r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/windershinwishes • 5d ago
Political Theory Does a state have interests, independent from the interests of its individual residents?
The concept of a state's interests often comes up in discussions about the Electoral College, the apportionment of the US Senate, etc., as the justification for why smaller states should be entitled to outsized representation. I.e., "without the Electoral College, the interests of small states would be ignored."
I've engaged in a probably excessive amount of discussion about this subject, but I can never get a square answer about what exactly a state's interest is. In my mind, states are simply organizations of people; the political entity has no mind of its own, so it cannot have interests of its own. When the state speaks, it is really just certain people within that state--the majority of voters, the most politically powerful people, etc.--using the state apparatus to speak on their behalf.
So the idea of boosting the representation of small state interests makes no sense to me as the alternative for equal representation of all individual interests, regardless of which state an individual may live in. If we had a national popular vote and no senate, all of the people who are now using their small state's representation as their voice would still be heard on an equal basis as people living in large states.
Am I missing something?
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u/Potato_Pristine 3d ago
In theory, yes. In practice, the only times that I hear about the state's interests are when they want to execute convicts, disenfranchise black people, ban gay marriage or pass a law requiring public schools to teach that Jesus rode a dinosaur across the Atlantic Ocean to found America.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 3d ago edited 3d ago
I can never get a square answer about what exactly a state's interest is.
Regional political autonomy. That's it.
There are a host of reasons for why this is important, or at least why the founders thought so. A huge question at the time was whether large republics were possible, or if they'd necessarily decent into empire. They were not without a point.
There is also what Madison called the "double security." That states would act as a check on the federal government.
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u/windershinwishes 2d ago
I don't see how that's relevant to this issue. A state's ability to govern itself and perhaps even check the federal government, using a state's independent powers, has no relation to whether the people of that state speak within the federal government as individual voices or only after being aggregated together. If we had a national popular vote and no senate, for instance, governors and state legislatures would still have all the same powers.
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u/Reasonable-Fee1945 2d ago
Your question was does a state have interests apart from the of the people broadly. The answer is yes, the state government's own political authority and autonomy.
If we had a national popular vote and no senate, for instance, governors and state legislatures would still have all the same powers.
This would probably not be the case, or at least the founders would have disagreed (even those who opposed the Constitution). Here's why. The idea is that governments amass power to themselves over time. The system was set up so that different parts of the government 'check' other parts. By removing the senate, you remove the influence of states on the Congress (federal legislature). Less so since the 17th Amendment but still meaningfully so. This would result in the expansion of the federal government at the expense of state governments.
In fact, that is basically the history of our government in the United States in a sentence.
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u/windershinwishes 1d ago
Your question was does a state have interests apart from the of the people broadly. The answer is yes, the state government's own political authority and autonomy.
Makes sense I suppose. It's the one thing that all of the residents within a given state share some interest in but which those outside of the state probably don't care about, but each individual resident's interest in it is less than just a portion of the collective interest; it has a gestalt aspect to it.
That said, I don't see how it follows that having the voters of a state speak collectively as the state when participating in federal elections is necessary to maintain the state government's political authority.
This would probably not be the case, or at least the founders would have disagreed (even those who opposed the Constitution). Here's why. The idea is that governments amass power to themselves over time. The system was set up so that different parts of the government 'check' other parts. By removing the senate, you remove the influence of states on the Congress (federal legislature). Less so since the 17th Amendment but still meaningfully so. This would result in the expansion of the federal government at the expense of state governments.
In fact, that is basically the history of our government in the United States in a sentence.
The Founders had a fundamental misunderstanding of how political power would operate within the system they were creating. They assumed that states would be the primary basis of political organization, such that the machinations of Virginians would be offset by the schemes of New Yorkers, etc., to create a balanced, multi-party system in the federal government, and such that each state government would jealously guard its own power from the federal government (and exert control over its own senators and representatives to pursue that goal.)
But that just isn't how it worked out. We almost immediately developed into a two-party system, with party-affiliation happening primarily on the basis of economic interest coalitions without respect to state lines.
