Evaluating partisan gains from Congressional gerrymandering: Using computer simulations to estimate the effect of gerrymandering in the U.S. House

Chen, Jowei; Cottrell, David

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2016.06.014

Cited by 48 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Values of the declination and its variants for the twenty 2012 US Congressional elections in states with at least eight districts for which each party won at least one seat. Political control of the redistricting process taken from[CC16]: R indicates republican control, D indicates democratic control, S indicates split control. Redistricting control in New Jersey and California was ostensibly non-partisan, but evidence suggests partisan control as indicated, see[Cai12,PL11] as noted in[CC16].…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Political control of the redistricting process taken from[CC16]: R indicates republican control, D indicates democratic control, S indicates split control. Redistricting control in New Jersey and California was ostensibly non-partisan, but evidence suggests partisan control as indicated, see[Cai12,PL11] as noted in[CC16]. Voting Rights Act (pre-clearance) states are marked Ultimately, the proper way to account for any inherent geographic advantages requires answering the following: To what extent is it constitutional for a district plan to exacerbate (or mitigate) existing, natural advantages?Additional summary tables and figures are included in the appendix.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution

WarringtonGregory¹

2018

Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy

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To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The efficiency gap, which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of Wisconsin's state legislative district plan. Unfortunately, however, the efficiency gap reduces to proportional representation, an expectation that is not a constitutional right. We present a new measure of partisan asymmetry that does not rely on the shapes of districts, is simple to compute, is provably related to the "packing and cracking" integral to gerrymandering, and that avoids the constitutionality issue presented by the efficiency gap. In addition, we introduce a generalization of the efficiency gap that also avoids the equivalency to proportional representation. We apply the first function to US congressional and state legislative plans from recent decades to identify candidate gerrymanders.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution

WarringtonGregory¹

2018

Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy

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“…there often exists at least some suspicion that a state's districts have been gerrymandered in some way, even in states with bipartisan or nonpartisan commissions or in states where mapmakers proclaim to be neutral. since it is difficult to estimate the nongerrymandered counterfactual using comparable elections, researchers have recently turned to simulating it using computer-automated districting algorithms (Chen and Cottrell 2016;Cirincione, darling, and O'rourke 2000;Fifield et al 2015;Fryer Jr. and Holden 2011;Krasno et al 2016;Magleby and Mosesson 2018). 4 these algorithms are designed to reproduce the districting process by aggregating Census blocks into a predetermined number of contiguous and equally populated geographic jurisdictions.…”

Section: Measuring the Effect Of Gerrymandering By Establishing The Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… These subunits are created by first dividing each congressional district into two contiguous halves and assigning the Census blocks to their nearest half. Then those halves and their corresponding Census blocks are subdivided into halves, which are subdivided into halves, and this process is repeated until the resulting subdivisions contain fewer than 2,000 residents each.This is the same grid technique used for the simulations in Chen and Cottrell (). …”

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confidence: 99%

Using Computer Simulations to Measure the Effect of Gerrymandering on Electoral Competition in the U.S. Congress

Cottrell¹

2019

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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Recent research has leveraged computer simulations to identify the effect of gerrymandering on partisan bias in U.S. legislatures. As a result of this method, researchers are able to distinguish between the intentional partisan bias caused by gerrymandering and the natural partisan bias that stems from the geographic sorting of partisan voters. However, this research has yet to explore the effect of gerrymandering on other biases like reduced electoral competition and incumbency protection. Using a computer algorithm to design a set of districts without political intent, I measure the extent to which the current districts have been gerrymandered to produce safer seats in Congress. I find that gerrymandering only has a minor effect on the average district, but does produce a number of safe seats for both Democrats and Republicans. Moreover, these safe seats tend to be located in states where a single party controls the districting process.

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“…In the years and decades that followed, computers made it possible for scholars to implement methods for developing optimal, neutral maps of legislative districts (see Weaver and Hess 1963, Nagel 1965, Garfinkel and Nemhauser 1970, Browdy 1990, Bozkaya, Erkut, and Laporte 2003, Chou and Li 2006and Fryer Jr and Holden 2011. At the same time, analysts recognized that retrieving an unbiased counterfactual of a jurisdiction's legislative districts is useful in a variety of applications (see Engstrom and Wildgen 1977, O'Loughlin and Taylor 1982, Cirincione, Darling, and O'Rourke 2000, McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal 2009, Chen and Rodden 2013, Chen and Cottrell 2016, Fifield et al 2015a, Tam Cho and Liu 2016. In spite of Vickrey's assertion that developing a neutral process to draw legislative districts would be "not at all difficult" (1961,110), computer-automated redistricting turned out to be at best a challenging problem and at worst an intractable one in complex redistricting scenarios.…”

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confidence: 99%

A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans

Magleby

Mosesson

2018

Polit. Anal.

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Computers hold the potential to draw legislative districts in a neutral way. Existing approaches to automated redistricting may introduce bias and encounter difficulties when drawing districts of large and even medium-sized jurisdictions. We present a new algorithm that can neutrally generate legislative districts without indications of bias that are contiguous, balanced and relatively compact. The algorithm does not show the kinds of bias found in prior algorithms and is an advance over previously published algorithms for redistricting because it is computationally more efficient. We use the new algorithm to draw 10,000 maps of congressional districts in Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas. We find that it is unlikely that the number of majority-minority districts we observe in the Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas congressional maps of these states would happen through a neutral redistricting process.

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Evaluating partisan gains from Congressional gerrymandering: Using computer simulations to estimate the effect of gerrymandering in the U.S. House

Cited by 48 publications

References 15 publications

Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution

Quantifying Gerrymandering Using the Vote Distribution

Using Computer Simulations to Measure the Effect of Gerrymandering on Electoral Competition in the U.S. Congress

A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans

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