The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering on Political Parties

Stephanopoulos, Nicholas; Warshaw, Christopher

doi:10.1111/lsq.12276

Cited by 36 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…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.…”

Section: Computersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Literature with Networks: An Application to Redistricting

Lo¹,

Judge-Lord

Hudson³

et al. 2023

Polit. Anal.

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Understanding the gaps and connections across existing theories and findings is a perennial challenge in scientific research. Systematically reviewing scholarship is especially challenging for researchers who may lack domain expertise, including junior scholars or those exploring new substantive territory. Conversely, senior scholars may rely on long-standing assumptions and social networks that exclude new research. In both cases, ad hoc literature reviews hinder accumulation of knowledge. Scholars are rarely systematic in selecting relevant prior work or then identifying patterns across their sample. To encourage systematic, replicable, and transparent methods for assessing literature, we propose an accessible network-based framework for reviewing scholarship. In our method, we consider a literature as a network of recurring concepts (nodes) and theorized relationships among them (edges). Network statistics and visualization allow researchers to see patterns and offer reproducible characterizations of assertions about the major themes in existing literature. Critically, our approach is systematic and powerful but also low cost; it requires researchers to enter relationships they observe in prior studies into a simple spreadsheet—a task accessible to new and experienced researchers alike. Our open-source R package enables researchers to leverage powerful network analysis while minimizing software-specific knowledge. We demonstrate this approach by reviewing redistricting literature.

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Section: Computersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Literature with Networks: An Application to Redistricting

Lo¹,

Judge-Lord

Hudson³

et al. 2023

Polit. Anal.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We expect partisan control of the state legislature to be especially important since threats of subversion in 2020 were often initiated by state legislators against statewide officials such as secretaries of state. Furthermore, while statewide elected officials like governors and attorneys general sometimes threaten electoral democracy, state legislative majorities often represent smaller proportions of a state’s electorate due to gerrymandered legislative maps (e.g., Stephanopoulos and Warshaw 2020).…”

Section: What Drives Subversion Policy?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Which States Adopt Election-Subversion Policies?

Grumbach,

Hill

2023

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Scie

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Research highlights a growing divergence among U.S. states in their costs of voting, the partisan balance of their legislative districts, and the responsiveness of state policy to public opinion. Less is known, however, about a new and acute threat to democracy at the state level: policies that increase the states’ vulnerability to election subversion. In this article, we investigate recent trends in state legislation that transfer election administration authority from independent to partisan actors, making it more likely that a losing presidential candidate could take office over the will of the electorate. We find that Republican control of state legislatures and the closeness of the 2020 presidential election are associated with these policies. Interestingly, these policies are mostly uncorrelated with gerrymandering and voter suppression policies that were enacted in the 2010s. We conclude with a discussion of how a recent Electoral Count Act reform in Congress partly mitigates the risk of election subversion.

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“…Additional electoral variables, especially voting wait times and other indicators of state administrative performance in elections, are from the MIT Election Lab 5 . Gerrymandering data, which feature prominently in the democracy indices, are provided by Stephanopoulos and Warshaw (2020), with an additional district compactness measure from Kaufman, King, and Komisarchik (2019). 6 I also use indicators of policy responsiveness to public opinion (separated into social and economic policy domains) based on the state policy and mass public liberalism measures from (Caughey and Warshaw 2018).…”

Section: Measuring Democracy In the Us Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding

Grumbach

2022

Am Polit Sci Rev

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The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.

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The Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering on Political Parties

Cited by 36 publications

References 47 publications

Mapping Literature with Networks: An Application to Redistricting

Mapping Literature with Networks: An Application to Redistricting

Which States Adopt Election-Subversion Policies?

Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding

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