Existing research argues that malapportionment primarily favours rural areas, resulting in conservative biases of electoral systems. In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the study of apportionment processes by identifying the institutional design under which malapportionment may favour other regions. Because of the geographical sorting of non-citizen residents, we argue that regions with high shares of non-citizen residents benefit from population-based apportionment, whereas the spatial sorting of non-citizens does not affect malapportionment in the case of citizen-based apportionment. Empirically, we use sub-national data from ten advanced democracies to forward evidence that differences in apportionment mechanisms and district-level shares of non-citizen residents systematically influence malapportionment. Our findings suggest that the impact of malapportionment on political representation and public policies may be more heterogeneous than previously thought.

A large body of literature indicates that partisan-motivated reasoning drives resistance to political persuasion. But recent scholarship has challenged this view, suggesting that people don’t always resist uncongenial information, and even when they do, it is not clear why. In this article, I present two survey experiments that examine when and why partisans selectively dismiss uncongenial information. The findings show that, in the absence of affective triggers, partisans were persuaded by both congenial and uncongenial information. But when randomly induced to feel adversarial, they became more dismissive of uncongenial information and ultimately disagreed more, not less, after considering the same information. These results (1) identify a crucial condition that provokes resistance to political persuasion; (2) demonstrate partisan-motivated reasoning more clearly than previous studies; and (3) underscore the importance of the quality of elite-level political discourse in determining the quality of citizen-level opinion formation.

What are the effects of reason-giving on political attitudes? Both political philosophers and political scientists have speculated that defending proposals with reasons may change voters’ preferences. However, while models of attitude formation predict that the explicit justification of one’s political views may result in attitudes that are more ideologically consistent, less polarized, and more stable, empirical work has not assessed the connection between reason-giving and attitudes. Implementing a survey experiment in which some respondents provide reasons before stating their opinions on six issues in UK politics, I find that reason-giving has very limited effects on the constraint, stability, or polarization of the public’s political attitudes. These findings have important implications for our understanding of deliberative conceptions of democracy – in which reason-giving is a central component – as well as for our understanding of the quality of voters’ political opinions.