Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 February 2006
In every contested election there are inevitably winners and losers,
both among the candidates and among the voters. Some candidates will take
their seats as elected officials, and others will not. Some voters will be
happy with the outcome, others will not. Here I seek to better understand
the relationship between whether a voter casts a ballot for the winning
candidate in U.S. House elections and that voter's evaluations of her
representative. I build on a burgeoning literature on the relationship
between voters and their elected governments to derive and test a theory
about this connection. The data will show that voters whose preferred
candidate wins a seat in the House of Representatives are systematically
happier with their representative than those voters whom did not vote for
the winning candidate. While this finding is not especially
groundbreaking, the implications for the way in which we draw
congressional and state legislative district lines are quite provocative.
Specifically, since district lines in the House are necessarily an
artificial construct, I argue that map makers ought to “pack”
districts with as many like-minded partisans as possible. Trying to draw
“competitive districts” effectively cracks ideologically
congruent voters into separate districts, which has the effect of
increasing the absolute number of voters who will be unhappy with the
outcome and dissatisfied with their representative. I discuss the benefits
of fundamentally rethinking the way in which we draw congressional and
state legislative districts, as well as address likely concerns that might
be raised about drawing districts this way.