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Title: The Targeting and Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering: Evidence from a Legislative Discontinuity

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: We propose a method that simultaneously identifies where parties take control of Congressional redistricting, and how they use it to win U.S. House races. Our method exploits the discontinuous change in a party’s control of redistricting triggered when its share of seats in the state legislature exceeds 50 percent during redistricting. In the elec- tion before redistricting, parties systematically win narrow majorities in legislatures of states where they have lost recent House races. We use a difference-in-discontinuities es- timator to control for this systematic difference in pre-redistricting U.S. House outcomes. We estimate that whichever party controls the state legislature during redistricting is 11 percentage points more likely to win House races immediately after redistricting. These gains effectively reverse the party’s pre-redistricting losses. Opposition votes are less ef- ficiently converted to seats and, under Republican redistricting, African Americans are more likely to be segregated into overwhelmingly black districts.

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

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Authors: Jeong, Dahyeon

Publisher: University of California, Santa Cruz

Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Other

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