Designing Democratic Government: Making Institutions Work

6. Redistricting Institutions and Competition in U.S. House Districts

Chapter 6 REDISTRICTING INSTITUTIONS AND COMPETITION IN U.S. HOUSE DISTRICTS  Michael P. McDonald POLITICAL THEORISTS DEFINE democracy in terms of electoral competition. Joseph Schumpeter (1950, 269) calls democracy a “competitive struggle for people’s vote.” For Robert A. Dahl (1984, 225) it is “a system of control by competition.” Electoral competition further supports characteristics often associated with a healthy democracy, such as strong party organizations (Rosenthal 1998, 195), higher voter turnout (see chapter 2 in this volume, by Shaun Bowler and Todd Donovan), targeted voter mobilization efforts by the political parties (Cox and Munger 1989; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), and accountability , or, in G. Bingham Powell Jr.’s (2000, 47) words, “The citizens’ ability to throw the rascals out seems fundamental to modern representative democracy because it is the ultimate guarantee of a connection between citizens and policymakers.” Regrettably, with competition so important to democracy, pundits and academics widely bemoaned the 2002 and 2004 United States congressional elections as the least competitive in recent history. Congressional Quarterly, The Cook Political Report, and other individuals and organizations described roughly 10 percent of the 435 congressional elections as “competitive,” that is, elections where the outcome was not known with a reasonable degree of certainty prior to Election Day (see Jacobson 2006 for Congressional Quarterly statistics, 1982 to 2004). An absence of competition even depressed Democratic seat gains in the 2006 election: even though the Democrats won a greater share of the vote than in 1994—an election with a national tide of similar magnitude favoring the Republican Party—only a net thirty seats changed hands in 2006, compared to a net fifty-four seats in 1994. The elec- tion outcome was reflected in preelection handicapping by Congressional Quarterly, which predicted in 1994 that ninety-eight seats would be “tossups ” or “lean” toward one of the two parties, and in 2006 classified only fortytwo as such. A widely speculated cause of the decline of competitive congressional elections is the decline of competitive congressional districts. Here, a competitive district is defined as a district with a near parity of partisan supporters (Niemi and Deegan 1978). As the national swing toward the Democrats in the 2006 election illustrates, district competitiveness is just one among many determinants of election results. Still, redistricting following the 2000 census set the stage for elections in the subsequent decade, depressing competition in 2002 and 2004 and the seat swing in 2006. There is a direct relationship between the partisan composition of districts and election outcomes: homogeneous partisan districts reliably elect members of the same party (Jacobson 2001, 182), whereas competitive districts are less likely to do so (Swain, Borrelli, and Reed 1998). District competition can have indirect effects on the competitiveness of elections by fostering the presence of strong challengers to incumbents (Maisel and Stone 1997). District competition affects other aspects of politics, such as the degree of political polarization in Congress, because “more competitive districts tend to produce more moderate candidates” (Ansolabehere , Snyder, and Stewart 2001, 143; Erikson and Wright 2001, 83). A cause for the decline in the number of competitive districts in recent congressional elections explored here is redistricting. The claim that redistricting has reduced the number of competitive districts appears in editorial pages across the political spectrum (see, for example, Fred Barnes, “Where Incumbents Tremble . . . In Iowa, a ‘Good Government’ Reform Actually Works,” Weekly Standard 8(3); “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” The Economist, November 2, 2002; “The Partisan Fix,” Washington Post, September 14, 2003, B6; “Democracy Takes a Hit,” New York Times, April 29, 2004; “No Contest ,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2004). I recently debated whether redistricting contributes to the declining number of competitive districts (McDonald 2006a, 2006b; Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning 2006a, 2006b). I believe that redistricting has the claimed effect and I leave it to readers to judge the merits of the debate for themselves, which largely turns on how to measure district competitiveness in the 1992 districts. Alan Abramowitz and his colleagues (2006a, 2006b) contend that redistricting is not the cause for the decline of the overall number of competitive districts, but they miss an important point: even if this is true, alternative redistricting institutions may affect district competition. There may be meaningful variation across states in the number of competitive districts that not only illuminate important theoretical debates within the scholarly literature, such as whether or not partisan gerrymanders result in more competitive dis142 DESIGNING DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT REDISTRICTING INSTITUTIONS...