Racial Gerrymandering of Municipal Borders: Direct Democracy, Participatory Democracy, and Voting Rights in the United States

As cities expand their jurisdictional borders via the process of municipal annexation, they sometimes leave low-income and minority enclaves perpetually excluded on the urban fringe, a process known as municipal underbounding. Despite a number of small-scale studies documenting the gerrymandering of municipal borders, robust empirical evidence of its extent is limited and little is known about the institutional factors that facilitate or stymie efforts to underbound poor and minority communities. In this article, a metropolitan area matching design is used to measure the effect of state annexation laws and federal protection of voting rights under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act on municipal underbounding between 1990 and 2010 in the United States. The analysis finds that laws that facilitate participation by city residents in annexation decisions lead to the underbounding of black neighborhoods, whereas those that provide third-party oversight of annexation decisions or expand opportunities for participation by residents living on the fringe lead to the inclusion of black neighborhoods. There is little evidence that such patterns of underbounding are driven by economic or fiscal considerations. In light of the 2013 invalidation by the Supreme Court of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, there is likely a nascent return to racial gerrymandering of municipal borders occurring in the South, particularly in states where city residents are granted some measure of influence over annexation. The results suggest the need for renewed attention to local government boundary changes and their role in facilitating and exacerbating racial discrimination.