Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Gerrymandering'

This study examined possibilities of preforming gerrymandering within Swedish municipal elections before 2015, when new regulations contributing to guaranteeing a proportional seat allocation and thereby eliminating the risk of gerrymandering altogether were introduced. As the configuration of the districting problems in Swedish elections follows that of spatial unit allocation, these problems could be modelled as integer-programming problems including previously formulated constraints guaranteeing necessary geometrical and topological properties of districts as well as additional objectives and constraints promoting desired seat allocations. For several of the examined municipalities districts solutions with none-suspicious shapes and a more desirable seat allocation for the considered parties given voting outcomes from the 2014 elections were found. The implication of these results for Swedish municipal elections prior to 2015 as well as other elections using similar seat allocation procedures would however be highly dependent on the ability to make detailed and accurate predictions of voting outcomes prior to actual elections.

Elections are the engine that drives democracy. The central question of this dissertation relates to the speed of that engine: How long does it take for elections to reflect changing preferences in the electorate? The findings presented in this dissertation suggest that electoral change is the result of a gradual process of natural selection in which the political environment, rather than district service activity, is the key variable. Comparing elections data across different types of district environment, I find evidence that the environment affects levels of competition and electoral outcomes. Utilizing an event history statistical model to examine various risk factors for electoral defeat, I find that the political environment of the district is the most important factor influencing the risk of defeat even when controlling for district service behaviors. Over time, the district environment operates as a self-correcting mechanism, purging political misfits and replacing them with representatives who better reflect the ideology of the district. Electoral change typically results more from evolution than revolution – it may not occur quickly, and it may not occur in every district, but it does occur when and where it is needed.

This thesis analyzes the history behind reapportionment and how the task of redistricting has differed in the past decades. For the most part, there was always been a public outcry when the task was in the hands of the Legislature. Fear of political gerrymandering and the creation of safe districts was enough for people to pass a series of initiatives to try and correct the system. While many initiatives failed to pass, Proposition 11, passed in 2008, created the Citizen’s Redistricting Commission—a 14-member committee put in charge of drawing this years’ plans. This paper also looks at population trends in the past decade and takes into account the impact of the increase in Latinos in the state of California.

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This work is intended to contribute to the literature about effects of municipalities secession, evaluating its possible impacts over municipal legislature elections. The theoretical models suggest that secession can alter the electoral outcomes in the seceded municipalities, in the same manner as the “gerrymandering”. The empirical evidence found suggests the same.
O presente trabalho pretende contribuir com a literatura sobre os efeitos das divisões de municípios, avaliando possíveis impactos das mesmas sobre as eleições legislativas municipais. Os modelos teóricos informam que o desmembramento pode alterar os 'outcomes' eleitorais nos municípios desmembrados, operando de maneira semelhante ao 'gerrymandering'. As evidências empíricas encontradas sugerem o mesmo.

The master's thesis deals with local elections in the Czech Republic from the point of view of electoral engineering. Theoretical part of the thesis is focused on the elections, electoral systems and variables of electoral systems. The main variables are electoral district magnitude, electoral formula, legal threshold and the number and character of tier districting. The thesis then describes issue of gerrymandering and malapportionment from the theoretical perspective. The next part of the thesis deals with legislative framework of the local government elections from 1989 including rules and problematic characteristics of current electoral law for electing members of municipality. Empirical part of the thesis analyses local elections in the Czech Republic and results of the elections between 1994 and 2014. In the last chapter, division of the territory into electoral districts is assessed with an emphasis on principle of equal weight of votes and degree of proportionality. Comparison was carried out by using two indices of proportionality, Loosemore and Hanby index and D'Hondt index.

Le découpage électoral est marqué par le mythe du gerrymandering, ou du « charcutage électoral ». Gouvernements et majorités l’utiliseraient dans l’objectif d’établir une carte électorale favorable par la délimitation de circonscriptions visant produire des gains électoraux. Il serait un outil électoraliste utilisé à des fins partisanes. En France, cette perception prédomine notamment en raison du peu de travaux consacrés au découpage électoral qui est, pourtant, un objet important au sein de la littérature politiste internationale. La thèse propose une étude du découpage des circonscriptions législatives sous la Ve République selon deux axes. Le premier, relatif au processus, interroge le rôle et l’action du gouvernement. Grâce à une analyse pluridisciplinaire, il apparaît que le découpeur est soumis à de fortes contraintes, et que les députés y occupent un rôle majeur. Le second porte sur les conséquences des délimitations. Après l’élaboration d’une méthode permettant d’appréhender l’aspect politique des découpages, l’étude empirique – statistique et cartographique – établit que les circonscriptions sont découpées en fonction des députés – sortants –, avant d’être favorables aux partis politiques, ou à la majorité qui y procède. S’il apparaît également que les changements de délimitations ne produisent pas toujours les effets escomptés, ils disposent de conséquences structurelles qui se vérifient sur la compétition électorale. Sous la Ve République, les découpages électoraux peuvent être qualifiés d’interparlementaires et d’intrapartisans. In fine, ni le processus, ni les conséquences des découpages électoraux ne correspondent à sa représentation cognitive classique
The myth of the gerrymandering overshadows the redistricting. Governments allegedly use it to draw a favorable electoral map aiming electoral profits. Thus, it is supposed to be an electioneering mechanism used for partisan motives. In France, few studies have been devoted to redistricting which is also an important object within the international political scientist literature. The thesis puts forward a study of the legislative redistricting under the Fifth Republic following two axes. The first one, the analysis of the policy process, questions the role and the actions of the government. Through a multidisciplinary analysis, it appears that the government is strongly constrained and that MPs have a main function. The second one relates to the consequences of redistricting. After developing a method to understand the politics of limits, the empirical study – statistical and cartographic – shows that districts are made according to deputies – incumbents –, before favoring political parties, or the majority making the redistricting. It also appears that if the constituency boundaries are not decisive, they still have structural consequences on the electoral competition. Under the Fifth Republic, redistricting can be described as interparliamentary and intrapartisan. To sum up, neither the redistricting process nor its electoral consequences match the "classic" cognitive representation of the redistricting

