This utterly bizarre question popped into my head out of nowhere. What percentage of people have visited their country’s capital?
I mean roughly. I know this is technically not a question with a factual answer (not a known one anyway) but it is not an opinion question either. so I felt it best belonged in GQ.
If it helps - restrict it to first-world people/countries.
Given that over 50% of Panamanians live within an hour’s bus ride of Panama City, my guess is that at least 80% of adults have come to town at least once in their lives. Probably only the poorest of the poor from outlying districts have never visited.
The population of the Tokyo Metro area (including neighboring regions in Kanagawa, Chiba and Saitama) is in the neighborhood of 30 million people, so there’s about a quarter of Japan’s population right there. Given the size of the country, the prevalence of high-speed railways (it’s also the hub for all the bullet train lines), and the fact that unlike Washington DC, it’s also the nation’s business capital, I wouldn’t be surprised if over 90% have come to the capital at some point in their lives.
The notion of tucking away the political capital far distant from the social and economic capital was pretty much started by Americans. We did it not just with Washington, D.C. but with state capitals as well. See Albany, New York; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Hartford, Connecticut; Annapolis, Maryland; and various others of the original thirteen colonies. Many later states followed their lead: Austin, Texas; Sacramento, California; etc. For many years Boston, Massachusetts was the sole exception - and the answer to the trivia question, which state capital was the largest. (In metropolitan population it still is, but if city limits are made the standard, I believe it’s now Phoenix, Arizona.)
Why did Americans do this? Without too much overstatement, it came from a fear of government, or at least the fear of the pressures that powerful leaders could place on politicians close at hand. Putting the legislatures a couple of days journey from the power that were was thought to insulate them from evil influences.
History has had the last laugh on this notion, but it’s stayed powerful in countries with British heritages, hence Ottawa, Canada and Canberra, Australia.
But not many other cultures have picked up on this. Most countries have a large city that is the capital in all ways: political, economic, social, academic, and otherwise.
So this is a long-winded way of getting to a WAG that in most countries, most people who are not absolutely poverty-stricken either live in the capital or have been to it because all the business of the country is done there in one fashion or another.
And doing a real quick late-night mental tour of the world, it seems to me that this holds true in third world countries as well as industrialized ones.
Ottawa is the capital of Canada because, at Confederation, a number of other cities were fighting for the privilege, and an unamused Queen Victoria decided to give it to none of them. 
Separation of the political capital from the social and economic centres was only a secondary affair; I suspect the idea of distance from the US border was more important.
As a contrast, the capital of the Province of Ontario is also its social and economic centre, and its largest city by far… Toronto.
FWIW, the site Canberra stands on was chosen because it is halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. I believe it wasn’t such a matter of isolating the legislature as it was avoiding a choice between the country’s two largest and most influential cities.
Incidentally, I imagine all citizens of Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Grenada, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Malta, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, Nauru, Palau, St. Kitts and Nevis, Singapore, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, Seychelles, Tuvalu and the Vatican City have visited their nation’s capital. 
… conversely, those of us living in geographically large countries are less likely to have visited our nation’s capital.
I visited DC in April of '93 if this helps anyone with their calculations.
Happy
For the citizens of Vatican City: 100%
If you don’t like Canada and Australia as examples, what will you say when I also throw in New Delhi, India, and Islamabad, Pakistan?
The only other major example I can think of is Brasilia, Brazil.
No doubt that avoiding favoring one major city over another equally major one is a factor in all these cases. And in the U.S. too. But not the only one, I would argue.
No doubt a lot of people visit the capital, but for reasons that have nothing to do with it being the capital. For example, the several times I’ve visited DC was soley because my sister lives there.
Albany was made the state capital because it was far enough away from the ocean to be safe from invasion by sea, and it was a transportation center that served as a startoff point for settlement of western New York, and also because the old capital, Kingston, had been destroyed by the British during the Revolutionary War.
And the Texas capital was moved to Austin to further inflame the conflict with the Commanche and solidify public support for ridding the state of all Indians (ref: Lone Star by T.R.R. Fehrenbach, though I can’t find the page at the moment.)
Oh yeah, I’ve also visited my nation’s capital. Between Happy Lendervedder and me, you now have the plural of anecdote.
