Mobility-Based Gerrymandering: Theory and Evidence

Steeve Mongrain, Federico Revelli, Tanguy van Ypersele and Roberto Zotti

No 12625, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper models theoretically and tests empirically the hypothesis that the decision about the location of a public bad within a multi-tiered structure of government (a facility providing benefits throughout the federation but inflicting damage to the region hosting it) can be driven by strategic electoral considerations exploiting the heterogeneous migration responses to the location of the public bad by voters of different ideologies - a sort of mobility-based gerrymandering. As long as the average utility loss from living close to the public bad is larger for progressives than it is for conservatives, conservative and progressive central governments will pursue opposite strategies. The former locate the public bad in an electorally tight region to induce progressive voters to exit and gain the region for the conservative party, while the latter attempt to spread progressive voters out of safe and into electorally tight regions. An application to waste treatment plant locations across Italian municipalities returns evidence in support of the model's main hypotheses.

Keywords: gerrymandering; sorting; multi-tier structure; local elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12625.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_12625

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().