Reapportionment and party realignment in the American States.

• Author: Ansolabehere, Stephen
• Position: Symposium: The Law of Democracy

Malapportionment of state legislatures before the mid-1960s gave urban and suburban voters much less representation than they deserved. This Essay documents that suburban and urban voters had markedly different policy preferences, party identifications, and partisan voting behaviors than voters in rural areas, who were overrepresented. However, the patterns were not uniform. In the Northeast and North Central, the suburban and urban underrepresented areas were much more Democratic than rural areas. In the South and West, the rural voters leaned more Democratic than the urban and suburban voters. Policy preferences split differently in the Northeast and North Central than they did in the South and West. Urban and suburban voters were much more liberal on social welfare and economic policy than rural voters in these areas. In the South and West, few differences existed across locales. On only one issue did the urban and suburban areas have more liberal attitudes throughout the nation: racial politics. Court-ordered reapportionment thus increased the political weight of liberals and Democrats in the Northeast and North Central, but not in the South and West. Reapportionment moved the median voter in all regions to the left on issues of civil rights and racial policy.

INTRODUCTION

Reapportionment of state legislatures during the 1960s radically altered representation in the United States. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, despite state constitutional requirements for population-based representation, most state legislatures either required representation of area as well as people or neglected to draw new district boundaries. As a result, representation in state legislatures failed to reflect much of the growth in urban and suburban areas that occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1960, dramatic differences existed in at least one chamber of almost all state legislatures. In California, for example, Los Angeles county had one state senate seat for its six million people and the three smallest counties in the state, with a combined population of 14,000 people, shared a senator. (1) In Connecticut, Hartford had two state representatives for its 162,000 residents, while Union had two representatives for its 400 residents. (2) Through a series of significant court cases, beginning with Baker v. Carr, (3) the U.S. Supreme Court forced the states to eliminate these disparities by the end of the 1960s. (4)

The sudden decline in rural political power in state legislatures had broad effects on public policies. Equalization of representation altered the distribution of public spending across areas within the states. Overrepresented areas had long gained a disproportionate share of public expenditures because of their advantaged political positions. That vanished once representation was equalized. (5) It was natural to believe that the "liberal urban agenda" would succeed in other policy matters as well. Surprisingly, a broad shift in public pop icy in the states cannot be traced to reapportionment, and several scholars have, in fact, found little or no evidence that malapportionment affected the overall liberalness of state policy, including overall levels of expenditure and labor regulation. (6) The exception is civil rights legislation, which a pair of studies by Robert Erikson suggest may have enjoyed increased support in state legislatures outside the South as a result of reappointment. (7)

In this Essay, we examine the effects of reapportionment on the political parties. At the time, it was conjectured that Democrats and liberals would see the greatest political gains because urban areas tend to be the most Democratic and usually had the least state legislative representation. Democratic, labor, and liberal political organizations provided much of the political activism in support of reapportiont. (8) men. Erikson has also examined the effects of malapportionment on party control of non-southern state legislatures that were substantially malapportioned. (9) In general, he concludes, Democrats tended to gain. (10) However, only half of the chambers analyzed showed substantively large effects, and some states saw significant Republican gains. (11) Subsequent studies have found similarly small net gains for the Democrats in the wake of reapportionment. Across the nation, Democrats seemed to have gained about three percent more state legislative seats. (12) This lack of party effects has been a cause of some debate, with partisan gerrymandering often blamed for the weak Democratic gains. (13)

Two puzzles emerge from past research. First, why did the Democrats make only modest gains following Baker, given the enormous underrepresentation of cities in state legislatures? Second, why are the policy effects of reapportionment limited to civil rights and the distribution of public expenditures? Uneven policy changes and weak Democratic gains reflected, we believe, the nature of malapportionment throughout the country prior to Baker. While partisan gerrymandering and related monkey business probably contributed some, much of the pattern of policy shift and partisan shift can be understood in terms of three factors: who was underrepresented, where, and what they believed.

To answer these questions, we examine the contours of electoral behavior and citizens' policy attitudes across the regions and parties in the decades leading up to the implementation of the one person, one vote standard. We examine aggregate data on state election returns and the structure of legislative districts to measure the partisan effects of malapportionment. We examine the National Election Studies (NES) from 1952 to 1968 to map the policy preferences of urban, suburban, and rural voters living in different regions. (14)

These data show that there was one "realignment revolution," not many. Malapportionment in the state legislatures regularly followed the contours of population, with rural areas having disproportionately more state legislative representation. However, the partisanship and political orientations of rural, suburban, and urban communities varied across states and regions.

We discern four distinct regional patterns of partisan underrepresentation that are attributable to malapportionment. In the South, malapportionment advantaged the Democrats, because rural areas voted much more Democratic than urban areas. In the Northeast and North Central, malapportionment tended to advantage Republicans, because rural areas in these regions voted heavily Republican while urban areas voted Democratic. In the West, a more mixed picture emerges, and the differences between urban and rural are less pronounced than in other regions.

Political orientations and policy preferences also varied across regions and locales. Southern rural voters, who were overrepresented throughout the South, tended to be very conservative; northern urban voters, who were underrepresented in their regions, tended to be very liberal. The differences between northern and southern voters are well known, but not exactly relevant. The more meaningful comparison is within each region. How did these voters compare to other partisans across geographic locales within their respective regions? Were urban and suburban southerners, for example, more liberal than rural southerners? Such would have to be the case for reapportionment to affect public policy by realigning the electorate represented in the state legislatures.

Some important differences did exist. However, the patterns are such that the policy implications of reapportionment varied across regions and across areas of public policy. Both within the parties and in the electorate as a whole, different political geography correlated differently with ideological belief and policy liberalism across regions. In the Northeast and North Central, reapportionment had the greatest potential to shift policy to the left; in the West, there was no such potential.

The potential to shift policy, we document, came from two engines. First, reapportionment had the potential to shift the locus of the median voter in the state legislative electorate as a whole. The average voter in many regions was much more liberal than the overrepresented rural voter. Second, reapportionment had the potential to move the political parties. Urban and rural voters within the Democratic Party differed substantially on most issues of the day. The Republicans were not similarly split. Reapportionment in the mid-1960s likely fueled the divisions within the Democratic Party--divisions over race, labor relations, education, and economic policy--that events and organizations were pushing to the fore of the national political agenda.

In the pages that follow we document these patterns using a mix of aggregate and survey data. Our goal is less to estimate the effects on specific policy changes and more to document the patterns of malapportionment as they relate to the representation of political preferences. Ultimately, we argue that reapportionment produced four different regional patterns of partisan realignment. In the Northeast and North Central, reapportionment shifted politics toward the Democrats and the Left. In the South, reapportionment shifted politics toward the Republicans, but not assuredly to the Right, and on issues of race the shift was in the liberal direction. In the West, reapportionment had little immediate partisan and ideological impact.

1. REPRESENTATION AND PARTISANSHIP

   In the first step of our study we attempt to demonstrate how inequalities of representation related to partisanship prior to Baker. Malapportionment produced partisan advantages to the extent that rural and urban areas within states and regions had differing party attachments. By far the most important factor explaining malapportionment was population distribution. Rapid urban population growth created a rural backlash in the...