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Paradoxes of Political Reform:: Congressional Redistricting in Florida
... Altman and McDonald [81] generated 1 million plans and threw out 850,000. They found about 17 new plans for every 20 rejections at the one millionth iteration, showing that there are a vast number of plans that could potentially be generated. ...
Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymandering is especially vexing in the United States. This paper introduces an algorithm, with an implementation, for creating districting plans (whether for political redistricting or for other districting applications). The algorithm, Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair (SFSR), is demonstrated for Congressional redistricting in American states. SFSR is able to create thousands of valid redistricting plans, which may then be used as points of departure for public deliberation regarding how best to redistrict a given polity. The main objectives of this paper are: (i) to present SFSR in a broadly accessible form, including code that implements it and test data, so that it may be used for both civic deliberations by the public and for research purposes. (ii) to make the case for what SFSR essays to do, which is to approach redistricting, and districting generally, from a constraint satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of producing a plurality of feasible solutions that may then serve in subsequent deliberations. To further these goals, we make the code publicly available. The paper presents, for illustration purposes, a corpus of 11,206 valid redistricting plans for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (produced by SFSR), using the 2017 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics. Also, the paper presents 1,000 plans for each of the states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, using the 2018 American Community Survey, along with descriptive statistics on these plans and the computations involved in their creation.
... The main objective of the project is to ensure transparency of political elections (Altman & McDonald, 2013), for example, in order to avoid secret redrawing of electoral districts that could affect the voting results that are too favorable for some candidates or political parties (The DistrictBuilder initiative for collaborative electoral redistricting, 2014). It should be noted that such a political practice has long been known to many American political consultants and sometimes applied by some subjects of political relations ...
This chapter reviews the development of various e-government institutions in the United States as a versatile administrative tool to perform public sector reforms at a broad range of public agencies, both federal and local. The e-government phenomenon in the US is analyzed by the author through the prism of its evolution as an institution that reflects well rich political, socioeconomic, corporate and historical foundations which the American nation is intrinsically built upon. In this regard, the author argues that such unique features of e-government politics in the United States as decentralized mechanisms of political decision making, the lack of a single national e-government platform, a wide institutional autonomy of local e-government ecosystems from federal policymakers and, more importantly, the presence of various institutions of self-government, noticeable regional unevenness in the development of such projects from state to state and from one major city to another, interesting effects of political bipartisanship on e-government policies, active participation of the local non-governmental sector and various civic players, etc. are the key arguments in favor of a unique federal implementation model in the development of the e-government phenomena in the United States.
... The main objective of the project is to ensure transparency of political elections (Altman & McDonald, 2013), for example, in order to avoid secret redrawing of electoral districts that could affect the voting results that are too favorable for some candidates or political parties (The DistrictBuilder initiative for collaborative electoral redistricting, 2014). It should be noted that such a political practice has long been known to many American political consultants and sometimes applied by some subjects of political relations under one or another pretext (Edwards, 1971). ...
The book introduces readers to the results of the comparative cross-institutional analysis on e-governance policies in the United States and Kazakhstan, which, from political and administrative contexts, represent, respectively, typical federal and unitary nations. The results of one-year field studies and ethnographic research that the author of the monograph conducted in the USA as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in 2011-2012 provided a rich empirical basis to write the monograph. In this regard, the research provides new evidences to support the hypothesis that the unique features of the administrative-territorial division and traditions of public administration existing, respectively, in federal and unitary states have a fundamental impact on the implementation of e-government policies pursued by national authorities in countries with similar political, administrative and institutional structures, which are eventually conceptualized in the book in decentralized and centralized models of e-government implementation policies, i.e. in electronic federalism and electronic centralism, respectively. According to the author of the research, the results of the comparative analysis, to some extent, could be extrapolated, correspondingly, to all federal and unitary nations in much wider global settings.
State legislatures are tasked with drawing state and federal districts and administering election law, among many other responsibilities. Yet state legislatures are themselves gerrymandered. This book examines how, why, and with what consequences, drawing on an original dataset of ninety-five state legislative maps from before and after 2011 redistricting. Identifying the institutional, political, and geographic determinants of gerrymandering, the authors find that Republican gerrymandering increased dramatically after the 2011 redistricting and bias was most extreme in states with racial segregation where Republicans drew the maps. This bias has had long-term consequences. For instance, states with the most extreme Republican gerrymandering were more likely to pass laws that restricted voting rights and undermined public health, and they were less likely to respond to COVID-19. The authors examine the implications for American democracy and for the balance of power between federal and state government; they also offer empirically grounded recommendations for reform.
The comparative analysis of the ICT-driven public sector reforms in the United States and Kazakhstan, representing respectively typical federal and unitary states, clearly demonstrates that the system of governance, the administrative structure of the country and the set of corresponding rules and traditions of public administration have a direct impact on the pace and character of the e-government development. In this respect, despite the fact that both countries according to their national constitutions are presidential republics with a really crucial role of federal and central administrations in the overall direction of public sector reforms, the power relationships related to the implementation of the e-government-driven reforms in public administration in these two countries are extremely different from each other, demonstrating various political approaches and algorithms of decision-making and implementation policies in the area. In this regard, it is especially interesting to trace and understand the differences in the character and intensity of related power relationships and networking that are being created and established between central and local authorities in the area, the presence of which provides a strong empirical basis to support the theoretical argument on the existence of two completely different ecosystems of e-government in the world, i.e. e-Federalism and e-Centralism. In this respect, the case study of the United States and Kazakhstan has provided almost an ideal playground to test the assumption and understand the fundamental features of both federal and unitary models of e-government implementation policies that could presumably be extrapolated into wider global settings. Therefore, the e-government practitioners and theorists from both federal and unitary countries could find this perspective useful in understanding the multidimensional nature of the ICT-driven public sector reforms and use the proposed research framework in the future investigations of this truly ubiquitous multi-institutional phenomenon.
