Abstract
We analyze the effects of redistricting as revealed in the votes received by the Democratic and Republican candidates for state legislature. We develop measures of partisan bias and the responsiveness of the composition of the legislature to changes in statewide votes. Our statistical model incorporates a mixed hierarchical Bayesian and non-Bayesian estimation, requiring simulation along the lines of Tanner and Wong (1987). This model provides reliable estimates of partisan bias and responsiveness along with measures of their variabilities from only a single year of electoral data. This allows one to distinguish systematic changes in the underlying electoral system from typical election-to-election variability.
Highlights
We develop measures of partisan bias and the responsiveness of the composition of the legislature to changes in statewide votes
We analyze the effects of redistricting as revealed in the votes received by the Democrats and Republicans in elections for state legislative seats
We develop measures of partisan bias and the responsiveness of the partisan composition of the legislature to changes in statewide votes
Summary
We analyze the votes received by Democratic and Republican candidates for the lower house of the legislatures of Ohio, Connecticut, and Wisconsin, in the seven elections held in even-numbered years from 1968 through 1980. All elections in these states were by plurality vote in singlemember districts, and, except for two districts in Wisconsin in 1980, were won by one of the two major-party candidates. Since we are interested in this party support, we define the effective vote in the case of uncontested districts to be the (unobserved) proportion of the two-party vote that this candidate would have won in his or her district had the election been contested. 1968-1980 in the three state legislatures considered in this article
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