Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies
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Partisan Gerrymandering.pdf
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Author(s)
Caughey, Devin
Tausanovitch, Chris
Warshaw, Christopher
Date Issued
December 2017
Journal
Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy
Publisher
Mary Ann Liebert Inc
Citation
Caughey, Devin, Chris Tausanovitch, and Christopher Warshaw. “Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Process: Effects on Roll-Call Voting and State Policies.” Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy 16, no. 4 (December 2017): 453–469. © 2017 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Recent scholarship has documented the advantages of a new measure of partisan gerrymandering: The difference in the parties' wasted votes, divided by the total number of votes cast. This measure, known as the efficiency gap (EG), can be calculated directly from aggregate vote totals, facilitating comparison of the severity of party gerrymandering across states and time. In this article, we conduct the first analysis of the EG's effects on legislative representation and policymaking in the states. We first show that the partisan outcome of legislative elections has important causal effects on the ideological representation of individual districts, the ideological composition of legislative chambers, and the conservatism of state policymaking. We then show that variation in the EG across state-years is associated with systematic differences in the ideological location of the median state legislator and in the conservatism of state policies. These results suggest that partisan gerrymandering has major consequences not only for who wins elections but for the political process as a whole. Keywords: redistricting, gerrymandering, state politics, representation, legislatures
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1089/ELJ.2017.0452
