Gerrymandering in the United States
Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering in the Legislative Process
A congressional district drawn in an odd or unnatural shape in order to improve the electoral prospects of one party. The idea of a gerrymandered district is to create a “safe” seat in Congress by concentrating supportive voters for the party doing the gerrymandering is the district—or to weaken the opposition party by spreading its voters out across several district boundaries. The name comes from one of gerrymandering’s earliest practitioners—Elbridge Gerry, who supported the practice while serving as governor of Massachusetts in 1811. To better favor his own Democratic-Republican Party, Gerry created one serpentine district—winding, long, and narrow—that critics suggested looked like a salamander.or a ” Gerry-mander.” The name stuck.
Concept of Gerrymandering
In the U.S., in the context of the U.S. Congress (Senate and House of Representatives), Gerrymandering has the following meaning: Drawing a legislative district or set of districts with unusual boundaries so that the resulting map favors one or more interest groups over others. Named after the prominent Revolutionary-era politician (and then Vice President) Elbridge Gerry. (Source of this definition of Gerrymandering : University of Texas)
Neighborhood Gerrymandering
I will mainly discuss another form of gerrymandering; namely of districts determining attendance at different public schools. Generally, students who live in a particular district attend the public schools in that district, with exceptions for charter and magnet schools, and other special schools. Since schools differ greatly in their quality, many parents prefer living in districts with better schools. One objective measure of this preference is the difference in prices of houses of a given quality, with similar neighborhood amenities, etc. between districts with good schools and those with lower quality schools.
Families who value education and have higher incomes will bid more for houses in districts with good schools. This will bid up the prices of these houses, and thereby would reduce the advantages of living there. Nevertheless, the higher price tag in good school districts would typically not be large enough to deter families with the greatest willingness to pay for good schools from moving there.
One way to measure objectively the housing premium for good schools is to compare the prices of similar houses on both sides of the boundary separating good school districts from other districts-a technique used in various studies, including a dissertation at Chicago by Daniel Tannenbaum. He is finding significantly higher prices for housing on the boundary within the good school districts.
Given the advantage of living in districts with good schools, there is jockeying to draw district boundaries in ways that favor families with greater political clout. These tend to be wealthier and more educated families, and also persons supporting the parties in power. If the boundaries are changed to place their houses in better school districts, homeowners gain doubly: their houses rise in value, and their children attend better schools.
The advantages of living in particular congressional districts can also be determined by comparing housing prices on different sides of the boundaries between congressional districts. I doubt if people are willing to pay much to be in districts with greater numbers of Republicans or Democrats because that has little effect on their personal benefits. However, regardless of their political affiliation, they would be willing to pay through higher housing prices to be in districts that provide greater subsidies and other benefits to residents because these districts have with influential representatives. They would pay higher housing prices to be in these districts, even if they would not vote for the influential representatives.
Author: Becker, defunct
Partisan Gerrymandering
The term “gerrymandering” refers to a political tactic that in the United States goes back to the eighteenth century—the tactic of configuring electoral districts to favor the party that does the configuring, or to achieve some other non-neutral political goal: for example, reducing minority representation in the legislature by drawing district boundaries in such a way as to pack most of the minority voters into a handful of districts, thus minimizing the number of legislators whom they can elect. The Supreme Court held racial gerrymandering unconstitutional—a violation of the equal protection of the laws—in 1960. But the Court has refused to hold that “partisan” gerrymandering, which means configuring districts so as to favor the party that controls the legislature doing the districting, is unconstitutional.
Article I of the Constitution provides in section 4 that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for … [members of the federal House of] Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.” The Supreme Court has required, in the name of equal protection of the laws, that congressional districts must have approximately the same number of people in them (“one man, one vote”). But this leaves a state legislature free to draw the district boundaries in a way that favors one party over the other. Take Illinois, a state that is entitled to have 18 Representatives in Congress (plus of course two Senators, but Senators are elected statewide, so the issue of gerrymandering does not arise for them). Illinois’s eighteen congressional districts have virtually identical populations, as required by the “one man, one vote” rule. The City of Chicago is strongly Democratic, but the suburbs tend to be Republican. If the Republicans controlled the Illinois legislature (they don’t), they could, without altering the population size of any district, redraw district boundaries in the Chicago area either to pack the city residents into as few districts as possible in order to minimize the number of districts that would elect a Democratic Representative, or to spread them out into as many districts as possible, where they would be in a minority and so wouldn’t elect any Representatives. Or the legislative majority could combine these tactics: compress as many city residents as possible into a few districts, and place the others in districts in which they would be outnumbered by Republican suburbanites. For a real-world example, an article called “The Great Gerrymander of 2012,” by Sam Wang, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (Feb. 2, 2013), points out that “in the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts [in advance of the 2012 national elections], 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats”—a much higher ratio of Republican to Democrat Representatives than of Republican to Democratic voters. In Ohio for example Republicans won 75 percent of the House seats with 51 percent of the votes. In Maryland and Illinois, where the legislatures were controlled by the Democrats, the figures were approximately reversed. In California, where the legislature had turned redistricting over to a nonpartisan commission, there was no significant discrepancy between the two percentages.
It seems hard to square the results of partisan gerrymandering with “one man, one vote.” It’s true that even in the absence of such gerrymandering, a person who belongs to a minority party in a district shouldn’t, from the standpoint of efficacy, bother to vote in a House race, because his vote will have no effect on who is elected to be the Representative from that district. But the minority voter’s political impotence is attributable to majority preference, a result implied by democratic political theory, while in the 2012 election Democratic voters were in the majority in some states in which, nevertheless, more Republicans than Democrats were elected to the House, and vice versa, a result brought about by partisan gerrymandering and in tension with democratic political theory.
Theory apart, partisan gerrymandering is objectionable because by creating safe congressional districts and thereby reducing political competition it reduces compromise in the House of Representatives. This is true with both “packing” and “spreading” the opposition voters. If the result of “packing” those voters is to create say a solidly Democratic district, the Representative will have no incentive to appeal to Republican voters in the district; there are few of them; he doesn’t need them; and for him to try to attract some of that small number might anger his core constituents. If the result of spreading Democratic voters is to create solidly Republican districts, the Representatives of those districts will similarly have little incentive to try to appeal to Democratic voters. The result is political gerrymandering is thus increased political polarization in the House of Representatives—which has been observed.
I can’t see any social benefits from partisan gerrymandering–nor any difficulty (other political opposition–though that is difficulty enough) in eliminating it, either by requiring that districting be delegated to a nonpartisan commission in each state (the California model) or by programming a computer that will create districts of equal population that are geometrically compact—as near as possible to circular, consistently with the need to equalize the population of the districts and respect certain limitations on perfect symmetry that are imposed by geography: one doesn’t want a district line to divide a house.
The only argument I’ve seen in favor of partisan gerrymandering is that it makes partisan voters happier—their Representative does not have to muffle his extreme views (or those of the voters of his party) in an effort to pick up some votes from members of the other party. So the voters whose candidate wins are happier but the losers—who in the 2012 election at least were more numerous—are unhappier. Gerrymandering that has such consequences is not a utility-maximizing practice.
Author: Posner
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