Identifying partisan gerrymandering and its consequences: evidence from the 1990 US census redistricting

Navid Sabet and Noam Yuchtman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We empirically identify politically-motivated redistricting and its consequences, studying the effects of changed electorate composition on US congressional district boundaries and on political outcomes. We exploit the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA),which legalized millions of immigrants, changing local electorates without changing demographics— legalized immigrants were already counted in the census. Where Democrats controlled the 1990 redistricting process, higher IRCA populations were associated with more spatially distorted districts. Consistent with theory, Democrats packed Hispanics(their ardent supporters) into majority-minority districts. House delegations had more Hispanics suggesting that partisan gerrymandering, in this case, increased representation among the historically underrepresented.

Keywords: gerrymandering; minority political representation; immigrant legalization; state governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 J10 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-09-19
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-inv and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, 19, September, 2025. ISSN: 2832-9368

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/126163/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:126163

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().