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Abstract
The authors examine constituency changes induced by redistricting and ask three questions: What explains the amount of instability and uncertainty induced by redistricting? Does uncertainty affect legislators' career choices? How do these changes affect election outcomes? The authors show that partisan redistricting plans are able to produce significant instability between elections, especially for opposing-party incumbents. Their findings have important implications for representation: through redistricting, strategic actors can disrupt the stability that many theorists would consider paramount for the operation of a democratic republic. The authors show that the effects of redistricting go beyond the simple examination of changes in each district's underlying partisanship.
Keywords
redistricting, representation, gerrymandering, uncertainty, instability, congressional careers, electoral competition
Most theories of representation posit that representatives in a democracy should possess some knowledge of the needs and wants of the represented. This importance of legislators' knowledge of the interests of their constituencies has long been recognized. In Federalist No. 56, for instance, James Madison wrote, "It is a sound and important principle that the representative ought to be acquainted with the interests and circumstances of his constituents," a situation more likely to occur when representatives can make meaningful, lasting connections with constituents (Fenno 2000, 2007). Democratic representation and popular sovereignty also entail the ability for constituents to hold their representatives accountable (Dahl 1971). Whether institutions facilitate or hinder representatives' understanding of their constituents' interests, on the one hand, and citizens' ability to hold elected officials accountable, on the other, is thus an important normative question. In this article, we posit one factor that can affect these linkages: the degree of inter-election instability, which we define as the disruption of the representative-constituent dyadic link between elections. While there are many causes that lead to high inter-election instability (e.g., legislator death, constituents moving), a theoretically more interesting situation occurs when political actors have the institutional wherewithal to foster instability strategically between elections. One example-and the one of interest in this article-is the way in which the redistricting process affects inter-election instability, uncertainty, and ultimately representation.
We ask two specific questions in this article. First, do strategic actors use redistricting to foster instability and uncertainty and to affect legislators' career choices? Second, do redistricting-induced instability and uncertainty produce a more competitive electoral...