Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

...Of course, the reason why they don't work so well in the US has more to do with geography than anything else: European countries are smaller and have a much more urbanized population. The US is gigantic, the population density is lower, and, furthermore, outsize political power belongs to almost totally unpopulated rural areas. I guess that's what jj was getting at complaining about suburban white flight, but that's a comical understatement of the problem: it really goes back to the founding of the country and the Compromise of 1787 that assigned seats in Congress.