Limits of Partisanship in Citizen Preferences on Redistricting

Abstract

A commonly accepted model of public attitudes toward election rules assumes that citizens follow the cues of their preferred party's elites and support rules that would benefit that party in elections. This article proposes an alternative theory in which most citizens prefer fair electoral institutions at the expense of partisan interest when that choice is made explicit, while a minority of committed partisans are driven by partisanship. I test this theory on the case of redistricting using two survey experiments that ask respondents to choose between a partisan gerrymander and a nonpartisan district map. While introducing party labels to a redistricting scenario makes partisans somewhat more likely to choose a gerrymandered map, a clear majority of partisans choose a nonpartisan map across all experimental conditions. Only citizens who strongly identify as members of a political party are likely to choose partisanship over fairness.