Competing Criteria: Rethinking Congressional Redistricting and Representation

Abstract

Congressional redistricting requires institutions to make decisions about which criteria they will use to draw new district boundaries. These decisions unavoidably prioritize certain criteria at the expense of other criteria. Further, the competitive nature of redistricting criteria also means that when institutions use certain criteria at the expense of others, they are also correlating with certain forms of group representation at the expense of others. This paper argues that the representational consequences of redistricting are best understood through an approach that accounts for this process and the full array of redistricting institutions and criteria. Using a novel research design and an extensive data set covering six decades of redistricting cycles, this paper supports these claims with empirical evidence describing the relationships of seven categories of redistricting institutions with a wide range of criteria. This paper finds that partisan legislatures, bipartisan legislatures, and political commissions facilitate partisan group representation; state courts facilitate geographic group representation; federal courts facilitate racial and ethnic group representation; and independent commissions facilitate both geographic and racial/ethnic group representation. These findings emphasize that Americans are categorized and grouped differently during congressional redistricting depending on who is drawing the lines.