Scholars have long been fascinated with how rearranging voters into districts affects the power of political parties, the careers of incumbents, and the representation of minorities. In this special issue, “Electoral Redistricting,” State Politics and Policy Quarterly brings together articles that touch on the three subfields of redistricting research: redistricting to advance the interests of partisans, incumbents, and racial groups. SPPQ is an excellent venue for these articles. The states are largely granted congressional redistricting authority in Article I, Section 4 of the United States Constitution, and they have the responsibility for determining their own sub-state electoral districts. And comparative state analysis provides an excellent research design to study the general impacts of political geography, redistricting institutions, and redistricting criteria.

Legislative redistricting is among the most intensely fought battles in American politics. Through redistricting, political parties seek to control government, incumbents seek job security, and minority groups seek representation. I explore how the various United States redistricting institutions, and the political actors who operate within them, determined the outcomes of the 2001-02 redistricting cycle. I categorize these institutions into two types: redistricting that follows the normal legislative process and that which takes place through a commission. For those states that use the legislative process, when one party controls state government, redistricting results in a partisan gerrymander. When there is divided state government, a bipartisan compromise results from the legislative process. Commission systems differ on membership and voting rules, suggesting two types of commissions: partisan and bipartisan. A partisan commission reliably produces a partisan map, while a bipartisan commission results in a bipartisan compromise.

How do term limits affect the electoral changes caused by state legislative redistricting? To answer this question, we compare the success of majority parties in the redistricting process in legislatures with and without term limits. We hypothesize that majority parties use the districts of term-limited members to redistribute supporters from safe districts to more competitive ones. We find that, indeed, the majority party changes district lines more in districts with term-limited legislators. Furthermore, the majority party is more strategic in reallocating voters for partisan gain in term-limited districts. Thus, our findings suggest that term limits make the redistricting process more partisan and that a reform intended to remove incumbents from the legislature actually strengthens the majority party.

How do traditional redistricting principles—contiguity, communities of interest, political subdivisions, incumbent protection, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, preservation of district core, and compactness—affect racial minority representation in congressional districts? Using data from the 2001-02 redistricting process, we find that compactness is the only principle that significantly affects minority representation, both in terms of majority-minority districts and minority influence districts, but these effects are contingent on the size of the minority community and extent of racial segregation in a state. Two other principles, Section 5 pre-clearance and protecting political subdivisions, improve minority representation in a more limited way. Thus, race-neutral redistricting criteria like the compactness principle, can dramatically affect the racial composition of the resulting districts and, thereby, affect minority representation.

How do members of Congress anticipate and prepare for redistricting? I present data from the 1992 redistricting cycle that indicate that one reason why we rarely see changes in representation after redistricting is that incumbents change both their legislative activities and their campaigning prior to the first post-redistricting election. To examine incumbents' behavioral anticipation of redistricting in more detail, I also present a case study of incumbents' activities prior to the 1998 court-ordered congressional redistricting in North Carolina. I find that these incumbents participated actively in the redistricting process and made behavioral adjustments before they began to represent their new districts officially. These types of adjustments were often subtle, including changes in casework, local projects, and the allocation of staff and campaign resources.

Legislative redistricting in the states is highly contentious due, at least in part, to its partisan implications. But does the method by which states draw legislative districts affect partisan competition in the elections that are held in these districts? We examine the effects of three methods used by states to draw district boundaries on competition in congressional elections. Specifically, we evaluate the effects on competition of legislative, judicial, and commission redistricting plans enacted prior to the 1992 and 2002 congressional elections. We find that more competitive elections occur when courts and commissions are directly involved in the redistricting process, as opposed to when redistricting is handled only in the state legislative process.

The Commission-based process of local government electoral redistricting in England seeks to balance the tensions between both neutral and party political and mathematic and organic approaches to boundary drawing. We evaluate the success of this process by assessing the impact of redistricting on electoral equality and the strength of the political parties in each local authority. On one hand, the Commission appears to be effective in achieving vote equality by reducing the variability between electoral units in the ratio of electors to councillors. On the other hand, the way that submissions are made to the Commission, together with aspects of social and electoral geography over which it has no influence, can allow one party to receive more electoral benefit than another from redistricting.