Redistricting and the Geographic Redistribution of Political Influence

• In Event: Redistricting Reform and Impact in the US

Abstract

Because the House of Representatives has been fixed at 435 members since 1913, states that gain seats wind up taking them from other states. The losing states have either lost population since the previous census, or more regularly simply haven’t grown as fast as the winners. Over the last 105 years, the fixed number of seats also means that the populations of districts have grown vastly larger.

Who has lost and who has won as the result of these decennial transformations? If the districts that disappear are exactly the same as the districts that pop up in another location, then it’s hard to argue that there are any clear-cut winners and losers. In reality, though, no district has disappeared only to reemerge in its entirety somewhere else. The old district has a distinctive population composition quite different from the new one. This research will document the compositional changes resulting from the emergence of new districts and the disappearance of the old.

Author

• James G. Gimpel, University of Maryland, College Park