11:20 - 13:00
PS7
Room:
Room: South Hall 2A
Panel Session 7
Silke Goubin, Peter Egge Langsæther - Do citizens really lose trust in the face of a crisis ? Experimental evidence on external shocks and subverted expectations.
Tom van der Meer - The dilemma of majority rule and minority rights: An international vignette experiment on citizens' support for democratic decision making process
Alexander Yeandle, James Maxia - Who's Responsible for Public Health Policy? Experimental Evidence from the Rollout of Covid-19 Vaccinations in England
Francesc Amat, Andreu Arenas, Albert Falcó-Gimeno, Jordi Muñoz - Pandemics meet democracy: Experimental evidence from the COVID-19 crisis in Spain
Marie-Lou Sohnius - Unintended Consequences of Decreasing the Number of Electoral Districts: Evidence From Germany
Unintended Consequences of Decreasing the Number of Electoral Districts: Evidence From Germany
PS7-5
Presented by: Marie-Lou Sohnius
Marie-Lou SohniusThomas Gschwend
University of Mannheim
The question of how to delimit electoral districts has concerned politicians and political scientists for decades. Over 100 democracies worldwide use population size as a guideline for drawing electoral borders to ensure their voters' equality of influencing political outcomes. However, this practice results in a significant variance of spatial district size due to increasingly heterogeneous population development. While common in many democracies, we know little about how differently sized electoral districts affect the way citizens perceive the political system and their role within. We study this relationship by linking CSES individual-level data from six German elections with spatial district-level data. The German case covers both diversity in electoral district size and a major reform in 2002 reducing the number of electoral districts, which allows us to differentiate static effects of size from reactions to a district's modification. Results indicate that while geographic size does not generally affect citizens' perceptions of the democratic system and their influence on political outcomes, significant changes in electoral districts' borders towards larger districts adversely affect citizens' political efficacy. If changing an electoral district is more harmful than maintaining electoral inequality due to heterogeneous population size, policymakers must more carefully weigh such a measure's consequences before implementation.