Scholars of American electoral politics remain skeptical about the capacity of political parties to engineer substantial advantages through the manipulation of electoral district boundaries. In Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy, Erik Engstrom attempts to overturn the conventional wisdom by widening the lens of analysis beyond the reapportionment and redistricting revolution that began in the 1960s.
The book is organized chronologically, beginning with the construction of electoral institutions in the early republic, from 1789 to 1840. Readers discover that conflict pervaded the drawing of the first congressional districts and the choice of electoral systems, shaping the fortunes of political parties as they emerged. Whereas most states adopted single-member plurality districts, over a quarter used multimember plurality “general-tickets” that would allow a dominant slate of candidates (typically Federalists) to capture all M seats in a single statewide race.
In the second section, Engstrom analyzes congressional elections from 1840 to 1900. His analysis of the timing of state redistricting events reveals that when parties had both the opportunity (unified control of the legislative process) and motive (a new party coming to power, especially when through an out-party’s biased districting plan), the probability of partisan redistricting spiked. The consequences for electoral competition and policy outcomes are analyzed in subsequent chapters. The final section of the book analyzes changes in the partisan landscape at the beginning of the twentieth century that, as Engstrom shows, reduced the incentive for partisan gerrymandering and helped usher in the careerism, seniority norms, and professionalism that we associate with the modern Congress.
One of the most difficult hurdles for the author to overcome is the received wisdom that the incentive to maximize partisan advantage through gerrymandering is limited in large measure by career-seeking interests of individual members of Congress. For decades, scholars of Congress such as David Mayhew, Morris Fiorina, David Rhode, and Peter Wissel have established the principle that incumbents in both parties are likely to prioritize their mutual interest in maintaining electorally safe seats over distributing their voters more efficiently across districts. Yet the conditions that have enabled careerism to flourish in our professionalized Congress are less well understood.
Engstrom illustrates how, prior to the 1890s, the electoral environment for members of Congress was not hospitable for long stays. Strategic partisan changes in congressional election requirements and frequent addition (and occasional subtraction of) congressional seats to state delegations, along with near parity in party strength and high turnover in state legislatures, generated enough uncertainty about career potential to align the interests of individual incumbents with the collective interest of partisan advantage.
As a result, decennial and mid-decade redistricting, in addition to occasional at-large elections and general-ticket voting, were strategically deployed to maximize partisan gain. Indeed, Engstrom’s accounts of redistricting events in specific states illustrate how the manipulation of electoral rules and maps was a regular part of campaign strategies in most electoral cycles from 1840 to 1900. He concludes that members did not develop a “home style” when they knew “that the legislature can, and likely will, carve up your district in two years” (p.187).
Still, adherents of the “minimal gerrymandering effects” thesis may not be convinced by the author’s analysis of the impact of statewide districting plans on the composition of the House of Representatives. On the surface, the frequent turnover and instability observed in state congressional delegations suggest that efforts to entrench partisan majorities were not very effective. Engstrom identifies only two elections during the partisan era, 1878 and 1888, in which gerrymandering likely determined party control of the House. However, his empirical analysis demonstrates how state parties reversed previous disadvantages and imposed their own biased plans for Congress, even if short-lived.
Engstrom accomplishes his primary goal in Chapters 5 and 6, demonstrating that partisan redistricting has profoundly shaped both electoral and policy outcomes in the House, and by extension the construction of American democracy. Arguably his most important discovery is that the nineteenth-century gerrymanders were primarily “dispersal” or “efficient” gerrymanders, which attempt to create a microcosm of the state in each district, allowing a majority party to sweep the election, rather than the “packing” of opponents into inefficient districts that we increasingly see today.
From 1840 to 1900, the average bias for Democratic-drawn plans was 8.25, meaning that if Democrats received 50% of the statewide vote, they would receive 58% of the seats. Republican-drawn plans were biased in their favor by an average of 5.7 points (Table 5.2). But both types of plans were responsive to a degree of 4 points or more, meaning that a 1% vote increase/loss would yield a 4% seat increase/loss. Compare these averages to the gerrymandering that occurred after 2010, according to Gerrymandering in America (2016) by Anthony J. McGann et al. Overall bias nearly tripled to a 5.02 point advantage for Republicans in 2012, and was likely responsible for their House majority, but responsiveness was much lower compared to the 19th Century, 1.52, and virtually unchanged from the previous plans. By shaving district majorities so thin in order to maximize efficiency, bias in nineteenth-century plans was amplified by their hyperresponsiveness, so that a gain (or loss) of just a few points would result in a massive seat swing.
How massive? In the “critical” elections of 1854, 1874 and 1894, widely understood as historically transformative expressions of public demand against the status quo, Engstrom shows (in Fig. 6.4) vote swings ranging from 6.8% to 7.6% against Democratic (1854, 1894) or Republican (1874) controlled Houses, substantial but not historic. Yet these three elections handed seat losses exceeding 30% to the governing parties, among the largest seat losses in congressional history. The author cleverly demonstrates the impact of hyperresponsiveness through a simulation of vote-to-seat translations using standard seat/vote ratios, which would have resulted in much less severe seat swings.
This is a major revision of electoral history, a revision that elegantly links the impact of mobilizing events, namely, the 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the economic Panic of 1873, and the Panic of 1893, to “manufactured competitiveness, an overabundance of marginal seats created by redistricting, and a vote swing against that current dominant party” (p.128). Additionally, Engstrom’s simulations demonstrate that partisan gerrymandering played a central role not only in providing Democrats elected in 1852 with the votes they needed to repeal the Missouri Compromise, but also in the federal abandonment of suffrage rights in the South after 1874, and repeal of the Federal Enforcement Act in 1892. He makes a persuasive case that our political history might have played out much differently were it not for these hyperresponsive gerrymanders.
In its entirety, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Construction of American Democracy provides an electoral life history of the House of Representatives. That is a major accomplishment. Yet the significance of this research extends beyond the past, subsuming our dominant theory of incumbent office seeking into a broader theory of partisan competition. Engstrom provides a framework for both electoral scholars and practitioners to better understand what the reemergence of partisan polarization, increased manipulation of redistricting in the absence of judicial restraints, and restrictions on voter registration and participation mean for the future of American democracy. In this era of renewed attention to what constitutes an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, and how we might implement judiciable standards, Engstrom provides an important contribution to a growing body of research that urges us not to be dismissive about the political consequences of institutional choice.
