Academic literature on the topic 'Gerrymandering – United States'

Japan is regularly criticized for the malapportionment of its election districts. In contrast, the United States has problems with gerrymandered election districts, even though district boundaries are crafted with meticulous attention paid to population equality among its districts. Japanese redistricting practices prevent gerrymandering of district boundaries, but at a cost of tolerating higher levels of malapportionment than would be allowed in the United States. I analyze the effects of Japan's redistricting rules and find that they have effectively prevented any malapportionment or gerrymandering that benefits a specific political party. I also show that in terms of actual votes cast, the Japanese system produces greater equality between districts than the results obtained in the United States, suggesting that US redistricting practices could be improved by modeling them after the Japanese example.

Background: When the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overruled a five-decade old precedent and gave states the unfettered power to regulate or ban abortion, it did so while proclaiming the decision would return power over the issue to the people, and that women specifically were not without political influence to shape policies. Nowhere amid such language about the power of the people does the Court decision acknowledge the capacity for biased legislative district maps (i.e., gerrymandering) to influence resulting policies. Methods: Here I consider the state-level relationship between gerrymandering and abortion policy using logistic regression that controls for several variables including statewide public opinion, religion, and the number of women legislators. Data on abortion rules are derived from the Guttmacher Institute’s database as of January 1, 2023. Data on gerrymandering scores for each legislative map are derived from the Campaign Legal Center. Results: I find that states with a pro-Republican gerrymander were considerably more likely to impose a pre-viability abortion ban in 2023. Across the 50 states, the logistic regression results suggest an increase in the odds of an abortion ban by more than 40 times as a result of a pro-Republican legislative map gerrymander. Notably, a pre-viability abortion ban is in place in nine of the 10 states where public opinion favors abortion rights but where the legislative map is biased toward Republicans. Conclusions: The influence of mapmakers over the resulting policy clouds the Court’s sanguine assertions of the public’s influence and women’s political agency over this issue.

This essay speaks to the context of domination and subordination in particular as it pertains to White Supremacy/White Privilege as manifested in the history of slavery and “Jim Crow” in the United States. It is within this historical context one can discern the present status of race relations in the United States that continues to foster race discrimination through the policies of the ethnic majority (white) power structure, e.g.-institutional racism, voter suppression laws, gerrymandering of voter districts and banking policies to name a few areas. The research of books, papers, television interviews and personal experiences provides a testament to present government policies that endeavor to maintain a social construct of dominance and subordination by the white power structure in the United States.

Every 10 years, the United States conducts population census. Beyond serving various socio-economic needs, gathered data also has consequnces for the political system – the states’ population determines the number of state seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. To ensure fair representation, consisent with ‘one person, one vote’ rule, the states modify the boundaries of congressional districts after each census. The article discusses federal and state rules that bodies responsible for redistricting – mainly state legislatures and special commissions – need to consider, emphasizing the nature and scope of legal changes, introduced between 2011 and 2020. The Author claims that defederalization of the redistricting regulations and Supreme Court opinion that issues related to gerrymandering constitute political questions, thus being beyond the scope of federal judiciary are two most important redistricting-related rules developments in the analyzed decade.

Gerrymandering—the intentional manipulation of legislative boundaries for political advantage—is a venerable practice. Why, then, some might wonder, should we pay greater attention to it at this time? In particular, should judicial inquiry into constitutional issues of fair representation, intense for some two decades, now turn to what may well seem to comprise the heart of the “political thicket”? Throughout this period of reapportionment litigation, federal courts have alluded to the problem, with increasing concern shown by members of the Supreme Court of the United States, about its importance (e.g.,Karcher v. Daggett, 103 S. Ct. 2653: 1983). Is the time ripe for a direct judicial examination of the gerrymander on constitutional grounds? And, if so, does California comprise an appropriate test case?Prerequisite to answering such questions are: (1) an understanding of how and why gerrymandering, in magnitude, extent, and impact, has become an essentially new kind of issue rather than a mere extension of a traditional practice; and (2) a need to develop judicially manageable standards of identifying gerrymanders.Prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, there existed a variety of constraints that conditioned boundary manipulation. For one thing, a large number of states simply failed to redistrict for several decades, the situation that triggeredBaker v. Can(369 U.S. 186: 1962),Wesberry v. Sanders(376 U.S. 1: 1964),et al.This resulted in great disparities in population among districts, a form of “silent” or “status quo” gerrymander that in practice minimized periodic boundary manipulation. For example, district lines for Congress were typically redrawn only in states—usually a minority—that lost or gained seats.

