From the Constituent’s Eye: Experimental Evidence on the District Selection Preferences of Individuals

States have increasingly taken the process of redistricting out of the hands of elected legislators and placed it with the public. The shift is in part driven by a concern that legislators are motivated to partition districts to advantage their own and their political party’s electoral prospects, whereas citizens are not. We know little, however, about the preferences of the public when it comes to redistricting. One party-based argument is that individuals should prefer to share a district with as many like-minded partisans as possible to maximize their legislative representation, whereas other arguments suggest that nonpartisan factors, such as sharing a district with their community, may be more important. Using a novel experimental design, we find that for most participants, the draw to share a district with copartisans is stronger than a preference for preserving a community (county) within the district even when participants are specifically instructed to attend to local jurisdictional boundaries.