Here we first highlight the central role played by the vote and political participation in the democratic process. We then look at who votes and who participates in politics. The chapter underscores severe racial imbalances across most types of participation—both conventional and less conventional. It then seeks to explain these imbalances through a rigorous examination of factors like socioeconomic status, group identity and consciousness, institutions, and mobilization. We also look at the impact of uneven participation on outcomes in American democracy and introduce potential solutions for existing inequities.

Political parties indisputably serve as intermediaries in converting individual political will into collective state governance. When they do so, are they servants or usurpers of constituent self-governance? While the White Primaries cases established that the Court intervenes when parties effect unequivocally illegitimate (i.e. racially exclusionary) democratic practice, when party affiliation activates constitutional scrutiny on a standalone basis remains unsettled. In areas such as state control over primary design and ballot access, the Court has struggled with parties’ dual status as public utilities and private organizations. This dual character has led to fierce debate regarding when the Court should police parties, and when they should be protected. Parties’ unsettled status has recently been exemplified by the partisan gerrymandering litigation, which highlights the debate over whether partisan coordination’s centrality to American governance facilitates or threatens popular self-rule. The Court has been hesitant to explicitly acknowledge that this raw question of parties’ impact on citizen self-rule drives its constitutional jurisprudence.

What lessons can we draw from the study of 2011 state legislative redistricting? We find that, on the one hand, predicting partisan gerrymandering is relatively simple: gerrymandering occurs when one party can monopolize redistricting and has an incentive to draw biased maps. One the other hand, our investigations of racial segregation and political geography reveal the intimate links between racial gerrymandering and political gerrymandering and suggest that the Republican Party in 2011 was willing to use racial vote dilution in many states in order to achieve extreme bias. We conclude with an assessment of redistricting reforms in Virginia and “best practices” in preventing partisan gerrymandering.

We investigate the role of politics in determining whether a map is drawn with partisan bias. We take a systematic look at the processes that states use to regulate the drawing of the lines through case studies and empirical analyses of redistricting outcomes, paying particular attention to one key variable: whether the maps were drawn by politicians. We find that the most biased maps occur in competitive states where politicians from a single party were able to draw the maps without having to work with the minority party. Our examination of the effects of bipartisan districting yields inconclusive results. In some cases, when the redistricting process requires two parties to work together to pass a plan, redistricting authorities draw the maps with low levels of seat–vote responsiveness, presumably as a result of the drawing of “safe seats” to benefit incumbents from both parties. However, in other cases, we do not see this outcome. We do find that, on average, bipartisan districting leads to a preservation of the status quo. In the states where two parties worked together to draw the maps, the level of bias in the post-2011 plans deviated little from the pre-2011 plans.

Although scholars have investigated the effects of redistricting for many decades, surprisingly little is known about the causes of redistricting outcomes. We argue that studying state legislative redistricting in 2011 provides a unique opportunity to identify the theoretical determinants of partisan gerrymandering and assess the political, social, and democratic consequences of bias. We also argue that the story of 2011 redistricting is incomplete without a comprehensive investigation of the causes and consequences of redistricting of state legislatures. Ultimately, our findings reveal the interconnectedness of racial and political gerrymandering and suggest that partisan bias has long-term consequences for public policy and democratic health, yet they also show that it is possible to design redistricting institutions to prevent bias.