IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bpj/statpp/v4y2013i1p1-13n3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Estimating Partisan Bias of the Electoral College Under Proposed Changes in Elector Apportionment

Author

Listed:
  • Thomas A. C.

    (Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of ­Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA)

  • Gelman Andrew

    (Professor, Departments of Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University)

  • King Gary

    (Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA)

  • Katz Jonathan N.

    (Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics and Chair of the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA)

Abstract

In the election for President of the United States, the Electoral College is the body whose members vote to elect the President directly. Each state sends a number of delegates equal to its total number of representatives and senators in Congress; all but two states (Nebraska and Maine) assign electors pledged to the candidate that wins the state’s plurality vote. We investigate the effect on presidential elections if states were to assign their electoral votes according to results in each congressional district, and conclude that the direct popular vote and the current electoral college are both substantially fairer compared to those alternatives where states would have divided their electoral votes by congressional district.

Suggested Citation

  • Thomas A. C. & Gelman Andrew & King Gary & Katz Jonathan N., 2013. "Estimating Partisan Bias of the Electoral College Under Proposed Changes in Elector Apportionment," Statistics, Politics and Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 1-13, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:4:y:2013:i:1:p:1-13:n:3
    DOI: 10.1515/spp-2012-0001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2012-0001
    Download Restriction: For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1515/spp-2012-0001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. King, Gary & Browning, Robert X, 1987. "Democratic Representation and Partisan Bias in Congressional Elections," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(4), pages 1251-1273, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael Geruso & Dean Spears & Ishaana Talesara, 2019. "Inversions in US Presidential Elections: 1836-2016," NBER Working Papers 26247, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tim R. Sass, 2000. "The Determinants of Hispanic Representation in Municipal Government," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 66(3), pages 609-630, January.
    2. Timothy Besley & Ian Preston, 2007. "Electoral Bias and Policy Choice: Theory and Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 122(4), pages 1473-1510.
    3. Matthew P. Dube & Jesse T. Clark & Richard J. Powell, 2022. "Graphical metrics for analyzing district maps," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 449-475, May.
    4. Justin Svec & James Hamilton, 2015. "Endogenous voting weights for elected representatives and redistricting," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 26(4), pages 434-441, December.
    5. Barry Burden & Corwin Smidt, 2020. "Evaluating Legislative Districts Using Measures of Partisan Bias and Simulations," SAGE Open, , vol. 10(4), pages 21582440209, December.
    6. Wolfgang Pesendorfer & Faruk Gul, 2007. "Strategic Redistricting," Levine's Bibliography 843644000000000351, UCLA Department of Economics.
    7. Benadè, Gerdus & Ho-Nguyen, Nam & Hooker, J.N., 2022. "Political districting without geography," Operations Research Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 9(C).
    8. Christian Haas & Lee Hachadoorian & Steven O Kimbrough & Peter Miller & Frederic Murphy, 2020. "Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(9), pages 1-34, September.
    9. David Niven & Benjamin Plener Cover & Michael Solimine, 2021. "Are Individuals Harmed by Gerrymandering? Examining Access to Congressional District Offices," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 102(1), pages 29-46, January.
    10. Christopher Warshaw & Eric McGhee & Michal Migurski, 2022. "Districts for a New Decade—Partisan Outcomes and Racial Representation in the 2021–22 Redistricting Cycle," Publius: The Journal of Federalism, CSF Associates Inc., vol. 52(3), pages 428-451.
    11. Bernard Tamas & Ron Johnston & Charles Pattie, 2022. "The impact of turnout on partisan bias in U.S. House elections, 1972–2018," Social Science Quarterly, Southwestern Social Science Association, vol. 103(1), pages 181-192, January.
    12. Stephen Coate & Brian Knight, 2005. "Socially Optimal Districting," NBER Working Papers 11462, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:4:y:2013:i:1:p:1-13:n:3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peter Golla (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.degruyter.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.