Electoral Geography and the Partisan Representation of the Poor

Date
-
Event Sponsor
The Munro Lectureship Fund and The Lane Center
Speaker

Karen Jusko, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University

 

Abstract

When will parties enter electoral contests on behalf of the poor? (What limits party entry in the U.S.?) The second half of my current book project presents an endogenous party formation and strategic mobilization account of party system development: Cross-national differences in electoral geography, or the joint geographic distribution of voters and legislative seats across districts, create (or undermine) incentives for parties to enter electoral competitions, and to target mobilization efforts to those potential supporters who are likely to be pivotal in the allocation of seats.  As a result, contemporary differences in party systems, and especially differences in the partisan representation of the poor, can be attributed to differences in the early mapping of votes to seats.     This presentation uses American, German (see the attached paper), and Norwegian census data to demonstrate the importance of electoral geography in the development of party systems.

 

Biography
Karen Jusko is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, and a faculty affiliate of Stanford's Europe Center and the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality.
 
Jusko's research is motivated by questions about the origins of contemporary democratic politics in the U.S., and in Europe. Drawing on survey research and historical census data, Jusko's current book project ties the different components of democratic representation -- participation, party politics, and the policy-making process -- to legislators' and political parties' electoral incentives. Specifically, Jusko draws attention to the ways in which the geographic distributions of different income groups and legislative seats across electoral districts shape legislators' and parties' incentives to craft responsive policy. This research builds on Jusko's dissertation, which was awarded the Harold D. Laswell Prize for the best dissertation in the field of public policy by the Policy Studies Organization and the APSA Public Policy Organized Section.
 
Jusko received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She has been a fellow at the Center for the Study Democratic Politics, at Princeton University, and her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the European Science Foundation, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford.