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Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

John A. Henderson,
Jasjeet S. Sekhon and
Rocío Titiunik
John A. Henderson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, 77 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520-8209
Jasjeet S. Sekhon*
Affiliation:
Travers Department of Political Science and Department of Statistics, Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 109 Moses Hall, #2370, Berkeley, CA 94720-2370
Rocío Titiunik
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, 5700 Haven Hall, 505 S. State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109
*
e-mail: sekhon@berkeley.edu; URL: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/ (corresponding author)
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Abstract

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Legislative redistricting alters the political and electoral context for some voters but not others, thus offering a potentially promising research design to study many questions of interest in political science. We apply this design to study the effect that descriptive representation has on co-ethnic political engagement, focusing on Hispanic participation following California's 2000 redistricting cycle. We show that when redistrictors draw legislative boundaries in California's 1990, 2000, and 2010 apportionment cycles, they systematically sort higher-participating Hispanic voters into majority-Hispanic (MH) jurisdictions represented by co-ethnic candidates, biasing subsequent comparisons of Hispanic participation across districts. Similar sorting occurs during redistricting in Florida and Texas, though here the pattern is reversed, with less-participating Hispanic voters redistricted to MH districts. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in redistricting largely unknown or underappreciated in previous research. Ignoring this selection problem could significantly bias estimates of the effect of Hispanic representation, either positively or negatively. After we correct for these biases using a hierarchical genetic matching algorithm, we find that, in California, being moved to a district with an Hispanic incumbent has little impact on Hispanic participation in our data.

Information

Type
Letters
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Summer 2016, pp. 404 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

Footnotes

Authors’ note: For valuable comments we thank Bruce Cain, Devin Caughey, Rudy de La Garza, Erin Hartman, Richard Johnston, Michael McDonald, Paul Sniderman, and Jonathan Wand. Nicole Boyle at the California Statewide Database helped provide data and answered our many questions, and we thank practitioners involved in redistricting who spoke with us in confidence. All errors are our responsibility. Replication data are available online at the Political Analysis Dataverse. A Supplementary Appendix for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site

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Supplementary material: PDF

Henderson et al. supplementary material

Appendix

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