“How Does Partisan Gerrymandering Affect Voter Participation? Evidence from a Randomized Redistricting Lottery in North Carolina,” Jowei Chen, University of Michigan

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS WORKSHOP

Abstract: In September 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly redrew 57 state house districts in 28 counties by holding several lottery machine drawings that randomly picked from among several computer-simulated districting maps. These randomly chosen districting maps were then combined together and used as base maps for North Carolina’s new state House of Representatives districting plan, enacted by the General Assembly on September 17, 2019. In this paper, I analyze these randomly chosen maps from the 2019 lottery to assess the causal effect of districts’ partisan composition on voter participation. I find that electorally competitive districts cause an overall increase in voter turnout. However, voters exhibit even higher turnout increases when they are placed into a district that slightly favors their own preferred party. Republican voters are most likely to turn out when their district is electorally competitive but Republican-leaning. Likewise, Democratic voters exhibit the highest turnout rates when they are placed into Democratic-leaning districts that are still competitive. Together, these results illustrate how the partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts can significantly skew the partisan composition of the turnout electorate.

Jowei Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and a Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He studies redistricting, political geography, distributive politics, and executive agencies. His research has examined the partisan and racial effects of redistricting maps and the effect of political geography on redistricting outcomes. He has studied how legislators’ pork-barreling strategies are shaped by the electoral geography of their districts and how government spending influences voters. Finally, his research has analyzed the political control of executive agencies.

In 2019, Common Cause honored Chen as a “Defender of Democracy” for his work on partisan gerrymandering.

The Quantitative Research Methods Workshop series is sponsored by the ISPS Center for the Study of American Politics and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale with support from the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.