IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ris/msuecw/2020_014.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Artificial partisan advantage in redistricting

Author

Listed:
  • Eguia, Jon

    (Michigan State University, Department of Economics)

Abstract

I propose a measure of artificial partisan advantage in redistricting. Redistricting is the process of drawing electoral district maps. Electoral outcomes depend on the maps drawn. The measure I propose compares the share of seats won by a party to the share of the population that lives in jurisdictions (counties and towns) won by this party. If a party has a larger share of seats than the share of the population in jurisdictions in which the party won most votes, then the drawing of the electoral maps conferred an artificial advantage to this party. This measure takes into account the geographic sorting of partisan voters and is simple to compute. Using U.S. election data from 2012 to 2018, I find an artificial partisan advantage of seventeen House seats to the Republican party. I argue that the artificial partisan advantage in the congressional maps of North Carolina, Utah, Michigan and Ohio is excessive.

Suggested Citation

  • Eguia, Jon, 2020. "Artificial partisan advantage in redistricting," Working Papers 2020-14, Michigan State University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:msuecw:2020_014
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://econ.msu.edu/repec/wp/APAv36all.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Election law; redistricting; gerrymandering; partisan advantage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • K16 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Election Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ris:msuecw:2020_014. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Dean Olson III (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edmsuus.html .

    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.