Metropolitan and Outstate Alignments in Illinois and Missouri Legislative Delegations1

Rural overrepresentation and metropolitan underrepresentation in state legislatures have long been standard targets for the criticisms of students of state and local government. As Murray Stedman, for example, puts it, “Rural minorities control many state legislatures and thereby penalize urban majorities. The virtual serfdom of the urbanite to the rurally controlled state legislatures in many areas is a recurrent plaint in the writings of political scientists.” Commenting on the tendency of state legislators to form blocs reflecting individual localities and their local and regional interests, Alfred DeGrazia concludes that “every American state with any considerable urban population has undergone protracted conflict between rural and urban blocs, often regardless of party lines.” Textbooks on municipal government, and state and local government, universally condemn urban underrepresentation in state legislatures and say, or imply, that the result is consistent defeat or frustration of urban interests in the legislative arena. My purpose here is to introduce a note of factual skepticism into a portion of the discussion.