Converting Wasted Votes into Legislation: An Empirical Investigation of The State Public Policy Outcomes of Partisan and Racial Gerrymandering

Despite the fact that gerrymandering has been a core practice of American politics since 1812, its consequences on the political process – whether detrimental, negligible, or something in between – are not adequately understood. In this thesis I investigate its empirical impacts on policy. Could the way district boundaries are drawn provide an explanation for why some state legislatures enact policies that are more extreme than others – in the liberal or conservative direction – even when states look similar on most dimensions? Are racial gerrymanders more likely to do so than gerrymanders that are strictly political? Are certain policy areas more affected than others? To answer these questions, I first classify political gerrymanders by how extreme they are (using the ‘Efficiency Gap,’ a metric created by Stephanopoulus and McGhee, 2015) and identify racial gerrymanders by consulting their litigation records. I then look for a significant relationship between the severity of a state’s gerrymandering and the average ideological leaning of its overall policy in the years that follow, using a standard measure of state policy liberalism (from scholars Devin Caughey and Christopher Warshaw). Such a study allows us to trace connections between gerrymandering and an array of policy measures on the left and/or right, while controlling for presidential vote counts and public mood. By examining the relationship between redistricting and policy, this study also speaks to larger questions about democratic health in US states, and the degree to which just, or unjust, apportionment affects the policies we live under.