The Effect of Redistricting Commissions on District Bipartisanship and Member Ideology

Abstract

Reformers advocate the use of commissions rather than legislatures to redistrict as a way of promoting less partisan districts and ideologically moderate congressional members. Much of the evidence in political science suggests that gerrymandering is not a cause of congressional polarization, but whether or not commissions produce different types of districts or members remains an important and unanswered question, especially now that many states have adopted reforms. This article examines whether commissions reduce district partisanship or ideological extremity using time-series-cross-sectional data. We find that bipartisan districts promote member moderation, but there is no evidence that commissions have distinct effects on districts or members as compared to districts drawn by legislatures, consistent with the notion that limiting gerrymandering is not a solution for polarization. These conclusions call into question the appropriateness of redistricting reform, especially when one considers the undemocratic nature of commissions.

Acknowledgments

This article was originally presented at the 2008 Southern and Midwest Political Science Conferences. The authors are indebted to Bill Jaeger for his research assistance Gary Jacobson for sharing his data, and thank Dave Doherty for his helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1 In 2010, Amendment 6 in Florida, designed to reduce the power of the legislature to gerrymander districts, passed with 62% of the vote, while Oklahoma State Question 748, intended to make the commission which draws legislative districts more bipartisan, passed with 58% of the vote. Proposition 20 in California, which created a redistricting commission, passed with 61% of the vote, while a similar proposition, New Jersey's Public Question 1, was supported by 56% of voters in 1995. In 2012, the Redistricting Reform Task Force in Ohio held public meetings throughout the state to generate support for a ballot proposition which would remove redistricting from the state legislature and create a commission-based redistricting process. (available at <http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/04/27/leadersoptimistic-about-redistricting-reform.html> (accessed June 6, 2012)).

2 While we focus on congressional representatives, similar claims have been made about the redistricting process for state house members and state senators (Abramowitz et al., 2006b).

3 Other commonly cited causes of congressional polarization include the sorting of like-minded voters into districts (Abramowitz et al., 2006b; Brewer et al., 2002), the breakdown of the New Deal Coalition, especially in the South (Jacobson, 2000; Rohde, 1991; Theriault, 2008), increasing divisions over cultural issues (Layman & Carsey, 2002; Layman et al., 2006), increasing income inequality (McCarty et al., 2006), and the incentives created by special interest groups and big-money donors (Fiorina et al., 2005; Sinclair, 2006).

4 <http://redistricting.lls.edu/why.php> (accessed June 7, 2012).

5 We replicate all results using NOMINATE scores, and the models are included in the Supplemental Information. The Supplemental Information can be found in the online Appendix available at https://bradley.academia.edu/JoshRyan.

6 According to Johnson (2005) these Masters drew districts based on factors, “from the Federal Law; Article XXI, Section I of the California Constitution; and the California Supreme Court's decision in Legislature v. Reinecke (1973).”

7 Berry et al.'s (1998) measure of state liberalism was also used, and the results are nearly identical to the those generated by the Pacheco measure. However, Pacheco's measure is more appropriate because Berry's measure uses congressional vote totals, a component of the dependent variable. We also note that the 109th Congress is the second Congress after the 2001 redistricting so any evidence of changes in member ideology caused by redistricting are likely to be apparent. Further, the models were run without the Pacheco measure and include the 110th Congress and the results are substantively identical.

8 The data was taken from the State Politics and Policy Quarterly Data Resource located at <http://academic.udayton.edu/sppq-TPR/tpr_data_sets.html>. The dataset was compiled by Lindquist (2007).

9 In Stata, the code to compute these means is egen mvarname= mean(varname), by(state)

10 The Stata code to compute the within-unit variables is: egen dvarname=varname-mvarname, where “mvarname” is the state-specific mean that was calculated in step 1.

11 All district-year level extremity results are analyzed using DW-NOMINATE scores. The number of observations is no longer a concern, and it is much easier to connect DW-NOMINATE scores to district numbers than adjusted ADA scores which are attached to the member rather than the district.

12 Most notably, the Texas legislature's 2012 redistricting plan was taken to Federal Court by the Justice Department.

13 We thank an anonymous reviewer for making this point.