Gerrymandering, Legislative Composition, and National Policy Outcomes

Many scholars claim that majority-minority districting has a perverse effect: it increases the number of conservatives elected to the House and thus moves policy to the right. To analyze the theoretical logic behind this claim, I develop a game-theoretic model with three stages: gerrymandering, elections, and policy choice. Electoral and policy outcomes are determined by median-voter models. In the first stage, policy-motivated gerrymanderers allocate voters to districts. In equilibrium, each state’s gerrymanderer maximizes the number of representatives from her state on her side of the House median. To model majority-minority mandates, I assume that minority voters have policy preferences to the left and that each gerrymanderer must create some majority-minority districts. This mandate forces conservative gerrymanderers to draw districts that elect liberal minority representatives. Liberal gerrymanderers, in contrast, draw districts that satisfy the mandate without wasting liberal white votes. Thus the mandate moves policy to the left.