{"title":"Secure majorities, unequal districts: One person, one vote & state bipartisanship","authors":"","doi":"10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102835","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>In 1964, the Supreme Court ended legal state legislature malapportionment. This paper considers the effects of this federal action on the partisan and ideological behavior of state legislatures in the immediate period following the Reapportionment Revolution (1959–1974), particularly in states with vast rural and urban representational differences. Using a novel dataset of state-level malapportionment rates, legislative partisanship, and state-level ideology, we find that nation-wide requirements led many state legislatures to become more competitive. Yet, while this electoral competition encouraged immediate bipartisanship, at least measured by partisan makeup and ideology, this partisan harmony was short-lived in states that malapportioned along geographic lines before the Redistricting Revolution. Thus, while we find evidence that institutional change can decrease partisanship, in cases where partisan control is reflective of perhaps a demographic or geographic imbalance, these changes can lead to a backlash effect.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48188,"journal":{"name":"Electoral Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-07-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Electoral Studies","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379424000933","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 1964, the Supreme Court ended legal state legislature malapportionment. This paper considers the effects of this federal action on the partisan and ideological behavior of state legislatures in the immediate period following the Reapportionment Revolution (1959–1974), particularly in states with vast rural and urban representational differences. Using a novel dataset of state-level malapportionment rates, legislative partisanship, and state-level ideology, we find that nation-wide requirements led many state legislatures to become more competitive. Yet, while this electoral competition encouraged immediate bipartisanship, at least measured by partisan makeup and ideology, this partisan harmony was short-lived in states that malapportioned along geographic lines before the Redistricting Revolution. Thus, while we find evidence that institutional change can decrease partisanship, in cases where partisan control is reflective of perhaps a demographic or geographic imbalance, these changes can lead to a backlash effect.
期刊介绍:
Electoral Studies is an international journal covering all aspects of voting, the central act in the democratic process. Political scientists, economists, sociologists, game theorists, geographers, contemporary historians and lawyers have common, and overlapping, interests in what causes voters to act as they do, and the consequences. Electoral Studies provides a forum for these diverse approaches. It publishes fully refereed papers, both theoretical and empirical, on such topics as relationships between votes and seats, and between election outcomes and politicians reactions; historical, sociological, or geographical correlates of voting behaviour; rational choice analysis of political acts, and critiques of such analyses.