The Effect of Majority-Minority Mandates on Partisan Gerrymandering

Bibliographic Data

ID6229697
AuthorsKenneth W Shotts (Northwestern University, corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume45
Issue1
Pages120
Publication date2001-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2669363
OpenAlexW2070415297
LanguageEN
Citations received33
References cited11

I develop a model of optimal partisan gerrymandering to analyze the claim that majority-minority legislative districting helps Republicans. I first determine the number of Democrats elected in states where Democrats control redistricting and the number of Republicans elected in states where Republicans control redistricting. I then determine how electoral outcomes change if the federal government requires redistricters to create majority-minority districts. In states where Republicans control redistricting, majority-minority mandates weakly decrease the number of Republicans elected. In states where Democrats control redistricting, a bare majority-minority mandate does not affect the number of Democrats elected. However, if Democratic redistricters face geographical constraints or supermajority-minority mandates, some Democratic votes are wasted and the number of Democrats elected weakly decreases. hat are the partisan effects of majority-minority districting? The conventional wisdom among political scientists is that the v T creation of a majority-minority district helps Republicans win in neighboring districts. This observation, if true, has three important implications. First, it suggests that majority-minority districting plans have a perverse electoral effect, reducing the total number of Democrats elected. Second, it suggests that unorthodox political coalitions may form in the redistricting process: civil rights groups and Republicans allied against white Democrats. Third, if the conventional wisdom is true, majority-minority districting plans may have perverse policy effects, decreasing substantive representation of minority voters' interests. The claim that majority-minority districting has perverse effects is based on the logic of the concentration gerrymander (Erikson 1972; Cain 1984). Many authors (Thernstrom 1987; Swain 1993; Lublin 1997) have argued that majority-minority districting plans, by concentrating liberal minority voters into a few districts, make the other districts in a state more conservative and thereby lead to conservative legislative majorities and conservative policy outcomes. This theoretical reasoning has received support from empirical research (Hill 1995; Lublin 1997) that examines district compositions and electoral outcomes before and after the creation of majority-minority districts and concludes that post-redistricting Republican gains can be attributed to racial gerrymandering. However this research has been disputed by Guinier (1995) and Engstrom (1995), who argue that Republican gains are primarily due to national electoral tides rather than racial gerrymandering. The perverse-effects claim has also received support from a second line of empirical research (Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran 1996; Epstein and O'Halloran 1999) that predicts policy effects of different districting plans and concludes that majority-minority districts are not optimal for promoting liberal policy outcomes. Despite being frequently discussed and debated, the perverse-effects claim has never been established through a precise theoretical argument

Democracy · Gerrymandering · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Fiscal Policies and Political Economy · Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth · Law

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