[EL] Check out Brewer, other GOP officials critical of redistricting map

[Michael McDonald]

Or to put it another way, poor Arizona Republicans really suffered this past
decade under the map drawn by the last commission. The state legislature was
known throughout the decade for passing one liberal law after another.

I’d be cautious about interpreting too much from a simple bivariate analysis
like Nicholas is presenting. There are multiple factors that influence bias
in addition to whether or not a commission drew the lines: the political
nature of the state; the type of commission (I believe that Arizona had the
only true “independent” commission last decade); and the rules that the
commission must follow in drawing plans, including but not limited to the
Voting Rights Act. Nicholas is not presenting an important statistic: his
bias statistic for the states without commissions. 

But, to really get at this question -- and to avoid selecting on one's
dependent variable -- one needs to draw alternative plans and do comparisons
of those plans within the same state. Since every state is very different,
cross-state comparisons are not truly meaningful. Separate work by Jonathan
Rodden and myself where we draw alternative plans and analyze these plans
shows that Democrats are inefficiently concentrated in urban areas for
redistricting purposes (there are some exceptions where such inherent biases
are minimal, such as Wisconsin, for example). The public mapping that Micah
Altman and I are encouraging is also generating more alternative
redistricting plans for us to analyze. So, again, it may not be the
commissions themselves that produce bias, but the nature of the state and
the rules for drawing districts that produce it. 

============
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 Nicholas
Stephanopoulos
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2011 9:13 AM
To: Aaron Blake
Cc: JBoppjr at aol.com; law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu;
law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Check out Brewer, other GOP officials critical of
redistricting map

In the last cycle, at the congressional level, the handful of states that
use commissions had plans with an average pro-Republican bias of 2%. At the
state legislative level, the larger number of states that use commissions
had plans with an average pro-Republican bias of 4%. So commissions don't
appear to have a systematic pro-Democratic slant, and if anything the
opposite might be the case (though the sample size is too small to know for
sure, and these figures include all commissions, not just nonpartisan
commissions).
On Fri, Oct 7, 2011 at 8:55 AM, Aaron Blake <BlakeA at washpost.com> wrote:
I think that map also favors Dems, if only slightly. Latham was drawn in
with King and has to move districts to challenge Boswell, and the district
is swing, but 2/3 of it is Boswell's territory. 


Aaron Blake
The Washington Post
The Fix
www.PostPolitics.com
blakea at washpost.com
twitter.com/FixAaron
202.503.4669




From:        john.k.tanner at gmail.com 
To:        JBoppjr at aol.com, law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu,
rhasen at law.uci.edu, law-election at uci.edu 
Date:        10/07/2011 08:52 AM 
Subject:        Re: [EL] Check out Brewer,        other GOP officials
critical of redistricting map 
Sent by:        law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu 
________________________________________



Iowa?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: JBoppjr at aol.com
Sender: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011 08:48:49 
To: <rhasen at law.uci.edu>; <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] Check out Brewer,
                other GOP officials critical of redistricting map

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