Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T18:26:29.944Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

John A. Henderson ,
Jasjeet S. Sekhon  and
Rocío Titiunik
John A. Henderson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, 77 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8209
Jasjeet S. Sekhon*
Affiliation:
Travers Department of Political Science and Department of Statistics, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 109 Moses Hall, #2370, Berkeley, CA 94720-2370
Rocío Titiunik
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 5700 Haven Hall, 505 S. State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
*
e-mail: [email protected]; URL: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/ (corresponding author)
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Legislative redistricting alters the political and electoral context for some voters but not others, thus offering a potentially promising research design to study many questions of interest in political science. We apply this design to study the effect that descriptive representation has on co-ethnic political engagement, focusing on Hispanic participation following California's 2000 redistricting cycle. We show that when redistrictors draw legislative boundaries in California's 1990, 2000, and 2010 apportionment cycles, they systematically sort higher-participating Hispanic voters into majority-Hispanic (MH) jurisdictions represented by co-ethnic candidates, biasing subsequent comparisons of Hispanic participation across districts. Similar sorting occurs during redistricting in Florida and Texas, though here the pattern is reversed, with less-participating Hispanic voters redistricted to MH districts. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in redistricting largely unknown or underappreciated in previous research. Ignoring this selection problem could significantly bias estimates of the effect of Hispanic representation, either positively or negatively. After we correct for these biases using a hierarchical genetic matching algorithm, we find that, in California, being moved to a district with an Hispanic incumbent has little impact on Hispanic participation in our data.

Type
Letters
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Summer 2016 , pp. 404 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Authors’ note: For valuable comments we thank Bruce Cain, Devin Caughey, Rudy de La Garza, Erin Hartman, Richard Johnston, Michael McDonald, Paul Sniderman, and Jonathan Wand. Nicole Boyle at the California Statewide Database helped provide data and answered our many questions, and we thank practitioners involved in redistricting who spoke with us in confidence. All errors are our responsibility. Replication data are available online at the Political Analysis Dataverse. A Supplementary Appendix for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site

References

Abadie, Alberto. 2005. Semiparametric difference-in-differences estimators. Review of Economic Studies 72:1–19.Google Scholar
Ansolabehere, Stephen, Snyder, James M., and Stewart, Charles. 2000. Old voters, new voters, and the personal vote: Using redistricting to measure the incumbency advantage. American Journal of Political Science 44(1):17–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barreto, Matt A. 2007. Sí Se Puede! Latino candidates and the mobilization of Latino voters. American Political Science Review 101(3):425–41.Google Scholar
Barreto, Matt A., Segura, Gary M., and Woods, Nathan D. 2004. The mobilizing effect of majority-minority districts on Latino turnout. American Political Science Review 98(1):65–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cain, Bruce, MacDonald, Karin, and Hui, Iris. 2006. Competition and redistricting in California: Lessons for reform. Institute of Governmental Studies.Google Scholar
Chen, Jowei, and Rodden, Jonathan. 2013. Unintentional gerrymandering: Political geography and electoral bias in legislatures. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 8(2):239–69.Google Scholar
De la Garza, Rodolfo O, and DeSipio, Louis. 1992. Save the baby, change the bathwater, and scrub the tub: Latino electoral participation after seventeen years of Voting Rights Act coverage. Texas Law Review 71:1479.Google Scholar
Fraga, Bernard L. 2016. Redistricting and the causal impact of race on voter turnout. Journal of Politics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henderson, John A., Sekhon, Jasjeet S., and Titiunik, Rocío. 2016. Cause or effect? Turnout in Hispanic majority-minority districts. http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/D6HU1J, Harvard Dataverse, v1.Google Scholar
King, Gary, Palmquist, Bradley, Adams, Greg, Altman, Micah, Benoit, Kenneth, Gay, Claudine, Lewis, Jeffrey B., Mayer, Russ, and Reinhardt, Eric. 1997. The record of American Democracy, 1984–1990. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA [producer], Ann Arbor, MI: ICPSR [distributor].Google Scholar
Sekhon, Jasjeet S., and Titiunik, Rocío. 2012. When natural experiments are neither natural nor experiments. American Political Science Review 106(1):35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Henderson et al. supplementary material

Appendix

Download Henderson et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 394 KB