Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

Author:

Elis Roy,Malhotra Neil,Meredith Marc

Abstract

Although there are compelling theoretical reasons to believe that unequal political representation in a legislature leads to an unequal distribution of funds, testing such theories empirically is challenging because it is difficult to separate the effects of representation from the effects of either population levels or changes. We leverage the natural experiment generated by infrequent and discrete census apportionment cycles to estimate the distributional effects of malapportionment in the U.S. House of Representatives. We find that changes in representation cause changes in the distribution of federal outlays to the states. Our method is exportable to any democratic system in which reapportionments are regular, infrequent, and nonstrategic.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Political Science and International Relations,Sociology and Political Science

Reference52 articles.

1. Nonswitchers drop from the main specification of equation (5) by construction via differences.

2. Again, similar patterns hold when estimating a LAD regression, although the coefficients are slightly smaller and the standard errors larger.

3. Another approach to eliminating the influence of outliers is to conduct a nonparametric sign test evaluating the pattern of results displayed in Fig. 7. We tested whether the observations were more likely to fall in quadrants I and III as opposed to the null of an equal distribution. We find that 31 of the 53 observations are in these two quadrants and reject the null of a homogenous distribution at p = .136. For the alternative specification (see Section 6.1), 33 of the 53 observations are in these two quadrants and we reject the null of a homogenous distribution at p = .049.

4. These values come from the R-squared of a regression of actual changes in the number of representatives on deserved changes in the number of representatives based on a simulated Congress that awards fractional seats

5. In practice, the common divisor must be modified slightly to ensure that the size of the House remains exactly 435 after rounding.

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