The Breakdown: The Economic Effects of Gerrymandering
When we talk about gerrymandering, we usually focus on fairness and representation. Those matter. But there’s a second, quieter, cost that shows up in the economy. By making many seats “safe,” partisan map-drawing weakens the pressure elected officials feel to perform and obtain real results for their constituents. When outcomes at the ballot box stop moving much in response to performance, the incentive to work hard on broad public goals fades, and the temptation to shift resources toward political allies grows. Over time, that mix between less effort on general value and more energy spent on favors ends rearranging where money, infrastructure, and private investment go, and it reduces the economy’s productive capacity.
The analysis behind this claim uses economic models as building blocks. However, you don’t need the math to see the economic story here. When district lines are drawn to make elections uncompetitive, the pressure on elected officials to deliver broad, high-value results weakens. With fewer consequences for underperformance, more energy goes into rewarding allies and fewer difficult, productivity-raising decisions get made. Over time, that mix (less effort on public value, more effort on political favors) shows up in slower growth and a less efficient economy.
One place this becomes visible is private investment. Businesses decide where to build, hire, and upgrade based on expected returns. If politically favored places get easier permits, targeted tax breaks, or soft-credit programs, while disfavored places face hurdles, capital follows politics rather than productivity. The result isn’t just “unfairness”; it’s waste. The economy produces less with the same inputs because too much money is pushed into lower-return projects and too little into higher-return ones. The harm is nonlinear: a few isolated favors do modest damage, but a thick, persistent layer of favoritism creates large, compounding losses in overall productivity.
Public investment magnifies the problem. Infrastructure like roads, ports, broadband, water systems, or schools, boosts output when it’s built where it’s worth the most. Biasing those decisions toward politically safe areas breaks that rule. Some places end up overbuilt, others starved of basics, and the national pie shrinks. The losses are larger in settings where infrastructure isn’t easy to substitute across locations: you can’t “move” a port, and a highway built in the wrong corridor doesn’t easily help the corridor that needed it. In plain terms, every dollar of public money placed for political comfort instead of economic need lowers what that dollar could have earned for everyone.
These distortions don’t wash out quickly because uncompetitive maps change the duration of the problem. If firms and households expect today’s political tilt to persist, they plan around it. Disfavored regions face a “politics premium”: investors demand higher returns to bear the added risk, or they avoid the long-lived projects such as training, software, and R&D that usually drive productivity. Then, skilled workers follow opportunity and amenities, leaving behind thinner tax bases and weaker local demand. That makes tomorrow’s case for investing in those places even harder, locking in a cycle of underinvestment.
There is also a quiet effect on the people who choose to run and how they govern. When competition is weak, the bar for performance is lower, and the payoff to creative problem-solving or difficult reforms declines. Over time, that encourages more risk-averse, insider-focused behavior: fewer experiments, more patronage, slower course correction when policies underperform. Those choices rarely make headlines, but they accumulate into a culture of governance that spends more on loyalty than on learning.
The distributional footprint is predictable. Politically favored areas get amenities and visibility; disfavored areas get delays and decay. That gap means different businesses face different costs to operate, different students face different odds of a good education, and different communities face different chances to attract the next employer. Inequality hardens by geography, not just by income group.
Therefore, the policy message is practical and, importantly, efficiency-oriented. First, raise contestability. Independent redistricting commissions, clear and transparent map-drawing rules, and meaningful review of extreme biases restore the basic pressure that ties performance to reelection. That reduces the payoff to favors, increases the payoff to broad-based problem-solving, and shrinks the spread in business conditions across places. Because the economic losses grow quickly as entrenchment deepens, curbing the most egregiously “safe” arrangements delivers outsized gains.
Second, insulate major public-investment choices from partisan pull. Use published, rule-based criteria (think credible cost-benefit analysis that scores projects on congestion relief, reliability, safety, and environmental costs) and commit to ranking and funding accordingly. Add sunset clauses to place-based subsidies and require independent evaluation before renewal. Publish, in accessible form, the marginal payoff of the last dollar spent across regions so that deviations are visible and accountable. These steps don’t require perfect politics; but they do reduce the expected persistence and scale of distortions even when politics is imperfect.
Finally, pair governance reforms with transparency that investors can price. The more credible and visible the rules for permitting, taxation, and infrastructure selection, the less room there is for arbitrary swings, and the lower the “politics premium” investors build into their plans. That, in turn, encourages the long-horizon, complementary investments (training, software, supply-chain upgrading) that underpin productivity growth.
The headline, then, is straightforward: gerrymandering doesn’t just distort representation; it distorts the economy. By weakening accountability, it steers both public and private capital away from their best uses, and the resulting productivity losses compound over time. The fixes are not exotic. Restore real electoral competition and tie big spending decisions to clear, published measures of value. Do that, and you don’t only improve democratic fairness. You raise the return on every dollar the country invests.
