Hard Questions for Democracy by Raj Chari

Author:Raj Chari [Chari, Raj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415523059
Google: sovPygAACAAJ
Goodreads: 13711817
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Consistent with the argument of Vickrey (1961), it was found that a shape constraint on constituency boundaries provides little insurance against gerrymandering. Whereas the classic image of a gerrymandered constituency involves tortured shapes, majority parties can generally ensure that vote leads translate into constituency leads even if they constrain themselves to regular shapes. This allows for very large distortions. In the UK, for example, with approximately 650 constituencies and 50 million voters, full control over constituency boundaries is sufficient to convert a one-thousandth of a per cent vote lead into 100% constituency control.

Do the results support the claim that compactness favors majority parties and more dispersed parties (Lowenstein & Steinberg, 1985)? The results do support the argument that a convexity constraint hurts minorities. Convexity does not prevent gerrymanderers supporting a party with a k seat lead from controlling all constituencies, but it can prevent a minority party with a k seat lag from gaining any (even if such a party could otherwise control up to k – 1 seats). There are, however, some benefits for minorities: in close races (with margins between – k and k) minorities can translate their vote margin into a seat margin and, for some distributions, they can be guaranteed that a majority gerrymanderer cannot force an even worse outcome upon them. However, these benefits arise only for a very constrained set of contexts.

The results do not support the argument that compactness disadvantages more concentrated minority or majority groups confronted with gerrymandering by majority groups because, at least when operationalized as a convexity constraint, majority gerrymandering is unconstrained by distributions except for exceptionally close races. Whether compactness constrains gerrymanderers working for concentrated minorities more than it does gerrymanderers working for dispersed minorities remains an open question.

I close by emphasizing a final, deeper, implication of this analysis. At the outset it was noted that convexity is a necessary but not a sufficient criterion for an optimal design under a wide range of compactness measures. Thus, one might argue that the results of Proposition 1 may be avoided for designs that require more than convexity (such as the dispersion requirement in Fryer & Holden, 2007). This is correct. However, the results of Proposition 2 are relevant for all criteria that include convexity: if all convex designs award all constituencies to one side then so do all designs that require more than convexity. Moreover, for such distributions, this is the case no matter which side controls the districting. This has important implications for normative assessments of gerrymandering. Perhaps the most prominent normative critique of gerrymandering is that it results in seat shares that poorly reflect vote shares (see e.g. the discussion in Gelman & King, 1994). Yet as is clear from Proposition 2, distributions exist such that any division into convex districts will produce such a mismatch. In such cases having ‘fairer’ outcomes requires a gerrymandering that violates compactness. This clarifies the fact that the problem of mismatch cannot simply be attributed to the gerrymander but is inherent in the use of single member districts in the mapping from votes to seats.

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