| The Dakota Diaspora
Why the Dakotas play the Greeks to the rest of the country’s Roman Empire
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South Dakota and North Dakota have hit upon a cunning, “extra-constitutional” way of extending their already disproportionate power under the electoral college system. And their ploy highlights serious issues about representative power around the country, including the de-population of the Midwest and the effect of immigration on Texas, Florida, California, and other states in Congress.
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First, the Dakotas: Two professors at George Washington University determined that when it comes to exporting raw political talent, no state comes even close to matching North and South Dakota—which can boast of 15 native sons or daughters in Congress between them, despite having less than 1.5 million people. (If the rest of the country was this prolific, there’d be 3,000 members of Congress.) The professors reported their findings in the April 2008 edition of PS, an academic journal published by American Political Science Association. And these results, which are statistically significant, are not mirrored in other small states, which rarely if ever export political talent, making the Dakotas unique.
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The authors suggest many possible causes for the Diaspora, including bad weather (which keeps kids indoors studying as youngsters and pushes them to leave when older), boredom (ditto) and a lack of major sports team (which makes high-schoolers “likely to devote unusual amounts of time and energy to pursuits that elsewhere would get them labeled as hopeless nerds—pursuits like student government and civic involvement.”) Regardless of the cause, the authors point out that the Dakotas reap real benefits from this web of delegates, especially from pork-barrel spending, which the Dakotas bring home by the bushel. This fact leads the authors to suggest, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that other sparse, and relatively poor states (Wyoming, Alaska, Montana) should copy the Dakotas’ success by setting up scholarship program to export smart students who want to study political science to other parts of the country.
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The authors also re-examines the notion of the “brain drain” from the Midwest. This is usually painted in bad terms, but their findings suggest it might in fact be beneficial, since people from the Dakotas tend to keep close ties there, like families that immigrate to the U.S. but send money back home. In addition, though states like Florida and Texas have seen explosive growth, this hasn’t always translated into more political power—in fact, by some measures their power has shrunk, since homegrown people tend not to win office in those places.
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Overall, the paper is meant to be more fun than serious, but it does touch on serious issues of how the Diaspora from the Midwest has remade Congress, and national politics in general. It seems the Dakotas have spread their power like the Greeks did to the Romans: The Romans may have overwhelmed the Greeks population-wise and economically, but the Romans ended up adopting all the Greeks’ ideas and gods and values.
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©SamKean
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