District Protectionism: Public Opinion on Race, Partisanship, and Redistricting Change

What do people value in redistricting? This paper presents three original survey experiments to examine public attitudes toward redistricting, including partisan gerrymandering, majority-minority districts, and traditional criteria such as compactness and contiguity. The experiments provide evidence consistent with an orientation I term ‘district protectionism’: a tendency to prefer minimal changes to existing districts – maintaining existing boundaries, compositions, and electoral configurations. The experiments highlight divergent views on race-conscious redistricting, with notably lower levels of support for majority-Latino districts than for majority-Black districts. Although respondents broadly reject partisan gerrymandering in the abstract, they also display significant partisan asymmetries and evidence consistent with loss aversion. As reformers seek to engage more citizens with redistricting, protectionism may interact with partisan self-interest to constrain efforts to redraw boundaries, revise partisan configurations, or expand opportunities for communities of color to elect preferred representatives.