Multimember district congressional elections

In the Apportionment Act of 1842, the House of Representatives mandated sin gle-member districts (SMDs) for elections of its members. Before this act, many states had multimember districts (MMDs), and even after this act, Cong ress permitted some exceptions up until 1967. This paper addresses several questions related to the election of represent atives in MMD elections. Herein, I develop a model of MMD elections that pr edicts that one party will sweep all the seats in this type of election. I then perform empirical analyses to examine and validate the four key assump tions of the model. My prediction that one party will sweep all the seats i n an MMD election is verified by examining the actual results of all MMD Ho use races in history. In this paper, I also show that, in general, the dive rsity of a state's House delegation increases when the state shifts from ge neral-ticket to single-member districts, but diversity decreases when the s tate moves in the opposite direction.