I appreciate Rick Pildes' e-mail touting my research. I should mention that
my exchange with Abramowitz, et al. appears in PS, not in JOP. Abramowitz
et al. have a companion piece to their PS article(s) also forthcoming in
JOP, so the confusion is understandable. Both journals should be arriving
in the coming weeks for those with a subscription. I'll leave it for
readers of the articles to determine how devestating my critique of
Abramowitz, et al. is. I'm sure they do not find it so. And I would add
that I do not believe that all districts should or could be competitive or
that redistricting is the only factor reducing electoral competition...save
the date for the March 9 Cato/Brookings conference on electoral competition!
I go further than just offering a critique in the PS article. I also relate
my experiences on the Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission to
demonstrate how a non-partisan commission operating under alternative
redistricting criteria might affect the number of competitive districts that
are drawn. It is possible to formulate a set of criteria that favor
competition, but Arizona's criteria -- one of which was to favor competition
-- ironically worked against it. Marty Lederman's inquiry concerning
non-partisan redistricting is not so far off base, then, but the right set
of criteria are also important to produce the desired outcome. More
research is needed here.
I think, not surprisingly, the competition argument in the brief is
persuasive: the harm affects partisans of both parties, depending on which
district one examines, and even affects independents and minor party
supporters who are not pivotal in election outcomes. I think the argument
may sway Kennedy, who opined that he would entertain a partisan
gerrymandering standard grounded in the 1st amendment (e.g., voters of the
minority party in uncompetitive districts have less ability to petition the
government to redress grievances).
Despite how persuasive the argument is, I am not sure what standard might be
applied to the problem, if the Court were to acknowledge it as one. Rick,
Sam and Burt are a bit sanguine at the end of their brief about such a
standard. I have a couple of ideas, such as formulating a plan with a
responsiveness close to one, or creating a number of competitive districts
somehow proportional to the overall competitiveness of a state. Kennedy is
searching for a standard, and would probably feel more comfortable with the
competition argument if a reasonable and simple standard can be offered.
------------
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Assistant Professor, George Mason University
Visiting Fellow, Brookings Institution
Mailing address:
(o) 703-993-4191 George Mason University
(f) 703-993-1399 Dept. of Public and International Affairs
mmcdon@gmu.edu 4400 University Drive - 3F4
http://elections.gmu.edu Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu [mailto:owner-election-
law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu] On Behalf Of Rick Hasen
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 4:01 PM
To: election-law@majordomo.lls.edu
Subject: message from Rick Pildes
Rick Pildes writes:
We did not cite any unpublished academic work, including the
forthcoming article you mention. As you must know, that particular
article has been powerfully and, I believe, devastatingly criticized by
another forthcoming article by Michael McDonald * in the very same issue
of that forthcoming journal. As McDonald points out, the article you
mention bizarrely used the 1988 Presidential election results to assess
the competitiveness of the 1990 congressional districts and then to
compare the competitiveness of the post-redistricting 1992 districts,
the article used the 1992 Presidential election results * even though
that was a three-way contest in which Ross Perot received 18.9% of the
vote. As McDonald's article shows, that unhelpful baseline from the
unusual 1992 election completely distorts all of the results in the
paper you note. When McDonald revisits the data using "more valid
measures of district competitiveness," as he puts it, he finds no
question that "redistricting is shown to reduce the number of
competitive congressional districts, contrary to Abramowitz et. al."
We would like to have cited this unpublished work, but I do not invite
the Court to rely on unpublished work, nor do I want to cite it before
publication. No matter how late in the production process an article
is, things can still change before publication. Indeed, I would like
also to have cited additional unpublished work, including additional
work by McDonald, that further confirms the obvious link between safe
districts and non-competitiveness. As McDonald concludes in "Drawing
the Line on District Competition," after data analysis: "Those engaged
in redistricting seem to have perfected their game, resulting in fewer
competitive districts in the 1991 and 2001 redistricting cycles." But
I also did not cite this work because it too was not in publication when
production of the brief was completed. The unpublished paper in your
email is, as far as I am aware, considered quite an outlier among the
studies that have looked at the 2000 elections. In advance of
publication, it has already been convincingly shown to be mistaken.
Please note that our brief never says that safe districting is the only
cause of the absence of competitive elections. We note that it is a
contributing cause. I believe the social-science evidence
overwhelmingly confirms this, even including unpublished work,
especially for the 2000s, which is the focus of the case.
Rick Pildes
Richard Pildes
Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law
Co-Director, NYU Center on Law and Security
NYU School of Law
40 Washington Sq. So. NYC, NY 10012
phone: 212 998-6377
fax: 212 995-3662
Rick Hasen <Rick.Hasen@lls.edu> 1/10/2006 2:50 PM >>>
From: "Kimball, David C." <kimballd@msx.umsl.edu>
To: <election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu>
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 10 Jan 2006 19:11:19.0687 (UTC)
FILETIME=[A354B970:01C61619]
The post about the Texas brief on political competition reminded me to
add something. There are a number of studies which find that
redistricting is not to blame for the decline in competitive contests or
for the incumbency advantage in American congressional elections,
including this article from the January 2006 issue of Journal of
Politics by Alan Abramowitz and his colleagues
(http://journalofpolitics.org/files/68_1/Incumbency.pdf). Not everyone
agrees with this finding, but I didn't see any of the studies which
claim to exonerate redistricting cited in the Pildes, Issacharoff, and
Neuborne brief.
- David Kimball
=20
David C. Kimball
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
University of Missouri-St. Louis
One University Blvd., 347 SSB
St. Louis, MO 63121-4400
phone: 314-516-6050
web page: http://www.umsl.edu/~kimballd
=20