Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis advisor: Shep Melnick / Every decade, following the U.S. Census, lawmakers redraw state and federal legislative districts. This process of redistricting is a necessary aspect of representative democracy for capturing population changes in a dynamic society. While this responsibility of redrawing legislative districts has historically been left to state legislatures to complete - and more recently to commissions and panels - the reality is that every redistricting cycle, some of these maps are actually drawn by the U.S. federal courts. These maps determine the district boundaries for millions of Americans - who votes where, for whom and with whom. Since the Supreme Court ruled that legislative reapportionment was a justiciable issue for federal judiciary in 1962’s landmark decision, Baker v Carr, the lower federal courts have regularly taken the extraordinary step of drawing legislative districts themselves when the initial redistricting institution fails to implement a lawful plan. This places the famously nonpartisan institutions at the center of the most political activity. There is no clear constitutional or statutory guidance for how federal courts should make these remedial maps, and there are dozens of competing criteria for where to draw each line: compactness, partisan advantage, racial representation, competitiveness, protection of political subdivisions, etc. This raises fundamental questions about the role of the federal courts in American government, the nature of representative democracy, judicial independence and the separation of powers, the criteria for judging fairness, institutional capacity and federalism. Despite these tensions, there has been no comprehensive research on the impact that federal courts have on redistricting. This dissertation aims to address these tensions and fill this scholarly gap, answering the question of What has been the impact of federal court involvement in legislative redistricting between 1962’s Baker v Carr and 2019’s Rucho v Common Cause. In this dissertation, I use five approaches to undertake a comprehensive examination of the role of the federal courts in redistricting during this 57-year period. In Chapter 2, I adapt Supreme Court decision making theories for the lower federal courts to develop a theory of institutional constraints. I argue these constraints determine the courts’ choices on when, how and why to make a redistricting map and which criteria to use. In Chapter 3, I use an American Political Development approach to examine the changes in judicially manageable standards created by the Supreme Court over time for understanding the legally constraining precedents for the lower courts. In Chapter 4, I conduct an original descriptive content analysis of more than 1,200 lower federal court decisions between 1960 and 2019 related to redistricting to understand the preconditions for federal court action, the trends in lower federal court caseload and outcomes, and the obedience of the lower courts to Supreme Court precedents. In Chapter 5, I present the analytical heart of this dissertation, testing my theory and defining what makes a federal court-made map distinct from those made by other institutions. To accomplish this goal, I use an original dataset of five decades of redistricting plans at the state and federal levels together with 13 varied quantitative methods developed by myself and other political scientists for measuring gerrymanders. Analyses of these data allow me to quantify the criteria used by the federal courts in distinction to other institutions, leading to predictive results about the federal courts as map makers. I find that federal courts create redistricting plans with lower population variance, more compact districts, and a higher proportion of majority-minority districts for descriptive racial representation than legislatures or commissions. Federal courts also create some partisan bias in their plans but at a lower level than is seen in legislatures. In Chapter 6, I take a qualitative, case study approach and compare these empirical results to the actual court opinions in four representative instances where the courts drew the maps. I examine how well judges understood the nonpolitical criteria they were actually using in practice and apply my theory of institutional constraints on lower federal courts. In sum, this dissertation offers: • new datasets and methods for studying redistricting institutions; • descriptive accounts of the trends, processes and development of federal courts redistricting; • an institutional theory and approach for studying the lower federal courts; • A detailed examination of the development of Supreme Court precedents on redistricting that constrain lower court decision making; • and quantitative and qualitative analyses of which criteria the federal judiciary favors when they draw plans and why. Most importantly, this dissertation finds that the criteria courts favor in practice differ from those used by state legislatures and commissions. Federal courts apply criteria shaped by judicial constraints and that reflect a distinct understanding of legislative representation. The dissertation’s conclusion examines the implications of these findings for American democracy, the lower federal courts, voters and constituents. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

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This thesis analyzes the history behind reapportionment and how the task of redistricting has differed in the past decades. For the most part, there was always been a public outcry when the task was in the hands of the Legislature. Fear of political gerrymandering and the creation of safe districts was enough for people to pass a series of initiatives to try and correct the system. While many initiatives failed to pass, Proposition 11, passed in 2008, created the Citizen’s Redistricting Commission—a 14-member committee put in charge of drawing this years’ plans. This paper also looks at population trends in the past decade and takes into account the impact of the increase in Latinos in the state of California.

Elections are the engine that drives democracy. The central question of this dissertation relates to the speed of that engine: How long does it take for elections to reflect changing preferences in the electorate? The findings presented in this dissertation suggest that electoral change is the result of a gradual process of natural selection in which the political environment, rather than district service activity, is the key variable. Comparing elections data across different types of district environment, I find evidence that the environment affects levels of competition and electoral outcomes. Utilizing an event history statistical model to examine various risk factors for electoral defeat, I find that the political environment of the district is the most important factor influencing the risk of defeat even when controlling for district service behaviors. Over time, the district environment operates as a self-correcting mechanism, purging political misfits and replacing them with representatives who better reflect the ideology of the district. Electoral change typically results more from evolution than revolution – it may not occur quickly, and it may not occur in every district, but it does occur when and where it is needed.

