Citation:
Abstract:
Redistricting poses a potential harm to American voters in limiting choice and accountability at the polls. Although voters still technically retain their right to contact their congressional representatives in order to seek redress for their concerns, we argue that the confusion created when redistricting divides ZIP Codes confounds the constituent-representative link and leaves a substantive minority of voters in representational limbo. ZIP Codes perform a functional role by organizing groups of residents into easily accessible blocs for mail service. However, congressional districts split the ZIP Codes of over 100 million Americans. Split- ting ZIP Codes across multiple congressional districts leads to constituents being confused about who their member is and greater inefficiencies for representatives to mail to their constituents. Additionally, several members of Congress actively ignore out-of-district mail. We posit that constituents from ZIP Codes split by multiple congressional districts will be less likely to recognize, contact, or ideologically identify with their representative. We conducted a population overlap analysis between ZIP Codes and congressional dis- tricts to determine the impact of splitting ZIP Codes on a battery of items on the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey (CCES) from 2008–2016. Our analysis provides evidence that splitting ZIP Codes across multiple congressional districts impairs the constituent-representative link. Finally, we demonstrate the preservation of ZIP Codes in redistricting is feasible and produces a substantive reduction in partisan bias.