Political Analysis Advance Access originally published online on July 23, 2009
Political Analysis 2009 17(4):358-376; doi:10.1093/pan/mpp012
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This article appears in the following Political Analysis issue: Special Issue: Natural Experiments in Political Science [View the issue table of contents]
Apportionment Cycles as Natural Experiments
Department of Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Serra Street, Stanford, CA 94305 e-mail: elis{at}stanford.edu (corresponding author)
Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, 208 S. 37th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104
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.
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.