Kazakhstan might be regarded today as an example of promising opportunities that e-government technology could offer for the implementation of major ICT-driven public administration projects in a typical unitary state. Especially, it is true in highlighting the potential contribution of this innovation to enhance democratic governance and transform extremely bureaucratic and somewhat cumbersome public administration systems for which many post-Soviet countries in transition have been notoriously famous, including Kazakhstan. In this regard, the recent publication of various e-government rankings, e.g. rating lists of countries leading the global trend, initiated and conducted by international experts under the auspices of the United Nations or the World Economic Forum, demonstrated that this nation has really succeeded in transforming its public sector by resorting to the use of new information and communication technologies, regarding it as a project of national priority. In this respect, the main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the incentives that lie behind the mere desire for better public administration in Kazakhstan through e-government platforms, focusing, especially, on the study of open data and e-participation policies to locate current and prospective challenges in implementing civic engagement projects, provide some generalizations on prospects of using the innovation in the future and offer ways forward both for academics and practitioners. In general, this chapter presents the analysis of e-government development in Kazakhstan as a political and economic institution which reflects the unique features of the political system, and the administrative and territorial structure of the country. It is these specific features of the implementation in a typical unitary state such as Kazakhstan that allow to presume the existence of a unique unitary model in building the e-government concept which is markedly different from similar programs in federal countries.
This chapter analyzes the concept of e-government from the perspective of its benefits for consolidating the efforts of the international community around this truly global political idea which itself has already become part of globalization and has been increasingly regarded as an institution that affects even international affairs agendas in different parts of the planet. Analyzing the joint efforts of the international community in promoting the idea of e-government as a universal tool to promote new public administration and increase transparency in government over the past two decades, the author argues that the standardized mechanism of
its implementation is beginning to be considered now as a versatile tool that could be harnessed by virtually any nation to address common issues in a technologically innovative and more cost-efficient manner.
What is the minimum black population necessary to elect African-American state lawmakers? We offer the most comprehensive examination of the election of black state legislators in the post-Thornburg v. Gingles (1986) era. We begin by charting changes in the partisan affiliation of state legislators and the percentage of black legislators from 1971 to 2016. This descriptive assessment is undertaken according to important regional (Non-South and South) and subregional (Rim South and Deep South) contexts in American politics. We then perform multivariate analyses of the likelihood of electing black legislators across three periods following the marked increase in the creation of majority-minority districts (1993–1995, 2003–2005, 2013–2015). Because of sectional variation in the partisan strength of the major parties, the probability of achieving black representation is significantly different depending upon whether a contest occurs in the Non-South, Rim South, or Deep South, with the latter constituting of the highest threshold of black population necessary to elect an African-American. By merging an original dataset on state legislative elections with the most complete evaluation of the factors shaping the election of black lawmakers, our findings shed new light on minority representation and how sectional differences greatly affect the electoral success of African-Americans.
In the last decade, Ohio reformers advocated redistricting by formula: selecting the redistricting plan that scores best on a predefined objective scoring function that combines prima facie neutral criteria with political goals of plan fairness and district competition. In the post-2010 redistricting, these reformers hosted a public competition where prizes were awarded to the best legal plan scored on the reformers’ formula. The submitted plans provide a unique opportunity to evaluate how redistricting by formula may work in practice. Our analysis finds the public yields a broader range of redistricting plans, on indicia of legal and public policy interest, than developed by the state legislature. The Pareto frontier reveals plans that perform better than the legislature’s adopted plan on one and two dimensions, as well as the reformers’ overall scoring function. Our evaluation reveals minimal trade-offs among the components of the overall competition’s scoring criteria, but we caution that the scoring formula may be sensitive to implementation choices among its components. Compared with the legislature’s plan, the reform community can get more of the four criteria they value; importantly, without sacrificing the state’s only African American opportunity congressional district.
Gerrymandering requires illicit intent. We classify six proposed methods to infer the intent of a redistricting authority using a formal framework for causal inferences that encompasses the redistricting process from the release of census data to the adoption of a final plan. We argue all proposed techniques to detect gerrymandering can be classified within this formal framework. Courts have, at one time or another, weighed evidence using one or more of these methods to assess racial or partisan gerrymandering claims. We describe the assumptions underlying each method, raising some heretofore unarticulated critiques revealed by laying bare their assumptions. We then review how these methods were employed in the 2014 Florida district court ruling that the state legislature violated a state constitutional prohibition on partisan gerrymandering, and propose standards that advocacy groups and courts can impose upon redistricting authorities to ensure they are held accountable if they adopt a partisan gerrymander.
States have increasingly taken the process of redistricting out of the hands of elected legislators and placed it with the public. The shift is in part driven by a concern that legislators are motivated to partition districts to advantage their own and their political party’s electoral prospects, whereas citizens are not. We know little, however, about the preferences of the public when it comes to redistricting. One party-based argument is that individuals should prefer to share a district with as many like-minded partisans as possible to maximize their legislative representation, whereas other arguments suggest that nonpartisan factors, such as sharing a district with their community, may be more important. Using a novel experimental design, we find that for most participants, the draw to share a district with copartisans is stronger than a preference for preserving a community (county) within the district even when participants are specifically instructed to attend to local jurisdictional boundaries.
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