While conventional wisdom holds that partisan bias in U.S. legislative elections results from intentional partisan and racial gerrymandering, we demonstrate that substantial bias can also emerge from patterns of human geography. We show that in many states, Democrats are inefficiently concentrated in large cities and smaller industrial agglomerations such that they can expect to win fewer than 50% of the seats when they win 50% of the votes. To measure this ''unintentional * The authors wish to thank

Do distributive benefits increase voter participation? This article argues that the government delivery of distributive aid increases the incumbent party's turnout but decreases opposition-party turnout. The theoretical intuition here is that an incumbent who delivers distributive benefits to the opposing party's voters partially mitigates these voters' ideological opposition to the incumbent, hence weakening their motivation to turn out and oust the incumbent. Analysis of individuallevel data on FEMA hurricane disaster aid awards in Florida, linked with voter-turnout records from the 2002 (prehurricane) and 2004 (post-hurricane) elections, corroborates these predictions. Furthermore, the timing of the FEMA aid delivery determines its effect: aid delivered during the week just before the November 2004 election had especially large effects on voters, increasing the probability of Republican (incumbent party) turnout by 5.1% and decreasing Democratic (opposition party) turnout by 3.1%. But aid delivered immediately after the election had no effect on Election Day turnout. D o government distributive benefits increase voter turnout? Scholars have long argued that non-means-tested entitlement programs cause increased turnout among their beneficiaries. For example, the recipients of agricultural subsidies (Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980), Social Security (Campbell 2002), and Medicare and veterans' benefits (Mettler and Stonecash 2008; Verba et al. 1993) exhibit higher turnout rates than nonrecipients. At the aggregate level, counties and congressional districts respond to increased distributive spending with higher turnout (Ansolabehere and Snyder 2006; Matsubayashi and Wu 2009). A commonly hypothesized explanation for this positive turnout effect is Lipset's classic argument that one's decision to turn out depends upon the perceived "relevance of government policies to the individual" (1960, 190). Under this theory, as articulated by subsequent scholars (e.g., Campbell 2002; Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980), the delivery of distributive benefits motivates recipients to protect their

R ecent work in political economics has examined the positive relationship between legislative size and spending, which Weingast et al. (1981) formalized as the law of 1/n. However, empirical tests of this theory have produced a pattern of divergent findings. The positive relationship between seats and spending appears to hold consistently for unicameral legislatures and for upper chambers in bicameral legislatures but not for lower chambers. We bridge this gap between theory and empirics by extending Weingast et al.'s model to account for bicameralism in the context of a Baron--Ferejohn bargaining game. Our comparative statics predict, and empirical data from U.S. state legislatures corroborate, that the size of the upper chamber (n) is a positive predictor of expenditure, whereas the ratio of lower-to-upper chamber seats (k) exhibits a negative effect. We refer to these relationships as the law of k/n, as the two variables influence spending in opposite directions.

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Article II Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution gives both the Senate and the President a role in the appointment of public bureaucrats. Yet, since the drafting of that constitutional passage, changes within the Senate and Executive have created new ways for officials to influence who gets appointed to the public bureaucracy. The Senate has developed intricate vetting procedures within its committees, while the Executive Branch has created new methods-such as the