For five straight cycles (the 1970s through the 2010s), Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act dominated redistricting in states covered by the provision. In these states, district plans had to be precleared with federal authorities before they could be implemented. Preclearance was granted only if plans wouldn’t retrogress, that is, reduce minority representation. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, Section 5 is no longer operative. So what happened to minority representation in formerly covered states after Section 5’s protections were withdrawn? This article is the first to tackle this important question. We examine all states’ district plans before and after the 2020 round of redistricting at the congressional, state senate, and state house levels. Our primary finding is that there was little retrogression in formerly covered states. In sum, the number of minority ability districts in these states actually rose slightly. We also show that formerly covered states were largely indistinguishable from formerly uncovered states in terms of retrogression. If anything, states unaffected by Shelby County retrogressed marginally more than did states impacted by the ruling. Lastly, we begin to probe some of the factors that might explain this surprising pattern. One possible explanation is the status quo bias of many mapmakers, which is reflected in their tendency to keep minority representation constant. Another potential driver is many line-drawers’ reluctance to use retrogression as a partisan weapon. This reluctance is evident in the similar records of all redistricting authorities with respect to retrogression, as well as in the absence of any relationship between retrogression and change in plans’ partisan performance.

Mail voting became unusually controversial in the 2020 presidential election. Many observers, including former President Trump, believed that more accessible vote by mail would encourage higher turnout at the expense of Republicans. While the literature has tested some of these claims, it has not offered a more comprehensive causal assessment of vote-by-mail policy, nor has any study looked at these questions in the context of the extraordinary 2020 election. We examine the effect of mail ballot access policies both before and during the 2020 pandemic election with county-level data and a variety of methodological approaches. Our results suggest that making it easier to vote by mail—especially mailing every voter a ballot—generally does increase turnout, both before and during the 2020 election. By contrast, the same policies do not have robust partisan effects, and in many models, they tilt the results in a more Republican direction. While some of our findings are sensitive to model specification, the positive turnout effect of mailing every voter a ballot is robust to many alternative approaches. The confirmation of the existing understanding of universally mailed ballots suggests the basic dynamics of the reform are immune to a wide range of disruptive forces.

This article provides an overview of the new congressional and state legislative districts that were drawn around the country during the 2021–2022 redistricting cycle. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, most notably the changing federal role in both partisan and minority representation. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competitiveness, and minority representation in the new plans. We find that both parties have enacted increasingly extreme partisan gerrymanders when they control the redistricting process. The combination of Republicans’ control of the redistricting process in far more states than Democrats and the inefficient concentration of Democrats in cities has enabled Republicans to largely maintain an advantage in the translation of votes to seats in both Congress and many state legislatures. As a result, the policymaking process in many states will continue to be skewed in a conservative direction. At the same time, nonpartisan commissions appear to offer a consistent means to produce less biased and more competitive maps than when parties drawn the lines. Finally, while Black and Latino representation has improved in some places, both groups of voters remain underrepresented. We conclude by discussing lessons for both scholars and advocates.

This article provides an initial overview of the new Congressional and state legislative districts being drawn around the country. We provide background on the redistricting landscape, including changes in scholars’ ability to measure partisan gerrymandering, the changing role of federalism, and the Voting Rights Act. We also discuss the process used to draw the new districts in each state. We then provide an empirical look at partisan fairness, competitiveness, and minority representation on the new plans. We find that both parties have continued to enact more and more extreme partisan gerrymanders when they control the redistricting process. The combination of Republicans’ control of the redistricting process in far more states than Democrats and the inefficient concentration of Democrats in cities has enabled Republicans to largely maintain an advantage in the translation of votes to seats in both Congress and many state legislatures. As a result, the policymaking process in many states will continue to be skewed in a conservative direction. At the same time, nonpartisan Commissions appear to be leading to less biased and more competitive maps. Finally, while Black and Latino representation has improved in some places, both groups of voters remain underrepresented. We conclude by discussing lessons for both scholars and advocates.

Automatic voter registration (AVR) is a popular reform that seeks to register eligible citizens to vote as a matter of course if they engage with government and provide the necessary information. Analysis of early adopting states has generally found some effect of the reform on both registration and turnout, but there has yet to be a comprehensive causal analysis. We use a variety of causal identification strategies to examine the effects of AVR on both registration and turnout. We find it raises registration rates substantially, and while these new registrants are less likely to vote, enough do participate to raise the eligible turnout rate. We also show that the effect of AVR gradually builds the longer it is in place, and that the different types of AVR have significantly different effects on both registration and turnout.

Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an unusually high level of public engagement. Yet this public-facing period has to some extent obscured promising avenues for future research within the discipline. I review the history of political science and redistricting and describe how research on this topic has been shaped by the newfound interest. The goals of the law differ from those of political science, so research that focuses squarely on the former often misses opportunities to advance the latter. I lay out the contours of this difference and then suggest reframing the existing metrics of partisan gerrymandering to make them useful for more traditionally scientific questions. Finally, I offer some ideas about what those future questions might look like when reframed in this way.

In its first year of implementation, did the Voter’s Choice Act (VCA) change turnout patterns in the counties – Madera, Napa, Nevada, Sacramento, and San Mateo – that adopted this new reform? How did this reform affect the turnout of groups of Californians – young voters, Latinos, and Asian Americans– who have often participated in elections at lower rates than others? We address these questions by gathering data on turnout rates, voter demographics, and electoral competition from 2002 through the primary and general elections of 2018, comparing trends in the adopting counties to the rest of the state.

