Electoral Institutions and Legislative Particularism

• Date: 01 August 2017
• Author: Jon C. Rogowski
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12153
• Published date: 01 August 2017

JON C. ROGOWSKI

Harvard University

Electoral Institutions and

Legislative Particularism

How do electoral institutions affect legislative behavior? Though a large body of

theoretical scholarship posits a negative relationship between multimember districting

and the provision of particularistic goods, empirical scholarship has found little evidence

in support of this expectation. Using data on the provision of US post offices from 1876

to 1896, a period during which many states elected congressional representatives from

at-large districts, and a differences-in-differences approach, I find that counties repre-

sented by at-large representatives received approximately 8% fewer post offices. The

results have important implications for studying how electoral institutions affect incen-

tives for legislative behavior.

How do elected off‌icials represent their constituencies? In design-

ing the American system of government, the Founders paid close

attention to how institutional structures would provide incentives for leg-

islative behavior. For instance, in Federalist 52, Madison wrote that

“frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy” by which mem-

bers of the House of Representatives would “have an immediate

dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.” A wide

range of electoral institutions, including term limits (e.g., Bernhardt,

Dubey, and Hughson 2004; Carey 1998), ballot formats (e.g., Engstrom

2012; Katz and Sala 1996), and party primaries (e.g., Aranson and

Ordeshook 1972), affect the behavior of election-seeking legislators.

A signif‌icant body of scholarship argues that single-member dis-

tricts (SMD) and multimember districts (MMD) offer dramatically

different incentives for legislative behavior (Cox 1990; Dow 1998;

Magar, Rosenblum, and Samuels 1998). Though legislators from both

systems draw upon their personal reputations and their party’s reputa-

tions when seeking re-election, the relative emphasis varies across

electoral institutions. Legislators elected from SMD are generally posited

to have greater incentives to cultivate a personal vote because they must

distinguish themselves from their competitors.

1

In contrast, legislators

elected under MMD are less individually identif‌iable apart from their

LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 42, 3, August 2017 355

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12153

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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis

party and are motivated primarily to support their party’s program and

collective reputation. The different incentive structures provided by

SMD and MMD thus have important implications for how legislators

represent their constituents. Consistent with these expectations, previous

research has shown that legislators elected under MMD report reduced

incentives to engage in constituency service (Heitshusen, Young, and

Wood 2005; Lancaster and Patterson 1990), initiate less parochial legis-

lation (Crisp and Desposato 2004; Kerevel 2015), are held less

accountable for their behavior in off‌ice (Lancaster 1986), and engage in

higher levels of corruption (e.g., Chang and Golden 2007; Kunicova and

Rose-Ackerman 2005).

In this article, I build upon these literatures and other recent

research on nineteenth-century distributive politics in the United States

(e.g., Finocchiaro 2015; Rogowski 2016) to study how districting insti-

tutions affect the provision of particularistic goods. Though prior

theoretical work predicts that SMD increases the provision of distribu-

tive goods relative to MMD (e.g., Ashworth and Bueno de Mesquita

2006; Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1984, 1987; Dixit and Londregan

1995), empirical scholarship has produced limited evidence in support

of this expectation (e.g., Hirano 2006; Snyder and Ueda 2007). I use

data on county-level post off‌ice locations to study the distribution of par-

ticularistic goods in the United States between 1876 and 1896, a period

in which many states elected at-large congressional representatives. The

districting institutions used in these states resembled electoral systems

currently used in countries including Hungary, Germany, and New

Zealand. Using a differences-in-differences approach, the data reveal

that at-large districting signif‌icantly reduced the provision of post off‌ices.

On average, counties included in at-large districting schemes received

approximately 8% fewer post off‌ices. These results are robust across a

wide range of alternative model specif‌ications, subsets of observations,

and characterizations of key variables. I further show that the negative

effects of at-large representation were especially large in counties with

low levels of electoral competition, which suggests an important interac-

tion in how electoral institutions changed legislators’ incentives to target

electorally valuable constituencies. The f‌indings have important implica-

tions for how electoral incentives affect legislative behavior and inform

debates over the use of alternative districting plans.

Districting Institutions and Legislative Behavior

Electoral incentives structure patterns of political representation

and legislative behavior (Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina 1987; Mayhew

356 Jon C. Rogowski