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Title: Do Voters or Politicians Choose the Outcomes of Elections? Evidence from the Struggle to Control Congressional Redistricting

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2016

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Abstract: We test for whether political parties can exert precise control over the outcomes of high-stakes elections. We study state elections that determine control of Congressional redistricting, which allows a party to construct districts that favor its own Congressional candidates. There is a discontinuous change in a partys control of redistricting when the share of seats won in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent. We test for whether the party that previously held a majority can precisely choose an outcome on the winning side of the threshold. We find that its control is precise enough to create large discontinuities in both the probability density of the seats won and in pre-determined outcomes. It manages this by concentrating its electioneering in a few states while losing the rest. Parties choose to control redistricting in states where they recently lost U.S. House elections. These losses are temporarily reversed by redistricting.

Url: https://people.ucsc.edu/~azshenoy/files/gerrymander_permlink.pdf

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Authors: Jeong, Dahyeon; Shenoy, Ajay

Publisher: University of California, Santa Cruz

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other

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