My dissertation contains three chapters studying the strategic allocation of resources in political environments. Chapter 2 asks if redistricting is the result of partisan gerrymandering or apolitical considerations. I develop a statistical test for partisan gerrymandering and apply it to the U.S. Congressional districting plan chosen by the Republican legislature in Pennsylvania in 2001. First, I formally model the optimization problem faced by a strategic Republican redistricter and characterize the theoretically optimal solution. I then estimate the likelihood a district is represented by a Republican, conditional on district demographics. This estimate allows me to determine the value of the gerrymanderer's objective function under any districting plan. Next, I use a geographic representation of the state to randomly generate a sample of legally valid plans. Finally, I calculate the estimated value of a strategic Republican redistricter's objective function under each of the sample plans and under the actual plan chosen by Republicans. When controlling for incumbency the formal test shows that the Republicans' plan was a partisan gerrymander. In Chapter 3 I introduce a new and novel electoral reform that continues to allow redistricting but changes the incentives to do so. This reform ensures that parties earn seats proportional to their performance at the polls without substantially changing the electoral system in the U.S. In order to evaluate the reform's impacts, I model and solve a game that incorporates the redistricting decision, candidate choice, state legislative elections, and policy choice. Unsurprisingly, strategic redistricting biases policy in favor of the redistricting party. In the environments studied, the new reform never increases policy bias, and often reduces it. Political campaigns often require the strategic allocation of resources across multiple contests. In Chapter 4 I analyze these environments in terms of the canonical Colonel Blotto game, beginning with the most basic of Blotto games: Two officers simultaneously allocate their forces across two fields of battle. The larger force on each front wins that battle, and the payoff is the sum of the values of the battles won. I completely characterize the set of Nash equilibria to any such game and provide the unique equilibrium payoffs. This characterization comes from an intuitive graphical algorithm which I then apply to several generalizations of the game. I completely characterize the set of equilibria and provide the unique equilibrium payoffs to Blotto games with battlefield values that vary across players and games with general resource constraints. I also use my approach to solve the Blotto games on more than two battlefields with asymmetric battlefields and force endowments. / text

This dissertation presents work on gerrymandering in American legislative districts and on school competition and school choice. The work on gerrymandering analyzes how to measure gerrymandering and investigates some of its causal effects. The analysis of how to measure gerrymandering is presented in Chapter 1 and in the first half of Chapter 2. The context is the following. Legislative maps are often evaluated along dimensions of proportionality (the alignment between parties' seat shares and their state- or nation-wide vote shares) and competitiveness (the fraction of contests with uncertain winners). Since a map is intended to be used for multiple elections, policy-makers want to accurately predict how it will perform on these dimensions in the future. Doing this is difficult because future elections will differ from past ones due to changes in the demographic composition of the electorate and as a result of electoral shocks to preferences and turnout costs. Citing this uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the judicial system is incapable of adjudicating claims of partisan gerrymandering. The first contribution of the dissertation is to develop a method for predicting the uncertainty in a map's performance due to electoral shocks and changes in demographics. The method relies on a structural voting model, which describes the preference and turnout decisions of a potential voter. The model decomposes an election into (i) a set of candidate qualities and (ii) individual-level utility parameters. I assess map performance in two steps. First, I examine the effect of electoral shocks by simulating alternative values of the candidate qualities and utility parameters. Second, I investigate the influence of demographic changes by re-running the simulations using different electorates. I apply the method to rich data from the 2008 to 2018 general elections in North Carolina and show that it allows credible and precise evaluations of maps. I also show that the method is better than existing approaches at predicting gerrymandering outcomes in excluded elections. The remainder of Chapter 2 concerns the causal effects of gerrymandering. Specifically, I examine whether the probability that someone turns out to vote is influenced by the competitiveness of his or her legislative districts. I do this by comparing outcomes over time for individuals in North Carolina who were placed into more or less competitive districts in 2011 as part of the decadal ``redistricting" process. I compare individuals who shared the same districts in each legislative chamber (U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House) before redistricting and who differed in districts for only one chamber after redistricting. Within these comparison groups, I match individuals on demographics and history of turnout and party registration. I find that being placed into a less competitive district reduces turnout. Effects grow over time and exist in both midterm and presidential elections. By 2018, having been placed in a district in which one party is always predicted to win versus one in which the parties have an even chance of winning reduces turnout by 1.9 percentage points for U.S. House districts and 1.4 percentage points for NC House and NC Senate districts. These results highlight the importance of considering district competitiveness when drawing legislative maps. Chapter 3 is work that is joint with Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola. It examines how schools' incentives are influenced by the way in which households make school choice decisions. A summary is as follows. Recent work examines whether households choose schools based on school value added (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2020; Beuermann et al. 2019). Given that value added is difficult to observe, households' choices are likely to depend on both (i) how much they care about value added and (ii) how well informed they are about which schools have high or low value added. We examine this concern using administrative data, a survey, and an experiment in Romanian high school markets. Using the survey, we can explain households' preferences based on their beliefs about school traits, rather than on the values of these traits that are measured by researchers. In the administrative data, we find that households' choices are better explained by measured values of peer quality than by measured values of value added. By contrast, in the survey data, we find that households' beliefs about value added and peer quality have equal explanatory power for their choices. This motivates an experiment in which we provide households with information on school value added. We find that the information has a positive but heterogenous effect on the extent to which households prioritize value added in their school choices. Effects are largest for households who were initially less certain of their choices and for households with low-scoring students.