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How Does Redistricting Matter? Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Setting in Mexico
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Elections held outside of advanced, industrialized democracies can turn violent because elites use coercion to demobilize political opponents. The literature has established that closely contested elections are associated with more violence. I depart from this emphasis on competitiveness by highlighting how institutional biases in electoral systems, in particular uneven apportionment, affect incentives for violence. Malapportionment refers to a discrepancy between the share of legislative seats and the share of population, violating the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. Drawing on recent work on malapportionment establishing that overrepresented districts are targeted with clientelist strategies, are more homogenous, and are biased in favor of district-level incumbent parties, I argue that overrepresented districts present fewer incentives for using violence. In contrast, elites in well-apportioned or underrepresented districts exert less control over electoral outcomes because such districts have more heterogenous voter preferences, raising incumbent and opposition demands to employ violence. I examine the effects of malapportionment on violence using constituency-level elections data and new, disaggregated, and geocoded event data on the incidence of election violence in India. Results from six parliamentary elections from 1991 to 2009 show that electoral violence is less prevalent in overrepresented constituencies, and that violence increases in equally apportioned and moderately underrepresented districts. The analysis establishes additional observable implications of the argument for district voter homogeneity and incumbent victory, accounts for confounders such as urbanization and state-level partisanship, and validates measures of election violence. The findings illustrate that institutional biases shape incentives for electoral violence.
El artículo intenta identificar, en el caso de una región del sureste de México, las dinámicas demográficas, especialmente las formas de movilidad que alimentan el crecimiento de las pequeñas ciudades en México. Los procesos de urbanización se caracterizan por la debilidad de los recursos disponibles en términos de servicios y de empleo, incluso en términos de prestación de la vivienda. Sin embargo, entre los cuatro tipos de urbanización estudiados en este artículo, todos ellos tienen una importancia de intermediario: entre dos etapas migratorias, entre el espacio productivo rural y el mercado laboral urbano. De esta manera es como, mediante instalaciones en la periferia que pueden llegar a estar muy alejadas, en el límite de pequeñas ciudades las poblaciones encuentran un compromiso entre economías rurales familiares en decadencia y la dificultad de acceder a la ciudad y a sus recursos.
Can institutions that are designed to improve minority representation also have an effect on electoral competition? We address this question by examining how minority-concentrated districts (MCDs)—designed to empower indigenous populations—affected minority participation and party competition in Mexico. Using an original dataset and a matching design that helps alleviate causal inference problems inherent to observational studies, we find that MCDs had no effect on minority participation but enhanced electoral competition. Field-research reveals that MCDs weakened one-party dominance by assembling minority voting blocs that were amenable to opposition-party appeals. More broadly, our results suggest that the mobilization of minority voting blocs can promote electoral competition in transitional democracies.
La participación electoral en México ha llamado la atención de los académicos, no sólo por su relación con la legitimidad de los procesos democráticos, sino también por su heterogeneidad. Usando información municipal de elecciones locales ocurridas entre 2006 y 2008, se estudia el impacto de las condiciones económicas y políticas so-bre el comportamiento electoral a nivel municipal. Los resultados indican que el grado de marginación se relaciona en forma de U-inversa con el porcentaje de votantes. Específicamente en municipios con baja marginación prevalece la movilización, mientras que en aquellos con alta marginación predomina el desencanto. Por otra parte, se corrobora la existencia de una asociación directa entre competencia electoral y participación. Abstract Determinants of electoral turnout in Mexico Voter turnout in Mexico has called attention of scholars, not only because its relation with the legitimacy of democratic processes, but also for its heterogeneity. Using information from local elections held between 2006 and 2008, we estimated the 1 Agradecemos los comentarios de dos dictaminadores anónimos que nos ayudaron a mejo-rar significativamente el trabajo. Los errores u omisiones que existan son nuestra responsabilidad.
Liz Allen, Amy Brand, Jo Scott, Micah Altman and Marjorie Hlava are trialling digital taxonomies to help researchers to identify their contributions to collaborative projects.
