Estimating the Electoral Consequences of Legislative Redistricting
نویسنده
چکیده
We analyze the effects of redistricting as revealed in the votes received by the Democratic and Republican candidates for state legislature. We develop measures of partisan bias and the responsiveness of the composition of the legislature to changes in statewide votes. Our statistical model incorporates a mixed hierarchical Bayesian and non-Bayesian estimation, requiring simulation along the lines of Tanner and Wong (1987). This model provides reliable estimates of partisan bias and responsiveness along with measures of their variabilities from only a single year of electoral data. This allows one to distinguish systematic changes in the underlying electoral system from typical election-to-election variability.
منابع مشابه
The Effects of Redistricting on Incumbents1
We analyze the effects of redistricting on the electoral fortunes of incumbent legislators, using voting data on U.S. congressional districts, state legislative districts, and statewide races. We find little evidence that redistricting helps incumbents in U.S. legislative elections. If anything, redrawing district lines reduces the average vote margin of those in districted offices compared wit...
متن کاملEnhancing Democracy through Legislative Redistricting
e demonstrate the surprising benefits of legislative redistricting (including partisan gerrymandering) for American representative democracy. In so doing, our analysis resolves two long-standing controversies in American politics. First, whereas some w scholars believe that redistricting reduces electoral responsiveness by protecting incumbents, others, that the relationship is spurious, we dem...
متن کاملThe influence of the legislative redistricting of 2009: Methodological issues and first insights
In 2009, following a legislative redistricting lead by the right-wing, 18.1% of the French cities have moved from one constituency to another. The aim of this note is to provide some methodological issues about this redistricting and some insights about its influence on the electoral results. The main result goes in the sense of a partisan manipulation: due to the redistricting, the left-wing l...
متن کاملRepresentation through Legislative Redistricting : A Stochastic Model
This paper builds a stochastic model of the processes that give rise to observed patterns of representation and bias in congressional and state legislative elections. The analysis demonstrates that partisan swing and incumbency voting, concepts from the congressional elections literature, have determinate effects on representation and bias, concepts from the redistrictihg literature. The model ...
متن کاملElectoral Reform and the Distribution of Public Expenditures: Evidence from Japan
Does the equalization of legislative representation reduce policy bias? We examine this question by focusing on the redistricting and reapportionment of seats associated with the recent electoral reform in Japan. We first show that the reform of 1994 resulted in a considerable degree of equalization in the allocation of legislative seats per capita. Second, using municipality-level data, we pre...
متن کامل