[EL] Gerrymandering and partisan composition of Congress

[Justin Levitt]

I admit that I've only skimmed the Chen-Cottrell paper that Rick Pildes 
mentions here, and I look forward to reading far more carefully.

But to Rick's description below, it may be worth adding a few short 
thoughts, particularly given inevitable shorthand descriptions of the 
paper in the media.

Most important, this paper doesn't mean that there's no point in 
addressing congressional redistricting (either process or result), or 
that the benefits and detriments of the status quo are basically a wash. 
   (And though some might draw that conclusion from the summary, I don't 
think that's the implication that Rick would draw either -- and it's not 
the implication that I think the paper authors have suggested in the 
paper itself.)

First, though I understand why net partisan gain is a compelling focus, 
it's not the only measurement for whether redistricting is being 
performed acceptably (or "best," which is a different question).  
Political scientists value the overall balance of Rs and Ds, and many 
citizens who aren't political scientists do too. But there is more to 
value out of districts than just random final assignment of R or D.  
Democrats in states in which the Republicans "gained" seats due to 
gerrymandering may not view those seats as fungible even given 
comparable states in which the Democrats "gained" seats due to 
gerrymandering.  People (including, but not limited to, minorities long 
excluded from the political system) may prefer equitable opportunities 
to elect their particular candidates of choice.  Communities may feel 
like they've got a representative delivering pork back home. Particular 
communities benefit from not having their incumbents "targeted" for 
district dissection, and that impact is magnified in Congress by the 
seniority system.  And on and on.

Second is the "compared to what" question suggested by the headline, and 
explicitly acknowledged as the "non-gerrymandered counterfactual" by the 
study authors.  The headline should really say that gerrymandering has 
"little to no effect" on the partisan composition of Congress _compared 
to a randomized system of drawing districts based on criteria designated 
by the study authors_.  There is no state in the country -- and there is 
no local jurisdiction in the country that I'm aware of, though I'd 
welcome information to the contrary -- that currently draws districts 
using the simulation comparison described below, and in many states, the 
baseline simulation comparison would likely not be lawful.  The study 
did not, I take it, conclude that gerrymandering presently has little to 
no effect on the composition of Congress compared to a system in which 
Republicans (or Democrats) controlled the process across the board, or 
compared to a map drawn according to federal law and the state laws in 
place in each individual state, or compared to some other proposal for 
how districts might be drawn or should be drawn, including the desire to 
avoid splitting meaningful communities along arbitrary computer-drawn 
lines.

Neither of these caveats is a critique of the paper, which is both 
impressive and valuable, and should be read on its own merits.  But 
they're important caveats, I think, about the broader conclusions that 
can be drawn from the paper itself.

Justin

-- 
Justin Levitt
Professor of Law
(on leave through spring 2017)
Loyola Law School | Los Angeles

On 2/14/2017 7:43 AM, Rick Hasen wrote:
>
>
>     Gerrymandering Has “Little to No Effect” on the Partisan
>     Composition of Congress <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91074>
>
> Posted onFebruary 13, 2017 12:52 pm 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=91074>by*Richard Pildes* 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=7>
>
> That is the finding of an important newpaper 
> <http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejowei/gerrymandering.pdf>co-authored 
> by one of the leading social science experts on districting, Professor 
> Jowei Chen.  In recent years, a debate has been taking place over 
> whether it is particularly aggressive Republican gerrymandering in the 
> 2010 round of redistricting or increasing geographic sorting of voters 
> by partisan affiliation that explains the Republican “advantage” in 
> the House — the fact that Republicans gain a larger percentage of 
> House seats than their nationwide share of votes in House elections.
>
> Chen and David Cottrell frame their inquiry as an effort to answer how 
> many seats each party would control in the complete absence of 
> gerrymandering.  I won’t explain their full methodology here, but it 
> basically consists of doing hundreds of computer simulations to 
> measure the election results in differently designed districts, in 
> which the building blocks are election-return results from the 2008 
> presidential election, all the way down to the Census block level.  
> The computer is then told to start randomly at different points in the 
> state and design equally populated, geographically continuous, and 
> compact districts.  The simulations do not take partisan or racial 
> information into account.  This method of using thousands of computer 
> simulated districting plans based on objective criteria is 
> increasingly being offered by experts, including Chen, in litigation.
>
> Their bottom line finding is that if congressional “districts were 
> drawn randomly with respect to partisanship and race, Republicans 
> would only expect to lose a single seat in Congress to the Democrats.”
>
> They do find that there are modest partisan gains from gerrymandering 
> in individual states.  But the gains to each party cancel out, in 
> their analysis.  Thus, they find that Republicans gain about five 
> seats in states in which they controlled the redistricting process in 
> this cycle.  In states Democrats controlled, they gained about three 
> seats.  And once race is taken into account through the way the 
> requirements of the VRA pre-clearance process demanded preservation of 
> VRA districts, the Democrats gained another 1.75 seats compared to 
> what a process based just on contiguity, compactness, and equal 
> population would tend to produce.
>
> This is certainly not the last word on this important subject.  Any 
> complex study of this sort poses many methodological issues.  And 
> their findings for congressional districts do not necessarily mean 
> that gerrymandering has not made a significant difference for state 
> legislative elections.  But this study provides one of the most 
> important counters to the argument that partisan gerrymandering plays 
> a major role in the current composition of the House.
>
> Further debates and discussions of this issue, including in the media, 
> are going to have to take account of this important new analysis.  It 
> is consistent with what at least some other social scientists, using 
> different approaches, have also concluded about the limited effects of 
> gerrymandering on the composition of the House.
>
> Posted inUncategorized <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=1>
>
>

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