Estimating the Impact of Districting on Representation

政治制度在将个人偏好聚合为公共政策的过程中发挥着关键作用。正是由于这个原因，政治行为者密切关注机构的设计，例如选举制度和与立法机构的投票规则。然而，某些类型的制度对选举结果的影响仍然知之甚少，包括选民的偏好在各个地区的分布与他们的代表所采取的行动之间的关系。本研究详细考察了一个特定的制度——多数少数民族选区的建立——以确定这些选区的影响，不仅是对谁当选为总统的影响，考虑到选区内不同的人口特征，而且对立法机关产生的最终政策结果的影响。在这方面，多数少数族裔选区为制度分析学者提供了机会和悖论。这是一个自然实验的机会：自20世纪70年代以来创建的大量多数少数民族地区允许人们调查不同的选区策略对代表性的影响。矛盾的是，即使越来越多的这些地区已经从政治版图中剥离出来，但向少数族裔优先政策结果的转变并不明显。事实上，在1994年中期选举后，共和党接管了国会，少数民族在全国层面上的政策收益很少。这种偶的结合指出了理论构建和实证分析的方向。从理论上讲，我们什么时候应该期待少数族裔占多数的选区的创建转化为真正的政策进步，这些选区什么时候会过度集中少数族裔选民，损害整体代表性？从经验上看，现在偏好在整个美国和不同地区是如何分布的，这对其他地区战略意味着什么？这些问题的答案使我们能够更好地理解制度在多元化共和国中聚集偏好方面所起的作用。这项研究的成果包括通过一个互动式网络档案向更广泛的研究界传播点名和选举数据。

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.