<x-flowed>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 We did not cite any unpublished academic work, including the forthcoming article you mention.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We would like to have cited this unpublished work, but I do not invite the Court to rely on unpublished work, nor do I want to cite it before publication.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  Indeed, I would like also to have cited additional unpublished work, including additional work by McDonald, that further confirms the obvious link between safe districts and non-competitiveness.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  The unpublished paper in your email is, as far as I am aware, considered quite an outlier among the studies that have looked at the 2000 elections.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  I believe the social-science evidence overwhelmingly confirms this, even including unpublished work, especially for the 2000s, which is the focus of the case.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








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