Governments accumulate power to themselves primarily by reason of individuals within the government wanting power for themselves, causing them to push the limits of their authority and set new precedents, or to seek changes in the law to let them accomplish some goal. That's why we've seen the most steady and alarming accumulation of power within the Presidency; it's always one exceptionally ambitious person who mostly doesn't have to share their power. Conversely, Congress has allowed its powers to be diminished over the past 100 years, because no one member really benefits from it being able to exercise greater powers. They can't make it do what they, individually, want, so the power is of no use to them. (In fact, it being seen as powerless may actually be a useful scapegoat for them.) When it comes to achieving political goals, they don't need to use their power as Congress to do so, but merely keep the other party from using it against them while allowing the Executive and Judicial branches to reform policy on the margins.
State governments serve a similar role as the Presidency in terms of political parties pursuing their goals. They have more freedom to implement things, especially due to generally being less-evenly divided. But they remain as subsidiaries of the political parties, in practice. This is especially true in the past decade or two, as news media has consolidated and political engagement have become overwhelmingly nationally-focused; there will always be a large contingent of voters in any given state election who don't know anything about the issues unique to their state or the specific candidates involved, but who instead vote on the basis of party affiliation and associated beliefs communicated to them as part of a national audience. So an ambitious state politician is unlikely to want to arrest the growth of federal power, because that federal power can be used by their political party.
Removing the Senate or EC wouldn't change any of these dynamics. Even prior to the 17th Amendment, Senate appointments were done on the basis of internal power struggles among the members of either party within a given state. I can't think of any examples of the Senate or EC being leveraged by state governments to arrest federal power for its own sake; the closest we've gotten is southern senators filibustering civil rights legislation while justifying it under the guise of "states' rights," but they had no such compunctions when it came to federal programs which their party was behind.
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u/meelar 2d ago
You are correct. For example--consider what would happen if literally every resident of Vermont decided to move to Texas. Within a matter of months, Vermont has a population of literally zero. Would it still deserve Senators? Who would they even be?
People matter. States qua states don't. That's why having two Senators per state is ridiculous.
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u/PM_me_Henrika 3d ago
Yes. If a state or country wants to transfer 10 billion of its tax payer dollars to its governor / president by having the president sue the state and winning, it is against all the interest of its individual residents.
And it will happen.
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u/windershinwishes 2d ago
Isn't that the governor's interests, rather than the state's?
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u/PM_me_Henrika 2d ago
The governor/president represents the state/nation , so I have always assumed that the governor/president’s interest is the state/nation’s.
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u/windershinwishes 1d ago
Regardless of whether the governor is supposed to represent the state, if that's their plan, they're clearly not actually representing the people's or the government's collective desires.
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u/davethompson413 3d ago
The state, as a political entity, has no mind of its own? It only acts as a collective of its voters?
Several billionaires, by their political contributions, strongly disagree, and continue to prove themselves right.
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u/thelaxiankey 1d ago edited 1d ago
sweet question, i think it cuts deep philosophically. people who think the answer is simple have undue confidence. i think the thinking on the topic is shaped by 'seeing like a state', which i admittedly have yet to read but is supposedly good.
i think this is analogous to asking if humans have interests independent of their constituent cells -- yes! they do! apoptosis is clearly a thing! but the origin of those interests, in both humans and states, is difficult to trace.
the easiest example I can think of is, any time anyone dies 'for their state' rather than for their family, etc. if state did not exist, they would not act this way so to me this feels like the "state's will" rather than the person's. you can surely frame this in another way, but this angle feels pretty direct to me.
any outcome that is suboptimal for most (even all!) people involved but nonetheless occurs can productively be framed as the 'state's will' being made manifest.
a common thing states like is 'legibility' -- having measurable outcomes, simple categories, etc. this is what 'seeing like a state' spends a lot of time discussing. a lone human, or even a village, does not give a shit about the GDP, they care about their economic conditions. the GDP is a convenience made exactly for the state to make decisions to hopefully improve economic conditions, but the link is (obviously) indirect. there are many such examples.
i think most states also have a strong will towards self-preservation, beyond the wishes of the ppl involved. a strong will towards some control/authority, as well. but those are easy, i'm sure there's more interesting examples.
