Competition, Representation and Redistricting

Abstract

A redistricting plan that maximizes the frequency of competitive elections does not maximize the representativeness of political outcomes. A plan more closely resembling a ‘bipartisan gerrymander’ (a non-competitive plan) out-performs a set of competitive districts. Drawing on the literature from democratic theory and the trade-offs between redistricting goals, I expand on previous models by taking legislators’ and constituents’ ideologies into consideration in order to compare the representativeness of a fair competitive and a fair non-competitive redistricting plan. I show that non-competitive districts lead to smaller ideological differences between the positions of district median voters and their representatives, voters being ideologically closer to their legislators in absolute terms, and a distribution of ideology in the legislature that is closer to the distribution of ideology in the electorate. Also, the competitive plan cannot simultaneously make legislators responsive to their district median voters while ensuring that there is a sufficient amount of variation in ideology among the state delegation. The non-competitive plan can meet all requirements. Consequently, I argue that competition is not as fundamental to representative government as we might think since competition does a surprisingly poor job of producing representative outcomes.