Stranger Danger: Redistricting, Incumbent Recognition, and Vote Choice

Hood, M. V.; McKee, Seth C.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-6237.2010.00696.x

Cited by 15 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Hayes and McKee () elaborate on this evidence using both individual data from the 1992 ANES, supplemented by an aggregate‐level analysis of voter roll‐off in House races in Texas at the voting‐precinct level; their findings indicate that voters are less likely to participate in House contests if they have been shifted into a new district. Hood and McKee () find similar evidence of a lack of recognition of the incumbent's identity among the voters added to an existing district in a study of voters in Georgia's Eighth Congressional District after a legislature‐initiated mid‐decade redistricting that shifted Macon‐based Democratic incumbent Jim Marshall into a more heavily Republican district, leading to an erosion of the incumbency advantage. In a similar vein, Winburn and Wagner () find that voters who are located in an outcropping of a district that splits a traditional community of interest are less likely to know the identity of the candidates seeking office in their district, although they do not find statistically significant effects on participation as a result.…”

Section: Evidence Of Redistricting and Its Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 91%

Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting

Lawrence

Huffmon

2014

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective. We seek to understand how voters respond to being drawn into a new congressional district: specifically, the new Seventh District of South Carolina created in 2012. Methods. We employ data from a survey of voters in the new district, and employ descriptive statistics and logistic regression models to identify whether voters are aware of the new district, whether they expect better representation as a result, and to explain their likely vote choice. Results. We find limited awareness of the new district among voters, despite a competitive election campaign, but nonetheless a broad public understanding that redistricting may lead to more local influence in Congress. Conclusions. Our results suggest that redistricting efforts that ensure the maintenance of communities of interest to preserve voter-representative links, even if that means deviation from a strict "one person, one vote" standard, may be superior from a representational standpoint.The effects of congressional redistricting on voters can vary dramatically in magnitude. In many cases, in states with fairly stable population trends across the state, we would expect redistricting plans to have few substantive effects on representation. In other cases, either due to political manipulation of the redistricting process or unequal population growth, the effects may be quite profound. However, most existing political science research focuses on the effects of redistricting on the outcomes of elections, particularly in terms of the partisan and racial identity of the candidates who are elected and the effects of redistricting on the incumbency advantage (see, e.g., Overby and Cosgrove, 1996;Desposato and Petrocik, 2003;Grose, 2005;Juenke and Preuhs, 2012). Instead, here we focus on its effects on constituents within the district, a relatively underexplored topic. Specifically, we consider the effects of redistricting on constituents' perceptions of their representation, with particular attention to the question of whether or not individuals are aware of redistricting's effects on them. We find, in general, that voters in the new district were only weakly-if at all-aware of either redistricting or its consequences for local representation, although the district's voters generally seem to believe the redistricting plan in question would help (or at least not harm) their representation in Congress. Finally we consider the consequences of these findings for future redistricting research.

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Section: Evidence Of Redistricting and Its Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 91%

Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting

Lawrence

Huffmon

2014

Social Science Quarterly

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“…• Preservation of existing political communities-Turnout is lower in areas that are "carved out" and placed into a different district [42,43]. Furthermore, residents testifying at redistricting public comment hearings tend to advocate for keeping geographic units in a single district when possible [44,45].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation

et al. 2020

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Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation.

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“…; Adams et al. ; Joesten & Stone ), voters’ psychological attachment to political parties/candidates (e.g., see Bafumi & Shapiro ; Medeiros & Noël ), the institutional or organisational resources of political parties/candidates (e.g., fundraising skills and name recognition; see Burden ; Hood & McKee ) and voters’ evaluation of the performance or character traits of political parties/candidates (e.g., see Lewis‐Beck ; Anderson ; Palmer & Whitten ; Clark ; Clark & Leiter )…”

Section: The Electoral Consequences Of the Social Pact Formation Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trying not to lose: The electoral consequences of unilateral reform efforts and the social pact formation process

Castater

Han

2017

European J Political Res

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Abstract. The existing social pact literature claims that governing parties offer social pact proposals because they anticipate they will receive an electoral benefit from social pact agreements. Yet the available data on social pacts inform us that in a substantial minority of cases social pact proposals fail to become social pact agreements. In an effort to better determine the political calculations made by governments before they propose a social pact, this article examines the effect of implementing reform legislation unilaterally, social pact proposals, social pact proposal failures and social pact agreements on the vote share of government parties in 15 Western European countries between 1981 and 2006. It is found that social pact proposals do not have any electoral consequences for governing parties, unilateral legislation and social pact proposal failures reduce the vote share of governing parties, and social pact agreements provide an electoral benefit to parties in minority governments only. These findings suggest that governing parties propose social pacts in a good faith effort to complete a social pact agreement; and that such an agreement is not a way for these parties to gain votes, but to avoid the electoral punishment associated with enacting unpopular reforms unilaterally.

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Stranger Danger: Redistricting, Incumbent Recognition, and Vote Choice

Cited by 15 publications

References 25 publications

Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting

Keeping Up with the Congressmen: Evaluating Constituents’ Awareness of Redistricting

Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation

Trying not to lose: The electoral consequences of unilateral reform efforts and the social pact formation process

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