Do you want to avoid the hassle of traveling with your printed poster? IAPHS2026 is pleased to make poster printing available to you through our supplier PosterSessionOnline. Your poster will be professionally reviewed, printed and shipped directly to Portland and you will be able to pick it up from the Poster desk. Click here to learn more.
Primary Submission Category: Non-health institutions (business, political, education systems)
Partisan Gerrymandering and Infant Mortality
Authors: AP Pittman,
Presenting Author: AP Pittman*
In the past ten years, partisan gerrymandering has gained more public attention, with scholars and activists alike calling for more rigorous empirical research into the topic. Empirical research on partisan gerrymandering to date is sparse; to the extent that it exists, it is primarily concerned with the consequences of gerrymandering for elections, governing bodies, and political parties. However, a large range of possible downstream consequences of partisan gerrymandering remain understudied, both within and outside of the political sphere. The current paper situates partisan gerrymandering in the broader framework of structural determinants of health and asks: Does gerrymandering, and the dilution of political power that it represents, result in tangible differences in infant health? I use a measure developed by legal scholars to quantify gerrymandering, called the efficiency gap; in results from two-way fixed effects models, I show that increasing values of the efficiency gap – that is, gerrymandering to the advantage of Republicans – results in significant increases in infant mortality rates for both White and Black infants. This effect persists even after controlling for current partisanship, suggesting that Republican gerrymandering impacts infant mortality through other pathways in addition to changing the partisan composition of state legislatures to be more Republican. This paper signals the need for population health researchers to integrate gerrymandering into their theories of structural/political determinants of health.