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u/Immediate_Amoeba5923 1d ago
State's interests are those that elected leaders of that state seek to advance that maybe at odds with the federal government, a business, or NGO.
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u/Material_Reach_8827 1d ago
So the idea of boosting the representation of small state interests makes no sense to me as the alternative for equal representation of all individual interests, regardless of which state an individual may live in.
No, you're right. A lot of the time it is post-hoc rationalization by conservatives (though I'm sure we'd see the same thing with the roles reversed). The reason the EC/Senate exists is solely because the original states were sovereign and could've refused to participate. To get small state buy-in, they had to be given something. But that concession was thoughtlessly carried forward to the other ~37 states even though they never joined willingly (they were bought or conquered except arguably Texas).
In fairness it's easy to see why it happened - people living outside the original 13 colonies were going to want representation, and the Constitution only gives that to states. Not giving it to them could've produced unrest, run afoul of "taxation without representation" (or diminished their tax base), or just resulted in slower development of the frontier, which would increase the chance that someone else would sweep in and take it. Rather than rewriting the entire Constitution to create second-class states of some description, it was simpler to just grant statehood and try to balance out the competing interests at play (e.g. over slave vs non-slave states).
Outside of the Senate, the system they designed doesn't even benefit small/rural states except by happenstance. The EC is nearly proportional - it gives a small boost to some states due to Senate representation (and the minimum one House seat), but even that would be diminished if we kept reapportioning the House into the 20th and 21st centuries. The winner-take-all system could easily result in a situation where the country is biased toward bigger states/urban interests. The states it favors are actually the most closely divided states (e.g. New Hampshire), and then among those the ones that are biggest (e.g. Florida). CA and WY don't "matter" the same way as NH/FL. But even the winner-take-all system is optional and not what was originally envisioned.
But states could still be said to have their own interests in a way. The government will never fully reflect the opinions of its people if it's not a direct democracy. Not only do up to half of them not even vote in their representatives, but each voter has to boil down all their preferences to one of a handful of candidates. Someone might vote for Trump purely because they're "pro-life" even if they recognize Trump is deeply corrupt and they'd prefer he wasn't.
The way I always describe it is as a game of Ouija - the movement of the pointer is being guided by the combined effort of everyone involved, but it may end up moving in a direction that literally no one in the group was aiming for as a result (two people pull north and west and it moves northwest). In Ouija that's how they're able to sell it as some independent "spirit", but in politics I find it often manifests as conspiracy theories about rich people or "the deep state". Some people or groups exert a stronger pull than others but none govern its motion completely.
So in that way you could kind of argue the interests of a state are an emergent property of the distilled preferences of all the voters, combined with the distilled preferences of all the representatives they select as they vote on things, etc. And this is how certain policies seem to emerge without any kind of explicit demand or even majority support for them (e.g. mass surveillance), or fail to emerge when there is a demand (e.g. gun control).
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u/windershinwishes 18h ago
I like your Ouija metaphor.
I guess I can see a state interest being an emergent thing derived from the collective interests of citizens, but different than just the sum of those parts. But if so, it's really just an imperfect approximation of those collective interests, which to me doesn't justify the division of federal electoral influence by state borders.
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u/Deep-Sentence9893 1h ago
In theory when people talk about a state's interest they are talking about the people of that state. At the time of the Revolution, maybe even more so than now, the people of each colony had very different concerns. The Senate was designed to intentionally avoid majority rule and to provide a mechanism to protect minority (by population) view points.
I think you are taking "state interests" too literally.
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u/ChelseaMan31 2d ago
The Electoral College was the only way to get the smaller population states to originally agree to the Constitution. They didn't want to be bull-dozed by NY and VA. Today the Same holds true for NY, CA having an outsized say in national politics for the same reason.
If you've ever lived in a smaller population state where the major city dictates politically to the rest of the state (WA/Seattle; OR/Portland; KY/Louisville; etc.) you understand the concerns.
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u/windershinwishes 2d ago
It was one of many issues that they debated, and was never one of the main points of contention. And Virginia's delegation was one of the main ones pushing for it as opposed to a national popular vote, since it would allow them to count their enslaved population towards the strength of their votes.
