invisible to the general public. Lobbyists could throw money at members in all sorts of questionable ways with the knowledge that it was unlikely anybody would find out. These legislatures were not only vulnerable to influence peddlers but largely immune to majority sentiment in the state.
States that conducted their government in big cities were not so susceptible to this form of mischief. More citizens and news outlets were watching in Boston or Denver than in Jefferson City or Springfield. I’m not so naive as to argue that state government in Boston or Denver was ever fundamentally pure. But legislative conduct in those metropolitan capitals at least faced more hometown scrutiny. Politics in backwater state capitals was almost certainly dirtier. According to the research conducted by Campante and Do, it still is.
What kinds of public-policy decisions vary with the size and location of the state capital? My feeling is that big-city capitals lend themselves to a more centralized brand of political power. Massachusetts, with its government headquartered in Boston, enacted a health-care law in 2006 that served as the model for the Affordable Care Act, which became federal law a few years later. That occurred in part because Massachusetts happens to be a liberal commonwealth. But it also happened because of the concentration of media, academics and activists on the Boston scene. Lobbyists might have fought the legislation more effectively in a remote state capital, but they wouldn’t have had the same critical mass against them.
Minnesota, with its political capital in the Twin Cities, has enacted an impressive array of progressive initiatives in the last few decades. Would the same support have coalesced had the capital been Bemidji or Duluth? It’s impossible to prove, but I think the answer may be no.
The question of state capital geography leads to a whole array of interesting hypotheticals. What if New York City, rather than much-ridiculed Albany, had become the capital of its state? Would the governmental history of the last couple of centuries have turned out differently? I think it would have turned out very differently. State government, bolstered by voter attention and media coverage, would have emerged as a colossus far beyond what it could be with Albany as a capital city. The war between New York City and upstate might have been even more intense than it has been, but the city would have been a much more frequent winner.
It’s also tantalizing to speculate about what the U.S. might have been like had the national capital remained in New York, rather than what was then the wilderness of Washington, D.C. I think we can say that the nation would have evolved more like France, where Paris is the political, commercial and cultural locus of the nation. For more than two centuries, in good times and bad, Paris has dictated the affairs and decisions of the entire country. One can make the same point about London as the dominant presence and locus of decision for all of Great Britain. We didn’t do that. We left the cultural and commercial center in New York and built a political capital in the hinterland. We didn’t get the centralization Alexander Hamilton would have wanted. We got more of a Jeffersonian fragmentation.
That leads me to one generalization I’m fairly comfortable making: If you’re a believer in strong central government, place your capital in the big city. If you prefer diversity, libertarian politics and occasional chaos, put it out in the country.