Using data from Italian municipal elections from 1993 to 2011, we investigate whether political competition affects electoral turnout. Taking advantage of the dual ballot system adopted for municipalities with more than 15,000 inhabitants, we measure the expected closeness in the second round through the first round electoral results. Thanks to the richness of our dataset we are able to distinguish between valid, blank and invalid ballots and to investigate the effect of closeness on each of these variables, controlling for municipalities’ and candidates’ characteristics and for municipal fixed effects. We also estimate a Heckman selection model to take into account for the non-randomly selected sample. It emerges that closeness strongly increases valid ballots and reduces blank ballots supporting the idea that the expected benefits of voting increase in closer competitions. The effect is much higher in magnitude than that merging when measuring closeness with ex-post electoral results, suggesting a quite relevant endogeneity bias. On the other hand, we do not find any statistically significant effect on invalid ballots.
The aim of this book is threefold. First to put in one place for the convenience of both scholars and practitioners the basic data on redistricting practices in democracies around the world. Remarkably, this data has never before been collected. Second, to provide a series of short case studies that look in more detail at particular countries with regard to the institutions and practices that have evolved for redistricting and the nature of the debates that have arisen. Third, to begin to look in comparative perspective at the consequences of alternative redistricting mechanisms and at the tradeoffs among competing redistricting criteria. This volume has contributions from some of the leading specialists on redistricting in the world. The chapters reflect a mix of country-specific material, chapters that are broadly comparative, and chapters whose contributions are more methodological in nature. The chapters in this volume provide an indispensable introduction to the institutions, practices, and consequences of boundary delimitation around the world. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Internal migration has been recognized as the major influence in terms of population redistribution across urban systems, but it is not a homogeneous phenomenon. Within the context of internal rural-urban migration decline and the negative changes in migratory balances in the metropolitan area of Mexico City, the core of enquiry in this paper is the approach to growth and consolidation of an internal urban–urban migration system in the early twenty-first century (2000–2015). This process has taken place through two main networks, among metropolitan areas not corresponding to the principal city and among intermediate cities. Internal migration is a complex process that involves both individual and spatial characteristics and which leads to spatially uneven development in the long term. Data from three censuses of the population of Mexico (2000, 2010, and 2015) show a transition to a more urban–urban migration pattern, with skilled migrants tending to have metropolitan and urban destinations, whereas less-skilled migrants prefer rural and small urban destinations.
To authoritarian rulers, holding somewhat competitive elections enhances legitimacy, but entails political risks. Committing electoral fraud can secure victory, but may jeopardize regime legitimacy. However, there is a tool of electoral manipulation that allows authoritarian rulers to reduce electoral risk while preserving legitimacy: gerrymandering. This article undertakes a systematic study of gerrymandering in Hong Kong, using a dataset that documents boundary changes at the level of residential buildings. The empirical findings show a significant partisan bias in electoral redistricting: opposition constituencies are more likely to be redistricted. Redistricting, however, fails to deter opposition incumbents from seeking re-election. No significant negative relationship is found between redistricting and opposition incumbents’ vote share, although redistricting does reduce their overall chances of re-election. The results suggest that gerrymandering, which involves the use of packing and cracking strategies in different districts, can be employed to undermine the aggregate electoral performance of the opposition parties.
Research on presidential power focuses almost exclusively on the modern era, while earlier presidents are said to have held office while congressional dominance was at its peak. In this article, I argue that nineteenth-century presidents wielded greater influence than commonly recognized due to their position as head of the executive branch. Using an original dataset on the county-level distribution of U.S. post offices from 1876 to 1896, I find consistent evidence that counties represented by a president’s copartisans in the U.S. House received substantially more post offices than other counties, and that these advantages were especially large under divided government and in electorally important states. These results are robust across model specifications and when examining the Senate. The findings challenge key components of the congressional dominance and modern presidency theses, and have important implications for scholarship on interbranch relations, bureaucratic politics, and American political development.
Mexico has a long experience with highly majoritarian variants of mixed-member systems, but has recently been made more proportional in a process of democratization. Electoral reform has developed along two major axes: the degree of proportionality, and the composition of the electoral authority, with the parties often trading openness on one axis for closure on the other. Sometimes trade-offs in reform negotiations followed a third dimension-the registration requirements for new parties. This chapter first describes the evolution of the Mexican electoral formulae from 1963 to today, explaining the rationale of each phase of reform either as a majority party decision or as a trade-off between government and opposition; the phases described are the plurality party deputy system (1963-1976), the mixedmember majoritarian (MMM) minority representation system (1979-1985), the governability clause of the 1988 law, the governability clause with 'moving escalator' of the 1991 law, and the abandonment of the governability clause in the 1994 law. The last part of the chapter focuses on the last round of electoral reforms (the 1997 law), in which the mixedmember majoritarian (MMM) system reintroduced in 1994 (after the earlier brief interludes of systems that combined MMM with mixed-member proportional (MMP) arrangements under the 1988 and 1991 laws), was further reformed to result in a more proportional allocation of seats, with the dominant principle depending on the vote distribution.
