The Effects of Congruity between Community and District on Salience of U. S. House Candidates

Abstract

Many political observers have argued that citizens in congressional districts coinciding with natural community boundaries will more often recall or recognize the names of the incumbent and challenger candidates. Despite the plausibility of this argument, there is surprisingly little evidence to support it, and none that estimates the magnitude of the effect controlling for possible confounding variables. We find a strong relationship between candidate familiarity and the congruence of community and district boundaries. Our results suggest differences in the context of elections in the different types of districts; challengers, in particular, are disadvantaged in noncongruent districts. The relationship between congruence and awareness occurs because of the effect of community-district congruence on the structure of the mass media markets. Our results also suggest that the preservation of community boundaries in redistricting merits more attention than the Supreme Court has heretofore given it, and they provide some of the factual evidence upon which future decisions may be based.