The British Journal of Political Science just accepted our paper entitled “Who Counts? Non-Citizen Residents, Spatial Sorting, and Malapportionment” (with André Walter). Here is the abstract:
Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favors rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the study of apportionment processes by identifying the institutional design under which malapportionment may favor other regions. Because of the geographical sorting of non-citizen residents, we argue that regions with high shares of non-citizen residents benefit from population-based apportionment, whereas the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not affect malapportionment in case of citizen-based apportionment. Empirically, we use sub-national data from ten advanced democracies to forward evidence that differences in apportionment mechanisms and district-level shares of non-citizen residents systematically influence malapportionment. Our findings suggest that the impact of malapportionment on political representation and public policies might be more heterogeneous than previously thought.
Patrick Emmenegger 