Evidence is offered to the effect that, at the congressional level, freshmen congressmen representing switched-seat districts are an important part of the process through which mass electoral behavior can be and sometimes is transformed into significant policy changes. We show that in two Congresses associated with significant policy changes (the 55th and the 89th) congressmen from switched-seat districts provided the strongest support for both the policy changes and the party position. And since it is during critical and landslide elections that large numbers of freshmen congressmen representing switched districts are elected, it is plausible to conclude that switched districts are one mechanism through which mass electoral behavior is connected to policy outputs.
This piece combines parts of Chapter 1 (Introduction) with Chapter 2 (theoretical framework) of an early draft of our book manuscript. The chapters that will eventually follow cover each of five regions: the Americas, Central Europe, former Soviet Union, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Almost two hundred years after the term gerrymandering was first used in Massachusetts, redistricting remains a complex and politicized process that affects the way the legislative branches are conformed and the quality of political representation around the world. In this paper, we describe the redistricting process in California and ask how it would work if it were to be implemented by an independent agent (instead of the local legislature or a bipartisan commission). Using a simulated annealing redistricting algorithm we create a hypothetical scenario that reduces significantly partisan bias in the state. Developed by the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute in 2005, this optimization model allowed us to recreate California's 53 Congressional districts and to analyze their racial and electoral composition. We found systematic evidence that the majority party in local legislature ends up with electoral benefits every time districts are drawn.
[Preface] Elbridge Gerry was governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. During his term, his party produced an artful electoral map intended to maximize the number of seats it could eke out of its expected vote share. Contemporary observers latched onto one district in particular, in the shape of a salamander, and pronounced it a Gerry-mander. This book is about a unique episode in the long history of American gerrymandering – the Supreme Court’s landmark reapportionment decisions in the early 1960s and their electoral consequences. The dramatis personae of our story are the state politicians who drew congressional district lines, the judges on the courts supervising their handiwork, and the candidates competing for congressional office. The plot of our story concerns the strategic adaptation of these actors to the new electoral playing field created by the Court’s decisions.
Redistricting has a substantial influence on parties' electoral fortunes, so the processreceives extremely close attention from those potentially affected by changes to the pattern of constituency boundaries. In the United Kingdom, redistricting recommendations are made by independent Boundary Commissions, but the political parties can influence the nature of those recommendations through the representations that they make during the consultative process. When a Commission has made provisional recommendations for a county (in England and Wales), region (in Scotland) or London borough, individuals and organizations have one month in which to make written representations, either favourable or unfavourable, regarding all or part of the recommendations, and they can suggest alternative sets of constituencies for the area concerned. The Commission may then hold a public inquiry, at which the interested parties can promote their views and contest those put forward by others. The assistant commissioner who conducts the inquiry reports to the commission, which may publish alterations to the provisional recommendations as a result of his/her advice. If their suggestions are adopted by the Commission for its final recommendations, then those promoting them at the public inquiry will have influenced the redistricting outcome. fn2
One of the salient characteristics of the British first-past-the-post electoral system is the amount of bias which it produces. Parties with large percentages of the votes (i.e. 25 or greater) almost invariably get even larger percentage shares of the parliamentary seats, whereas those with smaller vote percentages tend to get very few seats. That bias largely reflects the superimposition of a geography of constituency boundaries on the geographies of party support, so that different sets of constituencies can produce different levels and even directions of bias, as is clearly illustrated in studies using US data. fn2
Contrary to Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's article (1996), (1) racial redistricting remains vital to the election of African Americans to the U.S. House, and (2) the tradeoff between black descriptive and substantive representation is actually greater in the South than in the North. Substantive and methodological errors explain why they arrived at their findings. Specifically, their analysis ignores the effect of the presence of Latinos on the election of African Americans. Ironically, due to the very policy assessed in the article, Cameron, Epstein, and O'Halloran's data set does not allow them to examine the link between the racial composition of a district and the ideology of its representative. In addition, they do not consider that racial redistricting not only changes the aggregation of seats into votes but also indirectly boosts the Republican share of votes and seats.
