[EL] The COI-ness of California's Redistricting Commission

[Michael McDonald]

A couple points in response to Bruce.

You are out of luck if you are a registered as an independent (or decline to
state in California). Only partisans get safe districts and are worthy of
being represented by people like themselves. Political scientists who study
democratic transitions argue that political instabilities follow when
politicians define what types voters are, rather than allow voters to do so
themselves. Polarization is the mildest form of these instabilities.

One need to look no further than the current IL-17th district (the product
of a bipartisan gerrymander) to see what contortions would need to be
performed to create safe partisan districts everywhere.

The reform community has learned from unsuccessfully packaging competition
as a reform goal, and has mostly abandoned it in favor of advocating for
respecting existing political boundaries and communities of interest. These
concepts sell with voters. The two successful 2010 reform initiatives in
California and Florida took this approach. The mapping work I and others
(including Bruce, ironically) have done show that more district competition
follows than what we currently have if districts more closely resemble how
they looked before the equal population mandates of the 1960s allowed
politicians to fine-tune gerrymandering by splitting existing political
boundaries to their hearts' content. Recent academic work demonstrates that
aligning districts with existing political boundaries and communities of
interest increases the efficacy of the constituent/representative link, and
has positive effects on name recognition of candidates, voter turnout, etc.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, George Mason University 
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

                             Mailing address:
(o) 703-993-4191             George Mason University
(f) 703-993-1399             Dept. of Public and International Affairs
mmcdon at gmu.edu               4400 University Drive - 3F4
http://elections.gmu.edu     Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Bruce
Cain
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 5:47 PM
To: Doug Spencer
Cc: Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] The COI-ness of California's Redistricting Commission

Doug
 
 
It turns out that the reform community was divided between the good
government/more competition approach and the diversity/fairness position
taken by the civil rights community. Previous attempts at redistricting
reform failed to get the civil rights community support so my sense is that
there were concessions for Props 11 and 20 that moved away from the
competition
focus. But I will defer to others who were closer to the negotiations. As to
what you are hearing, this is a point I have made for 30 years.  No one
wants their district to be competitive, because that means spending more
money and a very real prospect of being represented by someone you disagree
with.  The push for competition is driven by political
officials/academmics/professionaol reformers who want to offset the
polarization of party activists in safe seats (although the empirical
evidence that supports this is thin at best), not by constituent demand.
 
 Bruce  
On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 5:26 PM, Doug Spencer <dougspencer at gmail.com> wrote:
Bruce, 

Something that has always struck me as odd, (and I would love to hear your
thoughts about this), is that Prop 11 (and later Prop 20) were both sold, to
some degree, on a platform of increased political competition, yet the
language of Prop 11 (preserved by Prop 20) explicitly precludes the
Commission from taking into account information critical to increasing
political competition: "communities of interest shall not include
relationships with political parties, incumbents, or political candidates,"
see Article XXI, §2(d)(4) of the California Constitution as amended by Prop.
11. How do proponents of Prop 11 presume the Commission will increase
competition? VRA compliance? Luck? I'm sure Dan Lowenstein has something to
say about this.  

Also, I have been very surprised by the lack of public comment on political
competition. I have attended or watched the majority of five Commission
hearings in the greater Bay Area and of the nearly 200 presenters I listened
to, not a single person raised incumbency as their primary concern. Perhaps
Californians don't care about increased competition as much as we think they
do, or perhaps they merely take it for granted given the nature of the
Commission. (Or maybe my sample of Bay Area presenters is not
representative).

Like many others, I'll be watching the political numbers closely. For those
who do care about the issue, you can download 2010 voter registration
information here, which you will then be able to merge with the Commission's
data files that are released tomorrow.

Coyly,
Doug

-----
Douglas M. Spencer
Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
Phone: (415) 335-9698
E-mail: dspencer at berkeley.edu



On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 8:23 AM, Bruce Cain <be.cain48 at gmail.com> wrote:
 
For those of you who have had your fill of "member" related issues, I
thought I would offer an observation on the eve
of the CRC releasing its preliminary maps.  I have occasionally tuned into
their meetings (which have all the excitement you would expect from
a group chosen by the state auditor), and noticed the frequent use of the
term "coi" which they pronounce like "coy."  When they use the term
they mean a short-hand for "community of interest," which has become their
primary consideration after equal population, contiguity and their version
of the VRA.
But ironically "coi" in the election law world can stand for "conflict of
interest" and that applies as well since the commission was purportedly
scrubbed clean of political conflicts
of interest.  
 
But "coy" also applies as the commission clearly hopes that the two senses
of "coi" will protect them from the inevitable onslaught of political
criticism
that will follow after the maps are released.  Looking through their
visualizations, their maps are a decent start, but a start only, and there
will be many throny and heated 
issues to resolve in the coming weeks, particularly in the southern part of
the state.  Rumor has it that they will not release political data, trying
to keep people in a "coi"
framework.  But in fact this will be hard to do when others report the
political data.  How will they shield themselves from this information? This
will seem coy or perhaps disingenuous.  
People will want to know how many of the seats will be competitive.  They
will want to know the prospects in the majority minority seats for minority
sucess. Perhaps 
the commission should be a little less coy.
 
Bruce Cain

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