Redistricting

This article offers the most comprehensive look yet at symbolic racial representation in Congress by analyzing legislators' public speech.

This paper reevaluates measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use and clarified in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020, American Political Science Review 114, 164–178). Attention centers on whether commonly used quantitative scores actually capture meaningful partisan fairness when applied to real-world vote patterns and redistricting decisions.

This paper asks whether parties in power can systematically win a slender majority of seats in close legislative elections — a pattern the authors call “precise control.” Using U.S. state assembly elections, the study tests for discontinuities at the 50% seat-share cutoff in outcomes that should be smooth if there is no deliberate manipulation: the density of seats won and which party previously held a majority. The central contribution is evidence that precise control exists, but primarily in high-stakes state elections that determine control over congressional redistricting, suggesting it is a strategic option used when stakes are large rather than a universal feature of state contests.

Political district scores are meant to flag unfair maps, but numeric measures respond not just to map shape — they also respond to noise and to seemingly innocuous implementation choices. Measurement values are affected by both noise and the compounding effects of seemingly innocuous implementation decisions. Such issues will arise for any measure, complicating efforts to use a single metric as a legal or policy standard.

This study investigates how economic segregation shapes local policy responsiveness.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable ends a long search for a judicial standard. That shift increases the importance of legislative solutions. A history of successful congressional action and existing statutory requirements show that the legislative route is more practical than commonly believed and allows consideration of a broader suite of districting objectives.

Does representation by a co-ethnic or co-racial candidate increase minority voter participation? This question has long been debated in the literature on political engagement. Previous studies produced conflicting results regarding whether exposure to minority candidates significantly raises turnout among their own group. However, this research argues that prior findings may have overlooked crucial differences between minority voters who encounter such candidates and those who do not.