Gerrymandering—the intentional manipulation of legislative boundaries for political advantage—is a venerable practice. Why, then, some might wonder, should we pay greater attention to it at this time? In particular, should judicial inquiry into constitutional issues of fair representation, intense for some two decades, now turn to what may well seem to comprise the heart of the “political thicket”? Throughout this period of reapportionment litigation, federal courts have alluded to the problem, with increasing concern shown by members of the Supreme Court of the United States, about its importance (e.g., Karcher v. Daggett, 103 S. Ct. 2653: 1983). Is the time ripe for a direct judicial examination of the gerrymander on constitutional grounds? And, if so, does California comprise an appropriate test case?Prerequisite to answering such questions are: (1) an understanding of how and why gerrymandering, in magnitude, extent, and impact, has become an essentially new kind of issue rather than a mere extension of a traditional practice; and (2) a need to develop judicially manageable standards of identifying gerrymanders.Prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, there existed a variety of constraints that conditioned boundary manipulation. For one thing, a large number of states simply failed to redistrict for several decades, the situation that triggered Baker v. Can (369 U.S. 186: 1962), Wesberry v. Sanders (376 U.S. 1: 1964), et al. This resulted in great disparities in population among districts, a form of “silent” or “status quo” gerrymander that in practice minimized periodic boundary manipulation. For example, district lines for Congress were typically redrawn only in states—usually a minority—that lost or gained seats.

AbstractWhile prisoners cannot vote, they are counted as residents of the often rural legislative districts where they are incarcerated rather than their home districts. We examine the extent to which incarceration shifts the balance of a representative democracy by considering its impact on legislative apportionment. Drawing on data from the Census, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, and Pennsylvania Redistricting Commission, we develop a counterfactual framework to examine whether removing and returning prisoners to their home districts affects equal representation. Because prisoners are disproportionately African American, we also employ this counterfactual to assess racial differences in the impact of prison gerrymandering. Findings indicate that incarceration shifts political power from urban districts to suburban and rural districts through legislative apportionment. Moreover, non-White communities suffer the most. We conclude by considering how our findings fit a growing literature on the role of mass incarceration in [re]producing racial inequalities in the contemporary United States.