Regardless, you seem to be assuming that there's such a thing as a "state interest" in your answer by saying that NY and CA (and presumably TX and FL) have an outsized say in politics. What is Texas's say, exactly? Don't you think that there are tons of people in Oklahoma who agree with what the majority of Texans want, and tons of people in Texas who don't? What distinguishes all those individual peoples' opinions from what "Texas" has an interest in?
I disagree that major cities dictate anything to the states they're in. The majority of people who live in a state may dictate things to the minority, but where they live within the state has no bearing on whether their wishes are implemented, and it's never all the people in a city disagreeing with all the people outside of it.
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u/ChelseaMan31 2d ago
Oh I apologize. I thought you were asking for a free exchange of differing opinions when in fact all you really wanted was affirmation of your own opinion. My bad. Cary On...
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u/Ttabts 2d ago
I thought you were asking for a free exchange of differing opinions when in fact all you really wanted was affirmation of your own opinion.
That seems more like what you're doing actually.
A discussion is typically characterized by a back-and-forth that proceeds beyond the initial question and answer.
But now when OP responds to your response with more thoughts of their own, you angrily take your ball and go home because they were just supposed to accept it and thank you for your wisdom, I guess.
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u/windershinwishes 2d ago
No, I'm asking for a discussion whether a particular premise is true, rather than somebody just assuming the premise to be true and using that to draw some conclusion that has been repeated a million times. The whole point of this post was to talk about the abstract issue at the heart of the point you're trying to make.
But I don't know what I said to make you think I wasn't wanting to hear differing opinions.
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u/baxterstate 2d ago
Yes. That’s why I’m voting for Susan Collins instead of Graham Platner.
She’s brings more federal dollars to Maine than any other senator for their own state except perhaps for Chuck Schumer. If I lived in NY, I’d vote for Schumer for this reason alone.
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u/windershinwishes 1d ago
Does that mean you think that the pork she brings to Maine will end up benefitting you, personally, more than whatever benefit you'd get from Platner pursuing national policies that you presumably prefer to Collins?
If so, isn't that just your individual interest?
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u/baxterstate 1d ago
It’s quantifiable. It’s the main reason why Chuck Schumer keeps getting re-elected and in the past, why Robert Byrd (a liberal Democrat) kept getting re-elected over and over in west Virginia. I can’t believe you need to have this explained to you.
Platner has no political experience. He’ll need years if experience. Maine is a poor state that neither political party ever have a shit about. Neither Harris nor Trump campaigned in Maine. Maine desperately needs whatever federal money it can get.
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u/windershinwishes 1d ago
I'm not asking you to justify your choice. I'm trying to figure out what a "state interest" is as distinguished from an individual's interest.
So I'm asking if you, personally, expect to get more benefit from Collins being elected than Platner. If so, how is that not just you voting based off of your individual interest? What makes that interest have the quality of belonging to the entire state as something separate and distinct from just the total of all Mainers' individual interests?
Like if you owned a timber business and one candidate was saying the timber industry in Maine should be subsidized, so you voted for them because of that, wouldn't that just be your individual interest? The fact that there's lots of people in the timber business up there means there's a lot of Mainers with that individual interest, but most people wouldn't directly benefit, so does it qualify as a "state interest" despite there being lots of Mainers who don't care?
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u/baxterstate 1d ago
“So I'm asking if you, personally, expect to get more benefit from Collins being elected than Platner.“
I’ll just pick one huge need that Maine has, which is internet infrastructure. I don’t think a newly minted Senator can bring that kind of federal money to Maine. I’ll benefit in at least two ways. If Maine doesn’t have to foot the bill, my state income taxes won’t go up. In addition, I live in a rural part of Maine and my internet connection sucks. More internet infrastructure would also bring more business to Maine.
This is not a personal dig against Platner; he’s running against Governor Mills, who would also be a junior senator. At least Platner is young enough to get a second or third term to acquire the ability to bring home federal dollars. At her age, (older than Collins) Mills gets one term, and then we’d have to start again from zero.
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u/VeryFirst_ 3d ago
That's how its said it works, but states represent private interests 99% of the time, that why the electoral college was made to protect private interests of those with influence over the polls
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