Racial Redistricting and Realignment in Southern State Legislatures

Abstract

Competing logit models of the link between the racial composition of districts and party are estimated and then analyzed for all state legislative elections held in the South from 1990 to 1998. Using these models and a decomposition model developed by Grofman and Handley (1998), we decompose changes in seats won by the Democrats since 1990 into redistricting, realignment, and interaction effects. Racial redistricting harmed the Democrats in all states and cost the Democrats control of at least two state Houses. However, the ongoing realignment toward the Republicans played a much greater role in Democratic losses. We find little evidence to support the white-backlash theory, but conclude that Democratic candidates fare better in highland districts compared to other heavily white regions of the South. acial redistricting emerged as one of the most fiercely debated policy questions among scholars, judges, and politicians during the 1990s. While the battle has raged along multiple fronts-normative, constitutional, methodological-the central empirical contention revolves around the policy's partisan impact. Critics of racial redistricting claim, and Republicans hope, that packing black voters into majority-minority districts cripples the Democratic party outside of the safe seats it creates for black representatives (e.g., Bullock 1995; Lublin 1997; Lublin and Voss 1998; Swain 1995a, 1995b; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). Friendlier analysts, by contrast, downplay the damage nearby Democrats typically will suffer (e.g., Engstrom 1995; Grofman and Handley 1998; LDF 1994; McDonald and Lucas 1998; Petrocik and Desposato 1998). The true electoral effect of racial redistricting remains unclear.' Virtually all studies of racial redistricting's partisan impact have focused solely on one or two congressional elections.2 Whatever their practical significance, these high-profile contests provide few actual cases to test how electoral borders shape Democratic fortunes, especially in the critical range where African Americans fall just short of a majority. Restricting attention to congressional elections unnecessarily limits the scope of analysis, since the hypothesized behavioral regularities that undergird this empirical debate are not unique to national politics.