The curse of malapportionment

Organised by

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This paper studies the link between spatial inequalities, representative institutions, and economic outcomes (redistribution and economic policies). We theorise malapportionment as a system that helps elites in skewed economic geographies coordinate to perpetuate systems of redistribution that: (1) use horizontal transfers between territories to limit the scope of interpersonal redistribution and; (2) anchor over-represented peripheral areas in persistent underdevelopment by facilitating policy bias that benefits core constituencies and a distribution of subsidies that is both disadvantageous and detrimental to regional convergence. In this sense, malapportionment works as an institutional curse on its alleged beneficiaries. Using datasets at the national and subnational levels, we demonstrate a clear link between legislative malapportionment, high levels of inter-regional distribution and patronage in over-represented districts, feeble centralised attempts to reduce economic inequality, pro-core policy bias, and persistent economic divergence in the long-run.

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