Does Racial Redistricting Cause Conservative Policy Outcomes? Policy Preferences of Southern Representatives in the 1980s

This research note uses a median legislator model to assess the claim that racial redistricting leads to conservative policy outcomes. I examine policy preferences of southern representatives to the U.S. House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Surprisingly, the fraction of southern representatives who were liberal, that is, to the left of the House median, increased after racial redistricting. To explain this empirical pattern, I develop a simple formal model of redistricting’s electoral effects. In the model, racial redistricting in a conservative state increases the number of members of that state’s delegation to the left of the U.S. House median, thereby moving national policy outcomes to the left.