Are Individuals Harmed by Gerrymandering? Examining Access to Congressional District Offices

Abstract

Objective We consider proximity and access to the district offices of members of Congress to explore whether gerrymandering affects individuals’ capacity to be heard and thus impairs their representation. Methods In a study of six states, we conduct more than 123 million distance measurements to identify residents whose closest district office is in the wrong congressional district. Based on survey results, we then estimate the likelihood that such mismatched individuals will personally visit the office of their member of Congress. Results We find that in five gerrymandered states, between 28.7 and 47.5 percent of residents have a mismatched closest district office, a rate several times higher than in a non‐gerrymandered state. Extrapolating from survey results, we find that mismatched residents are 38 percent less likely to visit their own district office, and that across five states gerrymandering effectively deters nearly 600,000 office visits over a two‐year congressional session. Conclusion Of significance in both the legal and scholarly arena, we find that gerrymandering increases the prevalence of mismatched district offices, thereby impeding constituents from making in‐person visits that are widely viewed as the most effective mechanism for communicating their opinions and needs to Congress. We believe this heretofore undocumented mismatch warrants additional scholarly consideration of gerrymandering's effects on individual's access to tangible aspects of representation.

Redistricting in Virginia: Identifying a Gerrymandered Map using County Levels

“…Niven then surveyed 1,046 voters from those six states and found that people in mismatched districts were deterred from talking to members of Congress. This is valuable, as it demonstrates another link between individual representation and redistricting (Niven, 2021).…”

Mapping Literature with Networks: An Application to Redistricting

“…The third insight of a traditional literature review is that recent work has continued exploring the effects of gerrymandering on various outcomes including incumbency advantage (Henderson, Hamel, and Goldzimer 2018); electoral competition (Cottrell 2019); candidate quality and emergence (Williamson 2019); roll-call voting and state policy (Caughey, Tausanovitch, and Warshaw 2017); political parties (Stephanopoulos and Warshaw 2020); campaign contributions (Crespin and Edwards 2016); and constituent access (Niven, Cover, and Solimine 2021). Our network also captures these relationships as dyadic connections, but can further illuminate downstream causal chains, confounding concepts, and multiple causal paths.…”