The gerrymandering of cities and the politics of racial exclusion: Evidence from a spatial typology of municipal boundary changes

ABSTRACT

Municipal annexation is the most common means by which local governments in the United States redraw their jurisdictional borders. The highly contentious process often leads to the gerrymandering of city borders. In this study, we use the Python programming language to develop a method for identifying areas that have been annexed by or excluded from cities via the gerrymandering of their jurisdictional borders. Through analyses of all cities in the nation, as well as selected growing cities, we illustrate the extent of municipal gerrymandering and its disproportionate impact on communities of color. Our findings point toward the need for renewed attention to the role of local government boundaries, and in particular the routine expansion of these boundaries via annexation, in the creation and perpetuation of spatial inequality.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the College of Social Science at Michigan State University for financial support via the Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative. They would also like to thank Sarah Reckhow and colleagues at the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University for feedback on an early draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. We also tested models with robust standard errors and with clustering at the city level. These tended to produce lower standard errors than did clustering at the area level, so the results we present here are more conservative.

2. Because we do not have historical boundary data for all neighboring cities, some of the areas identified as underbounded prior to 2010 may in fact have been located inside other neighboring municipalities at the time. To account for this possibility, we identify areas that, as of 2010, were located inside a neighboring municipality; we then weight estimates of the total square miles of land located in underbounded areas in each decade by the percentage of land that was correctly identified as of 2010.

3. An alternative option, suggested by an anonymous reviewer, would be to identify each annexed polygon and determine the maximum distance from the perimeter of each polygon to the pre-annexation boundary of the city. This distance, which represents the maximum distance by which the city expanded its jurisdictional border over the given time period, could be used as the length of the buffer in step 5. Although this approach would lead to the creation of buffer areas that were commensurate with the city’ recent annexation activity, it also has an important limitation in that the method could not be used for cities that had not conducted annexations within the given time period.

4. See https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/LG/htm/LG.42.htm

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Provost Undergraduate Research Initiative, Michigan State University.

Notes on contributors

Noah J. Durst

Noah J. Durst is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Michigan State University.

Meng Cai

Meng Cai is a PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning at Michigan State University.

Jada Tillison-Love

Jada Tillison-Love received a Bachelor of Science with a major in Urban and Regional Planning from Michigan State University.

Huiqing Huang

Huiqing Huang is a Geographer, Urban Planner and Python Programmer. He is currently working as a Data Engineer in a spatial data service company. He received a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from Michigan State University.

Wisdom Henry

Wisdom Henry is a Honors College student double majoring in Urban and Regional Planning and History at Michigan State University.