Abstract
Growing concern over gerrymandering has led some states to transfer redistricting responsibility from legislatures to commissions, boards, or other less overtly partisan bodies. These transfers in redistricting responsibility offer scholars an opportunity to study the impact of redistricting processes on elections. This study, focusing on congressional elections for the years 1982–2008, suggests that non-legislative methods of redistricting encouraged strong, well-financed challengers to step forward, and decreased the likelihood that incumbents would run unopposed. The data, however, do not show that non-legislative redistricting either reduced the typical margins of incumbents’ victories or increased the likelihood that incumbents would lose. In fact, the data sometimes run contrary to expectations. This raises questions about the common contention (especially by reformers) that non-legislative approaches (NLA) will promote turnover of elected officials. The benefits of non-legislative redistricting depend both on the types of outcomes that are desired, and on the specific NLA that is adopted.
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Notes
Alan Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning, “Don’t Blame Redistricting for Uncompetitive Elections,” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 (January 2006): 87–90; Alan Abramowitz, Brad Alexander, and Matthew Gunning, “Drawing the Line on District Competition: A Rejoinder,” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 (January 2006): 95–98.
Michael P. McDonald, “Drawing the Line on District Competition,” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 (January 2006): 91–94; Michael P. McDonald, “Re-drawing the Line on District Competition,” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 (January 2006): 99–101.
Thomas L. Brunell, “Rethinking Redistricting: How Drawing Uncompetitive Districts Eliminates Gerrymanders, Enhances Representation, and Improves Attitudes Toward Congress,” PS: Political Science & Politics 39 (January 2006): 77–85; Thomas L. Brunell, Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America (New York: Routledge, 2008).
Baker v. Carr. 369 U.S. 186, 1962.
Abramowitz et al., “Don’t Blame Redistricting.”
Peter Beinart, “Outer Limits,” New Republic 25 (November 2002).
Caroline J. Tolbert, Daniel A. Smith and John C. Green, “Strategic Voting and Legislative Redistricting Reform: District and Statewide Representational Winners and Losers,” Political Research Quarterly 62 (March 2009): 92–109.
Abramowitz et al., “Don’t Blame Redistricting;” Andrew Gelman and Gary King, “Estimating the Incumbency Advantage Without Bias,” American Journal of Political Science 34 (November 1990): 1142–64; McDonald, “Drawing the Line;” McDonald, “Re-Drawing the Line.”
Justin Levitt, with Bethany Foster, A Citizen’s Guide to Redistricting (New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2008). The authors note that 22 states use some form of commission for drawing state legislative districts. However, 10 of those states revert to traditional legislative redistricting for drawing their congressional district lines.
Montana and Alaska also utilize independent commissions, but they are solely for the purposes of state legislative redistricting.
With only one congressional district, Vermont's advisory commission is used solely for state legislative districts.
Levitt, Citizen’s Guide.
Ibid.
Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, Almanac of American Politics (Washington DC: National Journal, 1982–2008).
The normal vote takes the average of the incumbent's party's presidential vote in the last two elections and subtracts the national average for those same two elections in order to estimate the strength of district partisanship relative to the national average.
Gary C. Jacobson and Samuel Kernell, Strategy and Choice in Congressional Elections, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).
Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Ideology and Congress, 2nd ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007).
I have excluded states with only one at-large district from the analysis, as redistricting is not an issue for those states.
In constant 1990 dollars.
See, for example, Jon R. Bond and Richard Fleisher, eds., Polarized Politics: Congress and the President in a Partisan Era (Washington DC: CQ Press, 2000), Frances E. Lee, Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Barbara Sinclair, Party Wars: Polarization and the Politics of National Policy Making (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
Indeed, the commission only acts when the legislature fails to act. However, it is possible that the existence of the backup commission affects the way in which the legislature approaches the redistricting process. Therefore, I believe the inclusion of this category is necessary.
McDonald, “Drawing the Line;” McDonald, “Re-drawing the Line.”
States with a single at-large district (AK, DE, MT, ND, SD, VT, and WY) are excluded from the analysis. The 31 remaining states that use traditional legislative redistricting form the baseline category for the models, which allows for estimation of the NLA dummies.
Bruce E. Cain, The Reapportionment Puzzle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Levitt, “A Citizen’s Guide.”
The Statistical Abstract of the United States can be found at: http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/statab.html.
For a detailed explanation of Poole and Rosenthal's DW-Nominate scores, and to download their data, visit http://voteview.com/dwnl.htm.
While this measure does not provide information about the legislator's ideology relative to the district, it is preferable to “ideological discrepancy” measures based on estimates of district opinion and may, despite its drawbacks, provide some useful insights. Since the partisanship of the district is already estimated through the normal vote variable, the extremism measure should capture the effect of extreme ideology controlling for district partisanship.
John L. Moore, ed., Congressional Ethics: History, Facts, and Controversy (Washington DC: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1992).
Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa, Almanac of American Politics (Washington DC: National Journal, 1982–2008).
Gary C. Jacobson, “Strategic Politicians and the Dynamics of House Elections, 1946–1986,” American Political Science Review 83 (September 1989): 773–93; Gary C. Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 7th ed. (New York: Longman, 2009).
Thanks to Professor Jacobson for generously sharing these data with me.
Data on Section 5 Covered Jurisdictions can be found at: http://www.justice.gov/crt/voting/sec_5/covered.php
Robert K. Goidel and Todd G. Shields. “The Vanishing Marginals, the Bandwagon, and the Mass Media.” Journal of Politics 56 (October 1994): 802–10.
Gary C. Jacobson, “The Marginals Never Vanished: Incumbency and Competition in Elections to the U.S. House of Representatives, 1952–1982.” American Journal of Political Science 31 (March 1987): 126–41.
Estimation of probabilities was done using the SPost module for STATA, developed by J. Scott Long and Jeremy Freese. For more information on the estimation and reporting of predicted probabilities, see J. Scott Long and Jeremy Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata (College Station, TX: Stata Press, 2003).
See, for example, the “issue uptake” theory proposed by Tracy Sulkin in Issue Politics in Congress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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The author wishes to thank Timothy Lukes, Naomi Levy, Quan Li, Michelle Bezanson, and the three anonymous reviewers for Polity for their many helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Any remaining errors are my own.
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Cottrill, J. The Effects of Non-Legislative Approaches to Redistricting on Competition in Congressional Elections. Polity 44, 32–50 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2011.14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pol.2011.14