When Residents, Not Voters, Drive Seats: Noncitizens and Malapportionment

What the Paper Asks

André Walter and Patrick Emmenegger investigate how the geographic concentration of non-citizen residents interacts with the rules used to allocate legislative seats—and whether that interaction changes who is over- or under-represented. The paper challenges the common view that malapportionment chiefly benefits rural, conservative areas by showing that institutional design and population composition can shift the advantage elsewhere.

Key Concepts Explained

Malapportionment refers to systematic differences in representation across regions—some districts end up with more legislative seats per eligible voter than others. Apportionment can be based on total resident population (counting everyone living in a district) or on citizen population (counting only citizens or eligible voters). Spatial sorting of non-citizen residents means they tend to cluster in specific regions, which can change how seat allocations map onto the citizen electorate.

Data and Empirical Strategy

• Uses subnational data from ten advanced democracies to examine variation in district-level shares of non-citizen residents and in national apportionment rules.
• Compares patterns of malapportionment under population-based versus citizen-based apportionment, employing statistical models that link district non-citizen shares to deviations in representation.

Main Findings

• Where apportionment is based on total resident population, regions with high shares of non-citizen residents systematically gain representation relative to their citizen population.
• Where apportionment uses citizen-based counts, the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not produce the same malapportionment effect.
• These results imply that the political consequences of malapportionment are more heterogeneous than the standard rural/conservative story suggests: the distributional effects depend on which population is counted and on where non-citizens live.

Implications for Representation and Policy

The study highlights an institutional lever—whether seats are allocated by residents or by citizens—that can reshape the link between populations and political power. This matters for debates about electoral fairness, immigrant incorporation, and which communities receive policy attention, since apportionment rules can amplify or mute the influence of citizen voters depending on local demography.