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Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Roy Elis ,
Neil Malhotra  and
Marc Meredith
Roy Elis*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305.
Neil Malhotra
Affiliation:
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Marc Meredith
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 208 S. 37th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
*
e-mail: elis@stanford.edu (corresponding author)
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 17 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Natural Experiments in Political Science , Autumn 2009 , pp. 358 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We would like to thank Jowei Chen, Vincenzo Galasso, Saar Golde, Karen Jusko, Brian Knight, Frances Lee, Jonathan Rodden, Jonathan Wand, and the participants of Stanford University's Workshop in Statistical Modeling and American Empirical Seminar for valuable comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Fred Wollens for his excellent research assistance. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago.

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