Current Research Areas

Abstract: How does the size of a legislature affect the competitiveness of its districts' elections? This paper theoretically develops and empirically tests three hypotheses concerning the effect of legislative chamber size on electoral competition and partisan gerrymandering. First, in swing states, legislature size has a negative effect on the fraction of districts that are electorally competitive; the intuition here is that smaller districts are more politically homogenous and thus less competitive. Second, in those few states that are extremely Democratic (e.g., New York) or extremely Republican (e.g., Alabama), legislature size has a single-peaked relationship with electoral competitiveness: Moderate-sized legislative chambers produce the most competitive districts. Finally, because political gerrymanderers often seek to manipulate electorally vulnerable districts, a decline in competitive districts should cause a decrease in partisan gerrymandering. Therefore, among swing states, larger legislative chambers should exhibit less gerrymandering than smaller chambers. To empirically test these three arguments, I first present data from state legislative election results during 1992-2002. I then conduct automated, repeated simulations of state legislature and Congressional districting across several states. These simulations allow us to isolate the effect of legislature size on electoral competitiveness, thus removing confounding factors such as gerrymandering, candidate quality, and incumbency advantage. Finally, in order to measure the extent of gerrymandering in each legislative chamber, I compare real-life districting plans against the simulated districting plans. By comparing these two sets of plans, I estimate the extent to which gerrymanderers politically manipulated legislative districts in the 2002 redistricting cycle.

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Abstract: Conventional wisdom holds that electoral bias in US legislative elections results from intentional partisan and racial gerrymandering. We argue that in a two-party system, substantial electoral bias can also emerge without intentional gerrymandering when one party's voters are more geographically concentrated than the other party's voters. We show that many states experience such electoral bias against the Democrats, whose voters are concentrated in large cities and smaller 19th century industrial agglomerations. The theory behind our argument is that a party whose voters are more geographically clustered in urban areas will have its electoral strength inefficiently packed into lopsided districts. To measure this "unintentional gerrymandering," we use random districting simulations based on precinct-level 2000 presidential election results in several states. Our results illustrate a strong relationship between the geographic concentration of Democratic voters and electoral bias against the Democrats.