An enduring fact of life in democratic electoral systems is that the party winning the largest share of the votes almost always receives a still larger share of the seats. This paper tests three models describing the inflation of the legislative power of the victorious party and then develops explanations of the observed differences in the swing ratio and the partisan bias of an electoral system. The “cube law” is rejected as a description, since it assumes uniformity (which is not observed in the data) across electoral systems. Explanations for differences in swing ratio and bias are found in variations in turnout over districts, the extent of the “nationalization” of politics, and, most importantly, in who does the districting or reapportionment. The measures of swing ratio and partisan bias appear useful for the judicial evaluation of redistricting schemes and may contribute to the reduction of partisan and incumbent gerrymandering.
This chapter emphasizes the utility maximization of Samuelson's Revealed Preference Theory. It looks for consistency, form, forecasting, and recoverability criteria within the theory. It concludes that the strong axiom is necessary and sufficient for utility maximization, as well as rich in empirical content. The logic of the strong axiom runs as follows: If A reveals itself to be 'better than' B, and if B reveals itself to be 'better than' C, and if C reveals itself to be 'better than' D, and so on, then the theory of revealed preference is formulated. Furthermore, say that A can be defined to be 'revealed to be better than' Z, as the last in the chain. In such cases, it is postulated that Z must never be revealed to be better than A.
Elections,usually taken to be a hallmark of democracy,can also become a tool of authoritarian powerholders seeking to legitimate their rule.
In this Note we challenge the claim asserted in a 1984 Wall Street Journal editorial that partisan gerrymandering by Democratic-controlled state legislatures is the principal reason for the inability of Republicans to translate their national share of votes proportionally into seats in the US House of Representatives. In contrast to previous work, we show the critical importance of sectional (South/non-South) differences for understanding the dynamics of electoral change at the congressional level. We argue that the inability of Republicans to translate votes effectively into congressional seats is largely a product of wasted Republican votes in the South, although we recognize that a handful of states (e.g., California) are significantly gerrymandered against Republicans, and we also recognize that part of the reason for the present-day Democratic advantage in the House is an incumbency advantage that benefits the party that controls most seats.
Considerable debate exists over the impact of redistricting on the partisan composition of the U.S. Congress. I address this debate by turning to an era of congressional redistricting that has received little systematic attention—the politics of gerrymandering in the 19th century. Using statewide-, county-, and ward-level electoral data from 1870 to 1900, I show that when a single party controlled the districting process, they used districting to systematically engineer a favorable partisan bias. These partisan biases affected the partisan composition of state congressional delegations and at times even helped determine party control of the House of Representatives.
Profound changes in American public policy have occurred only rarely and have been associated with ‘critical’ or ‘realigning’ elections in which ‘more or less profound readjustments occur in the relations of power within the community’. Since the appearance of V. O. Key's seminal articles on critical elections, an increasing number of political scientists have attributed great importance to such elections. Schatt-schneider views the structure of politics brought into being by critical elections as systems of action. Thus, during realignments, not only voting behavior but institutional roles and policy outputs undergo substantial change. Burnham, perhaps the most important analyst of realignment patterns, alleges the existence of an intimate relationship between realigning elections and ‘transformations in large clusters of policy’.
Run-off elections offer certain advantages for the study of political behavior over other electoral systems. This paper exploits the fact that run-off elections resem-ble a natural experiment to study the effects of competitiveness on voter turnout. The literature offers several explanations of the determinants of voter turnout. In run-off elections most of these factors can be assumed to be constant between the two ballots. Run-off elections, thus, provide an opportunity to evaluate the insights offered by rational choice theories of voter turnout. The results of the first ballot inform voters about the competitiveness of the race, which influences their propen-sity to vote on the second ballot. I derive several hypotheses about voter turnout in multi-candidate run-off elections from a simple theoretical framework and test them using data on the French legislative elections of 1997 and 2002. The results indicate competitiveness has a strong effect on voter turnout.
Redistricting is a thoroughly political act, but the political strategies of the various actors have often been lost in legal and representational arguments. While not discounting the importance of these issues, this paper looks at one set of actors in redistricting ---state legislators ---and examines how they might pursue their own interests during redistricting. Using the 1992 redistricting in North Carolina as a preliminary case study, the paper presents a brief description of the redistricting process, describes the particular circumstances in the state, and presents some comparative analyses of eight redistricting plans. Our findings indicate that members sought to balance individual and partisan interests when proposing plans and that, at least sometimes, individual ambition outweighed partisan loyalty.
