The worry is that if globalization leads urban and rural voters to embrace starkly different political agendas around the world, democracies like the United States that give rural voters extra power will face crises of legitimacy as national policy is determined by a political minority. “Politics is just a pitched battle between these two geographically based groups,” Rodden said.

There is already reason to worry that Donald Trump will exacerbate this divide. He has emphasized social issues that strongly polarize rural and urban voters, by promising to appoint judges who will modify Roe vs. Wade as well as protect the second amendment. His economic policies may be just as polarizing. “If his economic policy is primarily an effort to bring back manufacturing in the Rust Belt and bring back coal [at] the expense of the innovation economy and knowledge economy in the cities … that would presumably have an impact on how people evaluate” the fairness of the constitutional system, Rodden said. The risk for the United States is that a failure to reform its democratic system will lead to the same crises of legitimacy seen in democratic systems elsewhere, as its urban majorities question why their priorities go ignored.

Kai Ostwald, a professor of Comparative Politics at the University of British Columbia, compared America’s situation to that of Malaysia, where urban voters are disillusioned after failing to unseat the ruling party despite winning the popular vote in the 2013 election. This happened thanks to a districting system that favors rural areas in terms of parliamentary representatives, he said. “It will certainly take time before we get the kind of disenfranchisement and sense of helplessness in the U.S. that is pervasive in Malaysia, [one where] the political system is so fundamentally biased that there is no sense in participating. But I’m not sure that that sense isn’t already quite strong in the U.S. electorate,” he said.

Certainly there is a sense of desperation among some American voters, now that the loser of the popular vote has won the presidency in two of the last five elections—both times, at a Democrat’s expense. (Some Democratic electors reportedly plotted a futile, last-ditch effort to select someone other than Trump as President.) Prominent Silicon Valley titans have latched onto plans to have California secede from the union out of frustration with the Electoral College.

Those frustrated with the Electoral College can take inspiration from Argentina, which succeeded in abolishing its own ahead of a 1995 national election, as part of a political compromise that allowed voter in Buenos Aires to be equally represented in elections for this one branch of government. (The legislature is another matter.) But such a compromise is almost impossible to imagine in today’s polarized Washington where the Republicans that now control the government have no incentive to tamper with a political system that benefits them. “If the frustration level gets ratcheted up I don’t know where we go. There’s either institutional reform or secession. Neither of those things happen easily given our constitution. That’s just the predicament that we’re in,” Rodden said.

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