Hare: Redistricting may have less effect than commonly thought
Redistricting — or the more pejorative term “gerrymandering” — is one of the bogeymen of contemporary American politics. Certainly, both parties invest a good deal of political resources in the redistricting process, carving up maps in an attempt to create favorable legislative districts.
It is also true that partisan polarization in Congress is at an all-time high, and the outcome of only a few dozen House seats and a handful of Senate races will be in real doubt on election night this Nov. 4. Redistricting seems to be an obvious culprit.
But how much of an effect does redistricting really have on our political system? There are several reasons to believe that it is much less than is commonly thought. One reason is that senators — who are elected statewide and thus not subject to the effects of redistricting — look and act a lot like House members. The Senate is only marginally less polarized and more competitive than the House.
More sophisticated analysis by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal shows that district characteristics do not have much of an influence on the ideological positions of members of Congress. Their simulations demonstrate that randomly drawn congressional districts produce a legislature that is only slightly less polarized than the existing Congress.
Other political scientists, such as Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, also employ a simulation-based approach to show that randomly generated redistricting plans produce a sizable number of noncompetitive congressional districts that favor one party over the other.
Why doesn’t redistricting play a larger role in American politics? The reality is that those involved in redrawing district maps are constrained in several ways. Congressional districts must be contiguous as well as meet stringent legal standards involving compactness and the representation of racial minorities. In addition, geographic sorting — the tendency for like-minded people to cluster in neighborhoods and cities — has produced communities that are increasingly solidly Democratic or Republican.
In Georgia, for instance, it is difficult to imagine how one could draw a metro Atlanta congressional district that is not overwhelmingly Democratic, or a Blue Ridge congressional district that is not lopsidedly Republican. Geographic sorting and legal constraints, more so than redistricting, appear to be responsible for the ubiquity of noncompetitive “deep red” and “deep blue” districts.
Christopher Hare is a Ph.D . candidate in political science at the University of Georgia. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science and Politics and Religion. He is co-author of the Voteview blog, at voteview.com/blog.
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