Democracy Distorted: The Role of Malapportionment

• In Event: The Political Economy of Democratic Backsliding and Malapportionment

Abstract

This paper revisits the role of malapportionment in generating representation biases and its policy implications. We begin by documenting the gap between voters’ policy preferences (proxied by the median voter) and members of the legislature (proxied by the median parliamentarian) across democracies around the world. We show that, contrary to received wisdom, malapportionment does not have a consistently conservative bias around the world. We then evaluate the importance of malapportionment relative to other sources of representation bias. To understand the mechanisms driving the effect of malapportionment and understand the conditions under which it leads to ideological bias, we turn to the in-depth analysis of several cases with individual survey data (UK, USA, Spain, and Chile). Finally, after developing a measure of malapportionment that incorporates its ideological bias, we provide evidence on its impact on economic (spending) policies and inequality.

Authors

• Pablo Beramendi, Duke University

• Carles Boix, Princeton University

• Marc Guinjoan, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• Melissa Ziegler Rogers, Claremont Graduate University