This research note uses a median legislator model to assess the claim that racial redistricting leads to conservative policy outcomes. I examine policy preferences of southern representatives to the U.S. House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Surprisingly, the fraction of southern representatives who were liberal, that is, to the left of the House median, increased after racial redistricting. To explain this empirical pattern, I develop a simple formal model of redistricting's electoral effects. In the model, racial redistricting in a conservative state increases the number of members of that state's delegation to the left of the U.S. House median, thereby moving national policy outcomes to the left.
Competition in U.S. House elections has been declining for more than 50 years and, based on both incumbent reelection rates and the percentage of close races, the 2002 and 2004 House elections were the least competitive of the postwar era. This article tests three hypotheses that attempt to explain declining competition in House elections: the redistricting hypothesis, the partisan polarization hypothesis, and the incumbency hypothesis. We find strong support for both the partisan polarization hypothesis and the incumbency hypothesis but no support for the redistricting hypothesis. Since the 1970s there has been a substantial increase in the number of House districts that are safe for one party and a substantial decrease in the number of marginal districts. However, this shift has not been caused by redistricting but by demographic change and ideological realignment within the electorate. Moreover, even in the remaining marginal districts most challengers lack the financial resources needed to wage competitive campaigns. The increasing correlation among district partisanship, incumbency, and campaign spending means that the effects of these three variables tend to reinforce each other to a greater extent than in the past. The result is a pattern of reinforcing advantages that leads to extraordinarily uncompetitive elections.
Scholars argue that electoral management bodies staffed by autonomous, non-partisan experts are best for producing credible and fair elections. We inspect the voting record of Mexico's Instituto Federal Electoral (IFE), an ostensibly independent bureaucratic agency regarded as extremely successful in organizing clean elections in a political system marred by fraud. We discover that the putative non-partisan experts of “autonomous” IFE behave as “party watchdogs” that represent the interests of their political party sponsors. To validate this party influence hypothesis, we examine roll-call votes cast by members of IFE's Council-General from 1996 to 2006. Aside from shedding light on IFE's failure to achieve democratic compliance in 2006, our analysis suggests that election arbiters that embrace partisan strife are quite capable of organizing free, fair, and credible elections in new democracies.
We look at the problem of devising an optimal gerrymander from the standpoint of the political party in control of the redistricting process in a single-member district system involving two-party competition. In an electoral universe with uncertainty, we show that the optimal partisan gerrymander is different from the classic recipe for partisan gerrymandering if parties are concerned with the long-run risk of electoral defeat caused by shifting electoral tides. We look at two different plausible objective functions: (1) maximizing expected seat share: and (2) maximizing the probability of a (working) legislative majority. In general, the optimal districting schemes which will be generated under these two objective functions will be different, although both will make similar use of the two basic gerrymandering techniques, the concentration gerrymander and the dispersal gerrymander. Also, because of the need to minimize risk, both will resemble a bipartisan gerrymander considerably more than has previously been suggested in the literature. We also look at difficulties in achieving either objective (1) or objective (2) because of conflicts between majority party legislators' own self-interest and the districting that will maximize party advantage, and briefly review evidence that the 1982 California congressional plan was a risk-minimizing partisan gerrymander.
The purpose of this article is to assess the reality behind the politician's perception that redistricting matters. There are, of course, many dimensions to that perception, because redistricting has many effects. This articles focuses on the impact of boundary changes on the partisan composition of seats. In order to do this, it will be necessary to specify what the expected partisan effects of redistricting are and how they can be measured. Thus, I first explain how the impact of redistricting will vary with the strategy of particular plans and then explore some techniques for measuring the partisan impact of boundary changes. I conclude with a detailed analysis of the most important congressional redistricting in 1982--the Burton plan in California.
Cumulative link models for ordinal regression with the R package ordinal
- R H B Christensen
�Together or Apart? Assessing the Success of Electoral Coalitions at the Subnational Level in Mexico
- Juan Olmeda
Registro Federal de Electores
- Ine
A comparative analysis of redistricting institutions in the United States, 2001-02
- David R Mayhew
Mexico City. Peri�dico Reforma
- Ciro Murayama
Mexico: Democratization Through Electoral Reform
- Weldon Uitti
El cambio electoral: votantes, encuestas y democracia en M�xico
- A Moreno