In recent years, a number of states have passed some version of automated voter registration (AVR). Implementation varies, but the core idea is to more aggressively promote voter registration as an option at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Evaluation of the impact of AVR has been limited thus far, mostly because AVR implementation has itself been limited. But post-reform data are now available for a number of states, and others that are considering adopting the reform are wondering what the effects of the laws have been in these states. What would registration and turnout have looked like in AVR states had the reform not been implemented? In this paper we take advantage of the first election cycle with significant post-AVR data across a range of states to explore the registration effects of AVR. We employ both difference-in-differences and synthetic control approaches to identify causality. Registration effects so far appear to have been solid overall and larger for Latinos. Evidence for Asian Americans and young people is more ambiguous, as is evidence for effects in individual states. We conclude with thoughts on future directions to help develop better estimates in these areas.

Over the last few years, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of scholarship on partisan gerrymandering. Much of this work has sought either to introduce new measures of gerrymandering or to analyze a metric — the efficiency gap — that we previously developed. In this Article, we reframe this debate by presenting a series of criteria that can be used to evaluate gerrymandering metrics: (1) consistency with the efficiency principle; (2) distinctness from other electoral values; (3) breadth of scope; and (4) correspondence with electoral history. We then apply these criteria to both the efficiency gap and other measures. The efficiency gap complies with the criteria under all circumstances. Other metrics, in contrast, often violate the efficiency principle and cannot be used in certain electoral settings.

An introduction to this Special Issue of CJPP focused on some of the issues central to democracy in California.

The question of how to best convert nonvoters into voters is one that continues to plague civicorganizations and political campaigns. Many feel that distrust and anger toward governmentmust be part of what keeps voters from participating, since trust is low and turnout is low. Wetest this idea using data from statewide surveys conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California(PPIC). The results suggest that nonvoters are actually somewhat more trusting of government,even independent of political interest. This finding is not robust to further statisticalcontrols, but no analysis suggests that higher trust is associated with higher turnout. This suggestsrethinking strategies for drawing these non-voters more consistently into the electorate.

The literature on partisan bias in U.S. redistricting has emphasized the role of incidental or accidental causes like incumbency and political geography, while questioning the importance of deliberate gerrymandering. I reconsider this settled understanding with a wider range of data, a robust difference-in-differences design, and a new measure of bias called the “efficiency gap” that measures the differential wasted votes of a gerrymander directly. I show that the accepted notion of a null effect for gerrymandering was appropriate for an earlier time period, but that gerrymandering has played a much larger and more durable role in the last two rounds of redistricting. I conclude that it is no longer certain that gerrymandering will play a modest role in the future.

There has been a recent surge in work on measuring partisan bias in single-member (SMD) redistricting plans. A classic SMD gerrymander is ''efficient'': it ''cracks'' a party's supporters so they barely lose many seats and ''packs'' the remainder in a few seats that the party wins by large margins. This essay classifies these new metrics and proposes a simple principle for evaluating each metric as a gauge of this efficiency. It finds that only methods that measure the packing and cracking directly through the counting of wasted votes can serve as consistent measures of the concept. Indeed, measures of symmetry in the seats-votes curve not only fail to consistently measure efficiency but suffer from internal contradictions in certain circumstances. Further examination of the wasted votes measures reveals that only a modified version of the ''efficiency gap''a measure active in ongoing litigationcan serve as a measure of efficiency under a wide range of electoral circumstances. Among the rest, there is considerable variation in their ability to serve as appropriate measures of the concept.

Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the same party to face each other in the fall. Here we leverage the adoption of the Top Two in California and Washington to explore the reform's effects on legislator behavior. We find an inconsistent effect since the reform was adopted in these two states. The evidence for post-reform moderation is stronger in California than in Washington, but some of this stronger effect appears to stem from a contemporaneous policy changedistrict lines drawn by an independent redistricting commissionwhile still more might have emerged from a change in term limits that was also adopted at the same time. The results validate some claims made by reformers, but question others, and their magnitude casts some doubt on the potential for institutions to reverse the polarization trend.

This memo calculates imputed values for uncontested seats in the 2012 and 2014 Indiana legislative elections. From these imputed values, it then calculates the efficiency gap for these plans. The final section of the memo explores the quality of the imputation.

When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California's 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsement, holding all other aspects of a candidate's background and policy positions constant. Second, we use a unique dataset to implement a regression discontinuity analysis of electoral trends by comparing the vote shares captured by candidates who barely won or barely lost the internal party endorsement contest. We find a constellation of evidence suggesting that endorsements do indeed matter, although this effect appears to be contingent upon the type of candidate and voter: endorsements matter most for candidates in their party's mainstream, and for voters who identify with that party and for independents. The magnitude of their impact is dramatically smaller than might be estimated from research designs less attuned to recent advances in causal inference.

California has recently changed the way candidates are nominated in its primaries. The reform was designed in part to encourage cross-party collaboration and moderate the state’s policy agenda. In this paper, I look specifically at the impact of the reform on business regulation issues, as measured by the legislative scorecards of the California Chamber of Commerce. I find that Democrats, but not Republicans, have indeed tended to be more moderate on these issues both recently and under similar reform conditions over a decade ago. But it is difficult to find firm evidence that would credit the reform for these changes. Moreover the Chamber’s policy agenda as a whole is not clearly more successful under such periods of reform. Instead, this business agenda—and by extension, the willingness of Democrats to support it—seems tied solidly to unified or divided partisan control of government.

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