The Limits of Partisanship in Citizen Preferences on Redistricting

• In Event: Mechanisms Explaining Policy Attitudes

Abstract

The most 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 paper proposes an alternative model in which most citizens prefer fair electoral institutions even at the expense of partisan interest when that choice is made explicit. To test this theory I use two survey experiments and the specific case of redistricting to determine how the presence of party labels and evidence of the opposing party behaving unfairly affect citizens’ choice between a “partisan gerrymander” district map and a “nonpartisan fair” map. The first experiment finds that while introducing party labels makes partisans more likely on average to choose a gerrymandered map, a clear majority of partisans choose a nonpartisan map across all experimental conditions. Only the small set of citizens who strongly identify as members of a political party or score highly on a measure of negative partisanship are likely to choose partisanship over fairness. The second experiment finds that being presented with evidence of the opposing party engaging in egregious gerrymandering does not cause partisans to be more likely to support similar gerrymandering benefitting their own side.

Author

• Devin McCarthy, Duke University