March 8, 2006
Gerrymandering
Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the gerrymander.
Gerrymandering is universally unpopular with voters and popular with politicians. And Stuart Taylor puts the case against gerrymandering quite well:
"The one-person, one-vote decisions of the early 1960s have had the unintended consequence of enabling politicians to choose their voters rather than the other way around".I don't know which is worse, when one party gerrymanders at the expense of the other, or when incumbents of both parties combine to gerrymander at the expense of challengers of the other party.
One of the complaints is that as we have more and more safe districts, we have highly polarized politics. But what about the other extreme? If we drew districts to maximize competitiveness, would we be happy if a party that had 48% of the electorate managed to win 100% of the seats -- which might happen in a smaller state with every district highly competitive. Would politics become focused even more on appearance, on sound bit, on the immediate tactical advantage on election day to the exclusion of good governance? So is the choice between polarized politics or representation that isn't representative?
The other alternative is to take gerrymandering to the other limit, so that districts would be all equally safe which would mean that the representation in the legislature would most closely reflect the party makeup of the electorate. That would achieve the global result of accurate representation of the electorate, but people would feel even less connected to the political process. Heck, we could avoid all the expense and controversy associated with general elections and just hold primaries.
And if you think that most people vote for the person and not the party (you of course never do that, free thinker that you are), then gerrymandering wouldn't work. What makes gerrymandering break down isn't our rugged individualism, but that over time we move around and thus change the relationship between party and location, and that there are slow shifts in the electorate between the parties.
I don't buy the theory that safer districts have led to more political strife. I think what we are seeing is a return to normal (although unpleasant) levels of political strife and incivility that after an abnormal period of consensus that was due to the experiences and outlook of my fathers generation - the one's who grew up during the depression, fought WWII, and came home with the ability and desire to get along to get things done -- and this change happens to correlate with more effective gerrymandering.
We could just select districts based on compactness and carve them up by computer without regard to their competitiveness, but then who knows what you'll get -- which is why politicians will never agree to such an approach. Would we be happy if such a scheme meant the dilution of minority votes, or inadvertantly made uncompetative districts that didn't represent the relative strengths of the parties? Would we then have to step in with some sort of neutral commision to adjust the boundaries so that the districts conformed to notions of fairness, as if that isn't a political judgement in itself?
Is there even a good answer on how to draw legislative districts in a two party system?
And don't even get me started on the problems with one man, one vote.
