The small-state advantage: for more than 200 years, the Constitution has given states with small populations a boost. But in recent years, the imbalance has grown much larger. Is it a threat to democracy?

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: NATIONAL

In the four years after the financial crisis struck in 2008, a great wave of federal stimulus money poured into Rutland County, Vermont. It helped pay for bridges, roads, preschool programs, a community health center, buses and fire trucks, water mains and tanks, even a project to make sure fish could still swim down the river while a bridge was being rebuilt.

Just a few miles away, at the New York state border, the landscape abruptly turns from spiffy to scruffy. Washington County, N.Y., which is home to about 60,000 people--just as Rutland County is--saw only a quarter as much money.

Vermont's 626,000 residents have two U.S. senators; so do New York state's 19 million. Each of Vermont's senators represent 312,000 voters; each of New York's senators represent about 9.6 million. That means one Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker just over the state line. The nation's largest gap is between Wyoming and California: A voter in Wyoming has 66 times the voting power of a voter in California.

Of course, it's not news that the Constitution gives states with small populations a boost. The Framers set it up that way, in 1787: As part of what's known as the Great Compromise, they created one legislative chamber--the Senate--in which every state has the same political voice, regardless of population (seep. 11).

What is new is that the size and importance of that advantage has grown. This disparity affects the political dynamic of issues as varied as gun control, immigration, and campaign finance. Political scientists call it a striking exception to the democratic principle of "one person, one vote."

Behind the growth of the advantage is an increase in the population gap between large and small states, with large states adding many more people than small ones in the last half--century.

The country was very different in 1787, when the Great Compromise was struck. The population was about 4 million (compared with about 315 million today), and the maximum disparity in voting power between residents of different states was perhaps 11 to 1. It is now six times greater than that.

'Make Out Like Bandits'

Today, the 38 million people who live in the nation's 22 least-populous states are represented by 44 senators. California also has 38 million residents, and they're represented by two senators.

It's easiest to measure the small-state advantage in dollars. For example, as the federal government has spent hundreds of billions to respond to the financial crisis, it has done much more to assist small states than large ones.

"From highway bills to homeland security, small states make out like bandits," says Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

In Rutland County, the federal government has...