Date:
Location:
Jonathan Rodden, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University.
Rodden will present part of an ongoing book project that relates historical patterns of industrialization with contemporary patterns of representation in majoritarian democracies.
The talk will focus in particular on the U.S. states. In many states, 19th century industrialization created a concentration of Democrats in large cities and along transportation corridors. When winner-take-all electoral districts are superimposed on this geography, several noteworthy things happen:
First, within legislatures of early industrializing states and in the U.S. as a whole, the Democrats are disfavored in the transformation of votes to seats.
Second, the median voter in the median district is more conservative than the median voter in the overall population.
Both of these phenomena are often magnified (but also sometimes diluted) by partisan and racial gerrymandering.
As a result, there is a group of states for whom the median legislator is, on average, more conservative than politicians elected to statewide offices, and for whom policy outcomes are pushed significantly to the right of those in states where Democrats are more geographically dispersed.
About the speaker: Jonathan Rodden is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, director of Stanford's Spatial Social Science Lab, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Rodden's work focuses on the comparative political economy of institutions. He has written several articles and a pair of books on federalism and fiscal decentralization.
His most recent book, Hamilton’s Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism, was the recipient of the Gregory Luebbert Prize for the best book in comparative politics in 2007. He frequently works with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on issues related to fiscal decentralization.
He has also written papers on the geographic distribution of political preferences within countries, legislative bargaining, the distribution of budgetary transfers across regions, and the historical origins of political institutions.
He is currently writing a series of articles and a book on political geography and the drawing of electoral districts around the world.
Rodden received his PhD from Yale University and his BA from the University of Michigan, and was a Fulbright student at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2007, he was the Ford Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
