Does low descriptive representation inhibit substantive representation for women in deliberating groups? We address this question and go beyond to ask if the effects of descriptive representation also depend on decision rule. We conducted an experiment on distributive decisions, randomizing the group's gender composition and decision rule, including many groups, and linking individuals’ predeliberation attitudes to their speech and to postdeliberation decisions. Women's descriptive representation does produce substantive representation, but primarily under majority rule—when women are many, they are more likely to voice women's distinctive concerns about children, family, the poor, and the needy, and less likely to voice men's distinctive concerns. Men's references shift similarly with women's numerical status. These effects are associated with group decisions that are more generous to the poor. Unanimous rule protects women in the numerical minority, mitigating some of the negative effects of low descriptive representation. Descriptive representation matters, but in interaction with the decision rule.

This article assesses whether the antimajoritarian outcome in the 2012 US congressional elections was due more to deliberate partisan gerrymandering or asymmetric geographic distribution of partisans. The article first estimates an expected seats–votes slope by fitting past election results to a probit curve, and then measures how well parties performed in 2012 compared to this expectation in each state under various redistricting institutions. I find that while both parties exceeded expectations when controlling the redistricting process, a persistent pro-Republican bias is also present even when maps are drawn by courts or bipartisan agreement. This persistent bias is a greater factor in the nationwide disparity between seats and votes than intentional gerrymandering.

Why are fewer congressional elections competitive at the district level when the national electoral environment is at its most competitive? This article explores this “pseudoparadox,” and argues that the answer can be found in partisan redistricting. Through an analysis of 40 years of congressional elections, I find that partisan gerrymanders induce greater competitiveness as national tides increase, largely due to unanticipated consequences of waves adverse to the map-drawing party, particularly in seats held by that party. The phenomenon anecdotally coined by Grofman and Brunell as the “dummymander” is thus actually quite common and has significant effects on rates of congressional competition nationally. In contrast, bipartisan maps are shown to induce lower competition, while nonpartisan maps induce higher competition, under all electoral conditions and competitiveness measures. But the effects of partisan gerrymanders on competition, though strong, can only be seen in interaction with short-term national forces.

This chapter explores the legal history and recent court proceedings surrounding partisan gerrymandering, revealing courts to be less than ideal venues in which to sort out competing and possibly noncommensurate claims for fair representation. The chapter begins by framing Justice Kennedy’s search for a universal standard to evaluate partisan gerrymanders in his opinion in Vieth v. Jubelirer. The chapter then details the arguments and decisions in four cases decided in the past few years: Whitford v. Gill, League of Women Voters v. Pennsylvania, Benisek v. Lamone, and Rucho v. Common Cause. For each of the cases, it outlines the unique legal claims by the plaintiff and, where relevant, the arguments accepted and rejected by the court. It then applies a “stylized test” drawn from each case to the facts of the other cases, showing how the standards suggested in one may lead to divergent outcomes in another.

This note observes that the pro-Republican bias in the relationship between seats and votes that characterized the 2012 US congressional elections largely disappeared in the 2014 elections, where Republicans won a six-point victory in the national popular vote but only a handful of additional seats. Replicating analysis from an earlier article on the 2012 elections, I find that the source of the decline in bias supports two theories about the effects of gerrymandering and geography on the US Congress. First, bias declined most sharply in states where maps were drawn by Republicans, suggesting that these maps were drawn specifically to maximize seats during a tied national election environment. And second, pro-Republican bias present in bipartisan maps almost entirely disappears, as does the previously observed effect of urbanization on bias, further supporting existing theories about the asymmetric geographic dispersion of partisans.