Redistricting

Abstract: Rising incumbency advantages in U.S. House elections have prompted a wave of new electoral laws, ranging from campaign nance regulations to term limits. We test a central claim for these reforms { that the incumbency advantage re°ects the collective irresponsibility inherent in legislatures. We study incumbency advantages for all state executive elections from 1942 to 2000 and contrast that with incumbency advantages in state and federal legislative elections. We nd that incumbency advantages for state executives and for legislators are similar in magnitude and have grown at the same rate over the last 60 years. If anything legislators have lower incumbency advantages than state executives. This nding reveals that the incumbency advantage is not unique to legislatures and that theories of incumbency advantages based on redistricting, legislative irresponsibility, pork barrel politics, and other features of legislatures do not explain the incumbency advantage. Some time in the late 1960s, congressional scholars began to note the increasing vote margins of U.S. House incumbents. By the mid-1970s a full-blown debate about the magnitude and sources of the incumbency advantage in US House elections had emerged. The list of potential causes is many { redistricting, congressional-bureaucratic relations, pork barrel spending, campaign nances, and declining party attachments. Broadly speaking, the debate over the sources of the incumbency advantage points either to factors that are distinctive to legislative politics, such as pork barrel politics and redistricting, or to factors that likely a®ected all o±ces, most notably the decline of party attachments or the growth of government generally. The conventional wisdom holds that legislative incumbents have uniquely high electoral advantages for two reasons. The rst is that many things that are thought to a®ect reelection rates are unique to legislatures. The most important of these are redistricting and seniority. Cox and Katz (2002) argue that the redistricting revolution caused the rise of incumbency advantages after the 1960s, because district lines can now be drawn to prevent competition. McKelvey and Reizman (1992) argue that seniority systems create a disincentive for voters to select someone else. Power within the legislature is tied to seniority, and as a legislator climbs the seniority rank the voters that legislator represents will bene t. Because all incumbents have some seniority no voters want to turn out their incumbent in the place of a new person, who will be the lowest ranked legislator. A second reason that legislators are thought to have especially large incumbency advantages is the lack of collective responsibility. Executives are held accountable for the broad performance of their agencies. Governors are responsible for economic performance; attorneys general, for crime; and so forth. Executives are also accountable for their actions: an executive decision is the decision of the individual politician. Legislatures, by contrast, are collective bodies. It is hard to know who in the legislature is responsible for a weak economy or a high crime rate. Party leaders can also coordinate legislators so that an individual legislator does not have to cast a vote that is particularly unpopular in the individual's

Abstract: In this paper we estimate the impact of press coverage on citizen knowledge, politicians' actions, and policy We find that a poor fit between newspaper markets and political districts reduces press coverage of politics We use variation in this fit due to redistricting to identify the effects of reduced coverage Exploring the links in the causal chain of media effects -- voter information, politicians' actions and policy -- we find statistically significant and substantively important effects Voters living in areas with less coverage of their US House representative are less likely to recall their representative's name, and less able to describe and rate them Congressmen who are less covered by the local press work less for their constituencies: they are less likely to stand witness before congressional hearings, to serve on constituency-oriented committees (perhaps), and to vote against the party line Finally, this congressional behavior affects policy Federal spending is lower in areas where there is less press coverage of the local members of congress

Abstract: We provide new estimates of the size of the personal vote in U.S. House elections from 1872 to 1990. We take advantage of the "natural experiment" that attends decennial redistricting: every ten years, most incumbents are given new districts that contain a combination of old and new territory. By contrasting an incombent's vote in the new part of the district with his or her vote in the old part of the district, we can estimate the magnitude of the personal vote-the vote that the incumbent receives because he or she represented the voters in the past. Our estimates confirm prior work that shows that a large fraction of the incumbency advantage owes to the personal vote, as opposed to challenger quality. Unlike past research, we are able to estimate the relationship between district partisanship and the personal vote. We find a significant interaction which shows that incumbents develop larger personal votes in areas where they are electorally most vulnerable. here is no doubt that incumbents today have a substantial advantage over nonincumbents in U.S. House elections. The overall size of this advantage has been fairly well established, as has the fact that incumbents' electoral strength has increased dramatically over the postwar period. Measured in terms of vote share, the overall incumbency advantage grew from a modest 1-3 percentage point edge in the 1940s and early 1950s to a 7-10 percentage point edge in the 1980s and early 1990s.1 There is much less agreement about the sources of the incumbency advantage and the causes of its growth. Congressional scholars have identified a variety of factors that may be responsible, which can be grouped into three broad categories. The first, and the focus of this paper, is electoral advantage that stems from a legislator's homestyle. Members of the House are reputedly very responsive to their constituents; in turn, their constituents reward them with their votes. Mayhew (1974b), Fenno (1974), and others detail the sorts of activities that legislators do to build a widely known and respected name, including casework, frequent visits to the district, position-taking on issues, and securing federal benefits. A second source of the incumbency advantage is candidate quality. Incumbents may win because they are the best candidates running, and they do noticeably worse when they face state legislators and other experienced challengers. Finally, incumbency may simply act as a voting cue, a label which voters rely on because party has become less relevant. Assessing the importance of these different factors has significant implications for our normative evaluations of the modern congress and our understanding

Abstract: Since the creation of minority-dominated congressional districts in 1991, the Supreme Court has condemned the move as akin to "political apartheid", while many African-American leaders argue that such districts are required for authentic representation. In this treatment of the subject, David Canon shows that the unintended consequences of black majority districts actually contradict the common wisdom that whites will not be adequately represented in these areas. Not only do black candidates need white votes to win, but this crucial "swing" vote often decides the race. And, once elected, even the black members who appeal primarily to black voters usually do a better job than white members of walking the racial tightrope, balancing the needs of their diverse constituents. Ultimately, Canon contends, minority districting is good for the country as a whole. These districts not only give African Americans a greater voice in the political process, they promote a politics of commonality - a biracial politics - rather than a politics of difference.