My dissertation project is motivated by an interest in how political boundaries might be manipulated or exploited to enhance or diminish influence over political power and influence. It consists of the following papers:

This paper evaluates how the dispersion of a commercial industry across U.S. congressional districts, and the concentration of employees within each district, affects the likelihood that a particular industry will be successful in pushing favorable legislation through the U.S. House of Representatives.  An examination of member support for two pieces of legislation, one which provides antitrust exemptions for the distribution of soft drinks and another that does the same for the distribution of malt beverages, finds a strong positive correlation between the concentration of employees from these industries within a congressional district and the likelihood that the representative of that district will support the legislation.  I also find that in both cases the number of employees per district that are needed to have an impact on member support is surprisingly small and that the best strategy to maximize the likelihood of legislative success for both industries is an unequal distribution of employees across districts.       

The census data used by most state legislatures to redraw congressional districts includes groups that are not permitted to vote, such as children, non-citizens and the institutionalized. Moreover, the U.S. Census Bureau counts the nearly 2-million individuals who are detained in the country’s correctional institutions among the population of the geographical unit in which they are incarcerated rather than their place of residence at the time of their conviction. By shifting a significant proportion of these phantom populations into districts that lean heavily toward the majority party, legislators can free up an equal number of citizens from those districts to be distributed among neighboring marginal ones, thereby increasing that party’s likelihood of picking up additional seats in the state legislature. An analysis of the population of correctional institution detainees in each state senate district across 46 states, both before and after the 2000 Census-based redistricting cycle, finds that prison populations do in fact shift systematically from districts controlled by one party to districts controlled by the other when there is a switch in partisan control from one census to the next. 

This paper examines how administrative boundaries can be drawn to dilute the political influence of actors who are both economically and socially powerful. Specifically, it argues that the Qing dynasty used provincial boundaries to limit the power of merchants and gentry by dividing the economic centers of China’s eight naturally formed market systems between multiple provincial governments. The paper contributes to the existing literature on this topic by providing a more thorough analysis of the degree to which administrative borders dissected macroregional economies and its effect on the distribution of political power in late imperial China.