District Competitiveness Increases Voter Turnout: Evidence from Repeated Redistricting in North Carolina

Robert Ainsworth, Emanuel Garcia Munoz and Andres Munoz Gomez

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2024, vol. 19, issue 4, 387-432

Abstract: We study whether competitive legislative districts cause higher voter turnout. To do so, we employ rich data on the 2006 to 2020 elections in North Carolina. We make use of variation in district competitiveness due to repeated bouts of redistricting, a process in which district boundaries are redrawn. Specifically, we compare people who share the same districts in each legislative chamber (U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House) before redistricting but who differ in districts after redistricting. We match these people on demographics, party registration, and pre-redistricting turnout. We then track their turnout behavior in post-redistricting elections. For the U.S. House, switching from an uncompetitive "80–20" district to a competitive "55–45" district increases turnout by a rate of 1 percentage point per election of exposure. For the state chambers, the magnitude is 0.6. Effects are highly persistent and sum across chambers. They appear to be explained in part by a learning channel, where living in a competitive district induces people to believe that races can be competitive.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00022114 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00022114

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Journal of Political Science from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().