With so many dominant narratives about the South being “the embarrassing part of the country” because of its seemingly conservative politics, it’s easy to think of this region of the United States as a place beyond redemption. In this piece, I describe the current state of Southern politics (e.g., voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other Right-wing attacks), and how these policies have led to a misleading narrative of the South that ignores the political work of Black queer Southerners. After an analysis of Southern political discourse, I craft a story about a Black queer community organizer tasked with amplifying the voices of marginalized Southerners during a presidential election for a campaign that wants to write off the South for its conservative policies. My counterstory not only rejects the majoritarian narrative that erases the progressive work of Black queer activism, but also provides a heuristic for exposing racist power structures and politically investing in marginalized communities.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Gerrymandering is the practice of deliberately drawing electoral districts in a way that provides unfair advantage to one group over another, typically with respect to political parties or particular social or ethnic groups (Bunge 1966; Horn 1999). The term itself was coined in 1812, after a Massachusetts Governor, Elbridge Gerry, signed into law a political reapportionment bill with long, sinuous districts that one political cartoonist aptly compared to a winged salamander (Morrill 1973). While this practice was by no means new, the particularly grievous instance had given it a name; because, of the profound impact that voting district boundaries can have on the outcome of single-candidate elections, the practice lives on some two centuries later. Since then, several important legislative and judicial standards have emerged at the level of US Federal Government that were intended to stymie this practice. These include the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which stipulated that US Congressional districts be comprised of contiguous territory in “as compact form as practicable” (Bunge 1966). And yet despite these laws and legal standards, the US Supreme Court has been “reluctant to overturn even fairly blatant partisan gerrymandering,“ (Horn 1999), in part due to the inherent complexity of ascribing arbitrary boundaries on complex social and geographic landscapes, but also due to the onerous (and sometimes conflicting) legal standards that have been established. As Bill Bunge (1966) put it, “the problem sounds geographically simple—merely construct regions of ‘compact form’! But the grouping of locations into an antigerrymandered state touches on some of the deepest and most fundamental problems in regional geography.”</p><p>In the United States, the upcoming 2020 Census, and the resulting redistricting process, has brought gerrymandering back into focus. Specifically, algorithmically conducted geospatial analysis and the resulting cartographic visualizations produced have emerged as a central battleground on which various practices of redistricting are discussed. However, most spatial analysis and cartographic visualization of gerrymandering to date has relied almost exclusively on Euclidean, absolute representations of space (O’Sullivan et al . 2018). In this paper, we demonstrate how strictly Euclidean perspectives may fail to account for the quotidian experiences of space. Further, we argue towards a relational understanding of space that takes into account how individuals move through space in their day-to-day lives. To do so, we first return to a set of complex mathematical approaches first espoused during the quantitative revolution of the 1970s (Forer 1978; Morrill 1976; Morrill 1973; Tobler 1961; and others). Using new and improved computational tools, we improve upon these efforts, providing a process for generating new visualizations that explore relational spaces within congressional districts. Specifically, we use Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) within a graph network to bend and fold congressional districts in accordance with the travel-time it takes to move through them. We conclude by discussing the limitations of this approach and areas for further research.</p><p>Though quantitative methods in the field of geography seem presently dominated by narrow views of absolute, Euclidean spaces, early efforts at defining quantitative geographic approaches were focused largely on finding new ways to define and visualize space (Janelle 2015; Kitchin 2006; O’Sullivan et al. 2018). Tobler (1961) proposed that much distortion of space by transportation can be understood through the transformation of coordinates. Bunge’s transformation of the “real” travel time for commuters is one of the more famous visualization of this type of isochronic transformation (O’Sullivan et al. 2018). Forer (1978) expands upon this idea with a discussion of an all-points-to-all-points reorganization, rather than the bending of adjacent points of interest based on a singular, central anchor point. Such an approach is necessarily computationally intensive as points must be moved over many iterations as the relative location of adjacent points is also in flux, and there exists the possibility of complex inversions in cases where the interior of the geographic space is not navigable (O’Sullivan et al. 2018). Simply put, this type of computationally intensive visualization was extremely difficult in the 1970s and, additionally, newer techniques such as MDS and bidimensional regression not developed or relatively unknown at that time (Ahmed and Miller 2017).</p><p>While the practical and mathematical execution of these approached failed to overcome the technical barriers of their time, deeper philosophical currents present in such were were carried on through discourse in both feminist and human geography. Much of this work has engaged with Marx’s concept of the “annihilation of space by time” particularly as articulated through Harvey’s (1990) explication of “time-space compression.” Despite academic interest in the relational experiences of space in daily life and a recognition that distance alone is an insufficient means of characterizing the spaces and places in which human interaction takes place, there has been little engagement with these ideas with respect to the creation of representational voting districts where an emphasis on purportedly “neutral” algorithms and their resulting visualizations has dominated the public discourse.</p><p>We present an approach for the visualization of congressional districts within the United States that is based upon the estimated travel time between points according to Bing Maps API. Such an approach is informed by the relational, lived experiences of individuals as they attempt to traverse space, but also requires significant computational complexity. The approach follows Forer’s (1978) conceptual model of continuous spatial transformations between all points. To create a visualization that maintains some similarity to the types seen by traditional maps, points will be assigned as an evenly spaced grid at sufficient density to roughly approximate the full shape of traditional congressional district polygons. In our test case, we demonstrate significant distortion of districts when travel-time is taken into account that reveals otherwise cartographically hidden experiences of lived space. We select three districts in Washington state for this demonstration, although the open-source code can be readily applied to any district for which the user has information.</p><p>In brief, the process involves the transformation of a congressional district to a set of coordinate points (Figure 1). A distance matrix of travel times between all-points-to-all-points is then constructed. MDS, a process for arranging points based on their dissimilarity (Bouts et al. 2016; Shimizu &amp; Inoue 2009; VanderPlas 2016), allows for the rearranging of these points within a graph network such that the average travel time between all points in the graph is minimized. This follows Morrill’s (1973; 1976) approach to the construction of congressional districts.</p>

