Estimating the Impact of Districting on Representation

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Political institutions play a key role in mediating the aggregation of individual preferences into public policy. It is for exactly this reason that political actors pay close attention to the design of institutions, such as electoral systems and voting rules with legislatures. Yet the impact of certain types of institutions on outcomes is still poorly understood, including the relation between the distribution of voters' preferences across districts and the actions taken by their representative. This research examines in detail one particular institution - - the creation of majority-minority voting districts - - to determine the influence of these districts, not only on who gets elected to office, given different demographic characteristics within the constituency, but also on the final policy outcomes produced by the legislature.In this respect, majority-minority voting districts offer scholars of institutional analysis both an opportunity and a paradox. The opportunity is that of a natural experiment: the large number of majority-minority districts created since the 1970s allows one to investigate the impact of different districting strategies on representation. The paradox is that even as more and more of these districts have been carved out of the political landscape, a shift towards minority-preferred policy outcomes has not been apparent. Indeed, with the Republican takeover of Congress following the 1994 midterm elections, policy gains for minorities at the national level have been few and far between.This combination of evens points in the direction of both theory building and empirical analysis. Theoretically, when should we expect the creation of majority-minority districts to be translated into real policy progress, and when will these districts over-concentrate minority voters to the detriment of overall representation? Empirically, how are preferences now distributed both in the U.S. as a whole and within different regions in particular, and what does this imply for alternative districting strategies? Answers to these questions enable a better understanding of the role that institutions play in aggregating preferences in a diverse republic.The product of this research includes dissemination of the roll call and electoral data to the broader research community through an interactive web-based archive.