But the two-senators-per-state system has also had some totally unintended consequences, and only recently have I begun to understand that it’s these unintended consequences—even more than the founders’ anti-democratic intentions—that, in the 19th Century, began building out the country in the politically warped manner that has given us the particularly anti-democratic conditions that we have to struggle with today. The country, that is, as we and not the founders know it.
The constitutional historian Jack Rakove, in his recent essay on the electoral college, refers to scholarship by Charles Stewart III of MIT and Barry Weingast of Stanford’s Hoover Institute, published back in 1992, showing certain western states as, in origin, what Rakove, Stewart, and Weingast call “rotten boroughs.” (The paper, “Stacking the Senate,” is paywalled, but here it is, just in case.) The evocative term “rotten borough” is drawn from a situation in the 18th- and 19th-century British parliamentary system, where some election districts had very few people living in them, yet sent representatives to the House of Commons anyway. Such boroughs’ few voters were subservient to local figures powerful in one of the national parties, and would vote how they were told, so the seat could be “won” by anybody the party decided to award it to. The corruption involved came under attack in the 1830 Reform Bill and was on its way out by the 1860’s.
On its way out in Britain, that is. What Rakove, Stewart, and Weingast are saying is that even as the old British system was abolished, a move in the U.S. to create a new type of rotten borough, by forming new low-population states of the Union, took off in the 1860’s, ‘70’s, and ‘80’s. We’re talking here about Wyoming, Idaho, and North Dakota, among others—exactly the kind of western state that critics of the two-senators-per-state system complain has created the current anti-democratic overrepresentation of a partisan minority in national government at the direct expense of majority rule.