While drawing electoral districts and its special type called gerrymandering (redistricting with a certain purpose in mind) has been present in American politics since the founding of the United States, it has recently received a lot of attention and criticism. Gerrymandering has been accused of ruining electoral competition, contributing to the gridlock in Congress, and hampering the spirit of American democracy. Moreover, legislators responsible for redistricting are frowned upon for choosing their own voters and thus ruining the purpose of the electoral process. Redistricting currently follows certain principles, the most important of which and the only two recognized at the federal level are population equality and minority representation. These principles were designed to limit the redistricting bodies when drawing districts. State legislatures remain the most common redistricting institution. However, for the criticism that they face various redistricting commissions with different powers were established. The current trend in the redistricting reform is to delegate the redistricting power to independent commissions which can adopt a redistricting plan without the consent of a legislature and whose members have no connections to politics. Competition and partisanship are the two most discussed...

AbstractThe election of the populist Donald Trump to the United States is argued to be a consequence of the fluke of the electoral college, the lackluster Democratic turnout, and the anti-establishment and populist sentiments in the population. Through effective gerrymandering after the 2000 general elections, the Republican party and its presidential candidate Trump won the elections, even though he lost the popular vote by close to 3 million ballots. Another example of the flaw of the electoral system is shown by the 2018 midterm elections.

In the United States, the growth of judicial power started as a way to curb over-reaching, sometimes corrupt, state legislatures and manifested itself in allowing the judicial branch, as opposed to the other branches, to resolve more disputes over contracts, property, debts, and other distinctly nineteenth-century problems. For the last seventy-five years or so, however, something else has propelled its influence: the growth of constitutional review at the federal level, the power to invalidate state and federal civil laws and executive branch actions as well as state and federal criminal prosecutions. This chapter discusses what has become an acutely American dilemma, a fear that the courts will do too little in enforcing constitutional rights and a fear they will do too much. It considers the problems posed in each direction and the risks of politicizing the federal courts if they become the exclusive source of identifying constitutional individual and structural rights.

This chapter explores one important controversy bedeviling nonproportional, territorial-districting systems such as those that exist in the United States: the problem of racial minority vote dilution. Vote dilution is indeed a serious political injustice, and consideration conception demonstrates why. In some circumstances, districting schemes diluting minority votes reflect and promote broader deliberative neglect of certain minority groups-that is, they reflect and promote failures of consideration. Recognizing these injustices does not commit one to supporting the proportional representation of groups in the legislature. The discussions of proportional representation and vote dilution together reveal that the fair representation of groups requires a variety of forms of consideration, and that there are few institutional means that will universally guarantee those forms of consideration in all political societies. These analyses also explain what is objectionable about partisan gerrymandering—that is, efforts to draw districts to favor a particular political party. Such efforts deny various forms of consideration to supporters of other parties.

This chapter examines the rise of mid-decade redistricting by focusing on the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 2006 case of League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry. Both Davis v. Bandemer and Vieth v. Jubelirer approached the question of partisan gerrymandering of congressional boundaries through the framework of the so-called first-order equal protection review, assessing the direct effects of a challenged redistricting plan on voters' ability to elect representatives of their choice. The 2004 case of Cox v. Larios demonstrates an alternative conceptual approach to the issue of political gerrymandering, one that has proven considerably more successful at striking down partisan gerrymanders than the strategy of claiming equal protection relief under the Bandemer precedent. This chapter discusses Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in LULAC vs. Perry and argues that the federal courts have failed to overturn a gerrymander because their effects are generally not that long-lasting. This conclusion is bolstered through case studies of the states of Pennsylvania and Texas.

