D. Stephen Voss

Instructor

University of Kentucky Department of Political Science

The Missing Middle:

Why Median-Voter Theory Can’t Save Democrats from Singing the Boll-Weevil Blues.

By David Lublin and D. Stephen Voss

Formal citation:
Lublin, David, and D. Stephen Voss. 2003 (forthcoming). "The Missing Middle: Why Median-Voter Theory Can’t Save Democrats from Singing the Boll-Weevil Blues." Journal of Politics 65(February).

Summary: Racial redistricting decimated the southern congressional districts once represented by centrist Democrats. Electoral maps drawn in the 1990s instead helped polarize the South’s congressional delegation into a mixture of minority Democrats and hard-right Republicans, creating a more-favorable environment for conservative legislation. As a method for enhancing black representation, redistricting backfired. We directly challenge the work of Ken Shotts, who contradicts our "perverse effects" argument using a median-voter approach. We argue that his models to assess the influence of racial redistricting create their own rosy conclusions. Most importantly, his analysis neglects the dramatic effect of 1994’s partisan shift, which moved the House median rightward and so causes his model to treat pre-1990s moderate Democrats as equivalent to post-1990s conservative Republicans.

This article begins with an overview of the research agenda Lublin and I have pursued to assess theoretically the partisan effects of redistricting. It therefore encapsulates the diverse findings of several articles:

• a 1998 Stanford Law Review piece in which we challenge the tendency of redistricting studies to treat white voting behavior as exogenous -- which is to say, as unrelated to the legislative borders in which both white voters and strategic politicians must operate,
• a 2000 American Journal of Political Science article assessing the partisan effects of racial redistricting in the South's state legislatures, which concludes that redistricting certainly cost the Democratic party a sizable number of seats, probably lost them seats in every state, and may have cost them control of 2-3 state legislatures,
• a 2000 American Review of Politics article counting the Democratic congressional losses caused by redistricting -- which we estimate at 11 net losses -- and explaining why other empirical studies have underestimated the count,
• a 2001 American Politics Research article probing the electoral underpinnings of minority success in districts with a white voting majority, in which we conclude (among other things) that, because whites who live near minorities are especially likely to support black Democrats (even in the South), creating majority-minority districts wastes a substantial quantity of Democratic votes,
• as well as Lublin's solo work on the ideological effects of racial redistricting (e.g., The Paradox of Representation) and my work grappling with contextual effects on white racial attitudes and voting behavior (Voss 1996, Voss and Miller 2001,

To Voss Conference Papers listing

Back to Voss Home Page