Just to add to the piling on. Sacramento was the center of what was happening when California became a state. The same goes for Carson City in Nevada. I have been to DC.
My family had a trip to Stockholm just because of the fact that it’s the capital. That holds a certain prestige. With USA being a huge countries, you have several metropolises, making the capital Washington a bit less unique. Most countries have one city that is permanently the center of attention.
If you examine the actual reasons many US states have their capitals where they are, you’ll find that the compomise location between two cities or populated areas is quite common. Ohio, for example, although in that case, Columbus is now about the same size as Cleveland and Cincinnati.
Also, you have to undestand that may capitals were placed while the population of the state was still quite small and it wasn’t obvious what was going to be the largest city in the long run. For instance, in Washington state, the largest town at the time Olympia (also a compromise location) was chosen was, I believe, Vancouver. Or Florida, where almost all the non-Indians lived in the north when Tallahassee (yet another compromise location) was chosen.
Actually Washington (DC) was predicted to become a major industrial and commercial center. This is why many cities fought for the distinction. However it was too close to Baltimore, which was until around 1950 one of the 10 largest cities in America. In fact for many years Baltimore was second to NYC in population.
But Washington was always supposed to be a center of industry and commerical trade. Just didn’t work out.
Many capitals were chosen for their geographic centerness, such as Pierre South Dakota, Indianapolis and Columbus.
In Kentucky Frankfort was chosen for it’s midway location between Louisville and Lexington.
State capitals by in large are big within their state. Even the smallest State capital Montpelier with about 8,000 is large for the state. Remember Burlington the largest city only has 39,000.
Large state Capitals include
(Est 2002 Population US Census est) [overall rank city population] *=Largest City in state
Phoneix* (1,371,000) [6th]
Indianapolis* (783,000) [12]
Columbus* (725,000) [15]
Austin (671,000) [16]
Boston* (589,000) [20]
Denver* (560,000) [26]
Nashville (545,000) [27]
Okalahoma City* (519,000) [29]
Sacramento (435,000) [38]
Atlanta* (424,000) [41]
Honolulu* (378,000) [45]
Raleigh (306,000) [58]
Saint Paul (284,000) [61]
Lincoln (232,000) [75]
Baton Rouge (225,000) [79]
Madison (215,000) [83]
Montgomery (201,000) [92]
Des Moines* (198,000) [95]
Richmond (197,000) [97]
So state caps aren’t by in large small. 25% of the Largest 20 cities are state capitals. 22% Of the top 50 cities are state capitals and 19% of the top 100 cities are state captitals
The capital of South Dakota, Pierre, was chosen because the geographical center of the state is only 8 miles away…and 300 miles from the 2 biggest cities- one in the SE corner and the other on the W side of the state.
Therefore, It’s a small town, with only 13,876 people (but that’s the 7th largest in the state). If it wasn’t the capital it would probably have a population of about 2-3000.
Questionable…certainly true of France, England, Ireland…but not so of Canada, Germany, Scotland, Russia, China, Spain, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland…
I’ve heard similar factors were at work when Ankara was chosen as the capital of modern Turkey.
So much misunderstanding.
Are you kidding me? Who predicted this and when? Washington was a dismal swamp, and virtually every reference to the city made before the Civil War was disparaging. Read Margaret Leech’s classic Reveille in Washington for what the city was like during the war. Washington exploded after World War II, but I can’t think of any time in its existence that it was predicted to become a major industrial center.
No it wasn’t, ever.
Well, not really, not to mention that it didn’t become the capital until several years after California became a state. It became the terminus for the transcontinental railroad, but San Francisco, six times the size of Sacramento in 1850, was the major city in the state for the entire 19th century.
Even if true, that hardly settled the matter:
That’s more like it. Markxxx’s table means very little. Phoenix, for example, was smaller than Tuscon through 1910, not to mention when it was actually chosen as territorial capital in 1889, after Prescott, Tuscon, and Prescott again.
And, BTW, once all of you get done explaining all the reasons why major cities weren’t chosen as the state capitals in the U.S., please also take a stab at explaining why so many of the major universities in the country are located in small college towns instead of major cities - and not at all in the nation’s capital.
The U.S. has a weird history this way. Really it does.