This chapter examines the Supreme Court case stemming from the issue of redistricting in Texas. After the 2002 election, Texas's congressional delegation consisted of seventeen Democrats and fifteen Republicans. After the 2004 election, the delegation was eleven Democrats and twenty-one Republicans. This change was the result of the 2003 redistricting effort demanded and orchestrated by United States House majority leader Tom DeLay. It completed the process of making Texas a Republican state. In 2003, Representative Joe Crabb of the House Redistricting Committee introduced a redistricting bill that would spark a legal battle between Republicans and Democrats in Texas. The chapter discusses the Democrats' legal challenge to this bill over the issue of gerrymandering as well as the winners and losers from the litigation.

Abstract This chapter illustrates various consequences of the abandonment of the D-words and how it’s possible to take familiar D-focused debates and improve them by using D-purged terminology. It uses discussions of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the United States, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, restrictions on voting, and gerrymandering to show that we can do better if we abandon the D-words. The chapter includes a debate over epistocracy (rule by citizens with political knowledge) and the roles of knowledge and understanding in collective decision-making. It shows that the D-words are superfluous; if political questions and answers are purged of the D-words, we might become a bit less dogmatic.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Supreme Court of the United States in litigation relating to partisan gerrymandering, paying particular attention to a case that attempted to apply the previously established Davis v. Bandemer precedent to congressional elections: Vieth v. Jubelirer. It begins with an overview of Badham v. Eu, which arose from the redrawing of California's congressional districts in the aftermath of the 1980 census and its most significant holding: that the Bandemer precedent, which had initially been applied to the drawing of state legislative districts only, also extends to the drawing of congressional districts. The chapter then considers the circumstances surrounding the Vieth case, in which the alleged political gerrymander concerned the reapportionment plan for the congressional districts in the state of Pennsylvania rather than those for the state assembly. It also analyzes the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Vieth, focusing on Justice Antonin Scalia's plurality opinion and Justice Anthony Kennedy's concurring opinion.

Abstract This chapter introduces the goals and philosophy of this book. It first describes the litigation over the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering of electoral districts in the United States, which ultimately culminated in a Supreme Court justice calling the empirical evidence in the case “sociological gobbledygook.” It then explains that the goal of this book is to explain the empirical methods that many lawyers are quick to dismiss as gobbledygook. It also explains that this book will try to accomplish that goal while omitting the formulas and equations found in other books, instead focusing on explaining the intuition and logic of common empirical methods. This chapter concludes with a roadmap of the topics that will be covered in the subsequent chapters of the book.

Election College reform should be considered in the context of overall concerns about American democracy. Civic culture is essential, as is strengthening democratic institutions. While the United States must address other institutional weaknesses, including gerrymandering, the power of the presidency requires urgent attention to the current deficiency of the Electoral College. The problem is that plurality winner-take-all permits the kind of accident that occurred in 1844, where the winner is not the candidate preferred by a majority of voters in enough states for an Electoral College majority. Insofar as this kind of accident may have happened again in 2016, recognizing this institutional problem requires a different analysis and solution than if a majority of Americans want to elect a president with anti-democratic tendencies. Currently, there is a mismatch between America’s expectation of two-party competition and the multicandidate reality of contemporary presidential elections. Majority rule is necessary to realign reality and expectations.

The delineation of electoral district boundaries is a fundamental component of democratic practice in the United States. However, gerrymandering—the manipulation of district boundaries to favor specific interest groups—undermines this process and often leads to contentious debates and legal battles. The primary objective of this study is to quantitatively evaluate four sets of New York State’s 2022 congressional district maps for signs of gerrymandering. These maps were proposed by the Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC), the State Legislature, and the State Court, respectively. The quantitative metrics employed integrate factors such as population distribution, state boundaries, and spatial topology to assess district compactness and to identify gerrymandering. The results indicate that the Court-drawn congressional districts exhibit considerably lower levels of gerrymandering than the maps proposed by the IRC and the State Legislature, which exhibit little disparity. As the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that addressing partisan gerrymandering falls within the jurisdiction of the state, the findings of this study suggest that appointing special map masters by the State Court and reducing or eliminating the influence of political parties in redistricting could generate fairer electoral maps that promote equitable representation of the state's populace.