Partisan Consequences of the Post-1990 Redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives

Abstract

Following each recent round of redistricting, scholars have tried to determine whether that round worked to one party's advantage and whether control of the redistricting process by members of one party led to gerrymandering. They have reached mixed conclusions. Here, we examine the partisan consequences of the post-1990 redistricting for the U.S. House of Representatives. We create two sets of projections of partisan support levels for the 1990 and 1992 districts based on district-level 1988 presidential election data. One set of projections assumes an incumbency advantage, and one set assumes the hypothetical situation of all open seats, i.e., no incumbency advantage. We ask whether either party benefited and whether gerrymandering occurred. When we take incumbency into account, we find that our projections show that the two parties came out just about even in redistricting, with an increase in the number of districts evenly split between them. However, when we assume all open seats, our projections show an increase of 21 Republican districts, a decrease of 3 Democratic districts, and a decrease of 17 evenly split districts. We conclude that the Republican party gained from redistricting and that incumbency and other short-term factors obscure changes in the underlying partisan support in districts. In a state-level analysis of redistricting outcomes, we find no evidence that parties succeeded in using control of state government to gain partisan advantage through redistricting.Conventional political wisdom holds that parties use redistricting to gain electoral advantage. After redistricting, political observers point out particular candidates affected by gerrymandering. The academic literature, however, does not consistently support the view that parties and incumbents can improve their positions through gerrymandering or the view that redistricting affects election outcomes (for exhaustive reviews, see Butler and Cain 1992; Gelman and King 1994). Some studies conclude that parties and incumbents are highly

The Intersection of Redistricting, Race, and Participation

“…Much previous work has relied on imprecise measures of redrawn populations, such as the amount of overlap between a county and a congressional district, the district-level percentage of redrawn constituents, or changes in the districtlevel presidential vote (e.g., Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning 2006;Black and Black 2002;Gopoian and West 1984;Kousser 1996;McKee, Teigen, and Turgeon 2006;Petrocik and Desposato 1998;Swain, Borrelli, and Reed 1998;Winburn and Wagner 2010). But we join a growing number of studies that have been able to clearly differentiate between same-incumbent and redrawn voter populations with various units of aggregate-level data (see Ansolabehere, Snyder, and Hood and McKee 2009;Rush 1992Rush , 1993Rush , 2000.…”

Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy

“…Almost everything that is known about the national consequences of gerrymandering comes from research conducted on the redistricting cycles that have occurred since the court-led reapportionment revolution of the 1960s. This research typically shows that each of the subsequent rounds of redistricting produced, at best, only a minimal impact on the partisan balance of power in Congress (e.g., Glazer, Grofman, and Robbins 1987;Seabrook 2010;Swain, Borrelli, and Reed 1998).…”

The Effect of Redistricting Commissions on District Bipartisanship and Member Ideology

“…Unified political control helped generate more seats for the party in power after the 1970 and 1980 redistricting cycles, though the effects degraded over the course of the decade (Abramowitz, 1983;Niemi & Winsky, 1992). Interestingly, there seemed to be little effect of seats won by the party in power after the 1990 redistricting cycle as a result of unified control of redistricting institutions (Niemi & Abramowitz, 1994;Swain et al, 1998).…”