When Candidates Are Ignored: Independent Redistricting and Candidate Emergence

• In Event: Political Attitudes, Voters, and Voting in the States

Abstract

What impact does the movement toward independent redistricting have on legislative candidate emergence?

To remove partisan biases from the redistricting process, independent commissions are given the mandate to explicitly ignore candidates and be agnostic of incumbency. These new laws implicitly assume a district’s partisan and racial composition are sufficient determining factors to attract a representative pool of candidates.

This view is not shared by political science evidence, which suggests candidates are not simply cogs in the process of redistricting. Past studies of partisan and incumbency bias recognize the pool of candidates remain central considerations to parties in the process of redistricting (Gelman and King 1994, Cox and Katz 2002). And the candidate emergence literature makes clear that the economic status of a district (along with party recruitment) are major factors that determine what types of candidates can run (e.g., Carnes 2018). Race of candidacy studies also make clear that the racial/ethnic composition of a district is the primary factor promoting the emergence and success of co-minority candidates (e.g., Fraga, Juenke, and Shah 2020). And there is additional evidence that redistricting choice of a district’s geographic composition matters for the number and types of candidates that emerge (Gimpel, Lee, and Thorpe 2011; Myers 2015).

Thus, beyond partisan attributes, demographic and civic attributes clearly play a role in determining the nature and attributes of a district’s candidate pool. But what happens if independent redistricting commissions ignore those considerations?

This paper explores this question by evaluating the effects of Michigan’s first independent redistricting process. It compares the predictions of candidate emergence based on what is explicitly allowed (partisan, electoral characteristics), to those based on a broader examination of the entire pool of potential candidates. A key contribution of this study is the new step of combining the State of Michigan registered voter file (7.5 million observations) along with census data from each election cycle to identify the “supply” attributes of a district and how it impacts emergence in comparison to the political “demand” features of a district. By matching observed candidates for state legislative office with registered voter records of each candidate’s address, we identify what types of neighborhoods are more likely to produce a sufficient number of candidates for office and whether those types of neighborhoods differ for Republican or Democratic candidates as well as race and gender characteristics.

Predictions of candidate emergence from the March 2022 state voter file will be compared to the actual rates and characteristics of candidates that officially run in June of 2022. The results and comparison will allow us to assess the degree to which state mandates to prioritize partisan characteristics and ignore candidacy factors produced gaps between what was expected once considering the socio-economic characteristics of the pool of potential candidates in a district.

Author

• Corwin D. Smidt, Michigan State University