The country is undeniably “beleaguered,” says Filipe R. Campante, an associate professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. And perhaps it is in need of a reinvigorating political cut-and-shuffle. In an Op-Ed for The New York Times, Mr. Campante details a proposal to relocate the Argentine capital from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires to the northern city of Santiago del Estero — population 250,000, and “reportedly sleepy.”

The idea was put forward by Julián Domínguez, the leader of Argentina’s lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies. “The proposal reflects longstanding tension between Buenos Aires, with its European-style architecture and elegant boulevards, and Argentina’s provinces, where most of the country’s agricultural and mineral wealth is generated,” reports Simon Romero for The New York Times. “Many Argentines feel that Buenos Aires commands too much influence over the rest of the country.”

Similarly, a country might relocate its capital to lessen congestion and population density in overcrowded cores (example: Nigeria’s switch from Lagos to Abuja in 1991) or to provide an urban nucleus around which a nascent region might be developed (i.e., Brasília).

Other countries that have moved their capital to previously underdeveloped locales include Canada, which bounced between Toronto and Quebec City before settling on Ottawa in 1857; Australia (Melbourne to Canberra in 1927); Tanzania (Dar es Salaam to Dodoma in 1973); Ivory Coast (Abidjan to Yamoussoukro in 1983); Kazakhstan (Almaty to Astana in 1997); and even three-year-old South Sudan (Juba to Ramciel in 2011, just a few months after gaining independence). But in these games of musical cities, who really wins?

There is a third, somewhat insidious reason for a capital swap: “the specter of political upheaval,” writes Mr. Campante. “The history of political rebellions underscores the special role played by the capital city in deciding their fate.”

The last few years have proven this theory to be true: Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Kiev, Bangkok — all are heavily populated capital cities with immense centralizing power, and all were sites of large-scale political unrest. Perhaps President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who, according to The Buenos Aires Herald, recently expressed support for the proposal, has taken note. “A small mob in the capital can shake the government in a way that much larger crowds farther away cannot,” Mr. Campante explains. “It follows, then, that a shaky government would consider moving its capital away from a major population center to an isolated planned refuge.”

This, he says, is just what the junta in Myanmar did by relocating the capital from Yangon — a bustling coastal city of about 2.5 million — to drowsy, remote Naypyidaw.

While the Argentine government is hardly comparable to Myanmar’s junta, “or of yesteryear’s Argentina, for that matter,” Mr. Campante concedes, the country has a turbulent political history, and “the streets of Buenos Aires have often been a major player in political crises, even in recent years.” Relocating a capital away from densely populated core regions may reduce the likelihood of violent overthrow, but it also makes government corruption all the more easier to conceal.

For proof of this correlation, we need look no further than some of our own state capitals. Isolated capitals like Albany, N.Y., and Springfield, Ill., are statistically associated with worse governance and more corruption, according to Mr. Campante’s research.

But there are others who believe the opposite, that large, cosmopolitan capitals breed deluded, detached politicians and dysfunctional legislatures beholden to special interests. Benjamin E. Sasse, an official during the Bush administration, has predicated his campaign for one of Nebraska’s senatorial seats on this very issue. “The way to cure the incredible ineffectiveness and dysfunction of both parties in Washington,” he said in a campaign advertisement. “We move the Capitol to Nebraska.”

“Yes. We should do this,” writes Philip Bump for The Wire, though his ideas appear less reflective of Mr. Sasse’s antiestablishment stance than the idealism of planned capitals like Abuja and Brasília. “It would be a massive stimulus project,” he explains. “When Malaysia decided it wanted to build a new capital city in the 1980s, it invested $8.1 billion in doing so. That’s about 8.7 percent of the country’s GDP when the city became a federal territory.”

If the United States spent a corresponding proportion, he says, the investment would equal $1.3 trillion — “about 50 percent more than the federal government spent in the 2009 stimulus,” which he believes would “benefit areas far beyond Nebraska alone. Raw materials from the Pacific Northwest, technology from California, a labor force from all 50 states.”

Likewise, “it would offer the chance to build the best city possible,” he writes — a utopianism that would no doubt sound familiar to the architects of Brasília. The Brazilian capital was “planned from scratch as an ideal city and built on an empty plateau,” reports Robin Banerji for the BBC World Service. It was to be “the opposite of the old coastal capital, Rio de Janeiro. Brasília would be without the colonial legacy, without baroque and classical architecture, without slums.”

“The problem is that it’s not a city,” Ricky Burdett, a professor of urban studies at the London School of Economics, told the BBC. “It just doesn’t have the complexity of a normal city. It’s a sort of office campus for a government.” Furthermore, Brasília doesn’t boast much in affordable housing, so the poor, often engaged in domestic labor and the service industry, are shuttled to and fro satellite shanty towns, ascribing the city an illusion of economic equality and prosperity.

Still, with its ultramodern buildings — designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect behind New York’s United Nations headquarters — clean streets and open spaces, it is reasonable to see why Argentina is considering a similar move. Brasília is now the fourth largest city in Brazil and home to one of its most vibrant urban economies. Recession-defying growth in our own capital region, Washington and its surrounding counties, proves that proximity to government (and lucrative government contracts) can breathe new life into depressed local markets. Could a move to Santiago del Estero be just what the ailing country — once among the world’s most prosperous — requires to get on track?

“While a dramatic move might be appealing as a fresh start, it could end up aggravating the challenges of governing the country,” Mr. Campante writes. “Capitals, like flags, are symbols, but their choice has very real consequences.”