My dissertation contains three chapters studying the strategic allocation of resources in political environments. Chapter 2 asks if redistricting is the result of partisan gerrymandering or apolitical considerations. I develop a statistical test for partisan gerrymandering and apply it to the U.S. Congressional districting plan chosen by the Republican legislature in Pennsylvania in 2001. First, I formally model the optimization problem faced by a strategic Republican redistricter and characterize the theoretically optimal solution. I then estimate the likelihood a district is represented by a Republican, conditional on district demographics. This estimate allows me to determine the value of the gerrymanderer's objective function under any districting plan. Next, I use a geographic representation of the state to randomly generate a sample of legally valid plans. Finally, I calculate the estimated value of a strategic Republican redistricter's objective function under each of the sample plans and under the actual plan chosen by Republicans. When controlling for incumbency the formal test shows that the Republicans' plan was a partisan gerrymander. In Chapter 3 I introduce a new and novel electoral reform that continues to allow redistricting but changes the incentives to do so. This reform ensures that parties earn seats proportional to their performance at the polls without substantially changing the electoral system in the U.S. In order to evaluate the reform's impacts, I model and solve a game that incorporates the redistricting decision, candidate choice, state legislative elections, and policy choice. Unsurprisingly, strategic redistricting biases policy in favor of the redistricting party. In the environments studied, the new reform never increases policy bias, and often reduces it. Political campaigns often require the strategic allocation of resources across multiple contests. In Chapter 4 I analyze these environments in terms of the canonical Colonel Blotto game, beginning with the most basic of Blotto games: Two officers simultaneously allocate their forces across two fields of battle. The larger force on each front wins that battle, and the payoff is the sum of the values of the battles won. I completely characterize the set of Nash equilibria to any such game and provide the unique equilibrium payoffs. This characterization comes from an intuitive graphical algorithm which I then apply to several generalizations of the game. I completely characterize the set of equilibria and provide the unique equilibrium payoffs to Blotto games with battlefield values that vary across players and games with general resource constraints. I also use my approach to solve the Blotto games on more than two battlefields with asymmetric battlefields and force endowments.
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abstract: Gerrymandering is a central problem for many representative democracies. Formally, gerrymandering is the manipulation of spatial boundaries to provide political advantage to a particular group (Warf, 2006). The term often refers to political district design, where the boundaries of political districts are “unnaturally” manipulated by redistricting officials to generate durable advantages for one group or party. Since free and fair elections are possibly the critical part of representative democracy, it is important for this cresting tide to have scientifically validated tools. This dissertation supports a current wave of reform by developing a general inferential technique to “localize” inferential bias measures, generating a new type of district-level score. The new method relies on the statistical intuition behind jackknife methods to construct relative local indicators. I find that existing statewide indicators of partisan bias can be localized using this technique, providing an estimate of how strongly a district impacts statewide partisan bias over an entire decade. When compared to measures of shape compactness (a common gerrymandering detection statistic), I find that weirdly-shaped districts have no consistent relationship with impact in many states during the 2000 and 2010 redistricting plan. To ensure that this work is valid, I examine existing seats-votes modeling strategies and develop a novel method for constructing seats-votes curves. I find that, while the empirical structure of electoral swing shows significant spatial dependence (even in the face of spatial heterogeneity), existing seats-votes specifications are more robust than anticipated to spatial dependence. Centrally, this dissertation contributes to the much larger social aim to resist electoral manipulation: that individuals & organizations suffer no undue burden on political access from partisan gerrymandering.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2017

This dissertation presents work on gerrymandering in American legislative districts and on school competition and school choice. The work on gerrymandering analyzes how to measure gerrymandering and investigates some of its causal effects. The analysis of how to measure gerrymandering is presented in Chapter 1 and in the first half of Chapter 2. The context is the following. Legislative maps are often evaluated along dimensions of proportionality (the alignment between parties' seat shares and their state- or nation-wide vote shares) and competitiveness (the fraction of contests with uncertain winners). Since a map is intended to be used for multiple elections, policy-makers want to accurately predict how it will perform on these dimensions in the future. Doing this is difficult because future elections will differ from past ones due to changes in the demographic composition of the electorate and as a result of electoral shocks to preferences and turnout costs. Citing this uncertainty, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that the judicial system is incapable of adjudicating claims of partisan gerrymandering. The first contribution of the dissertation is to develop a method for predicting the uncertainty in a map's performance due to electoral shocks and changes in demographics. The method relies on a structural voting model, which describes the preference and turnout decisions of a potential voter. The model decomposes an election into (i) a set of candidate qualities and (ii) individual-level utility parameters. I assess map performance in two steps. First, I examine the effect of electoral shocks by simulating alternative values of the candidate qualities and utility parameters. Second, I investigate the influence of demographic changes by re-running the simulations using different electorates. I apply the method to rich data from the 2008 to 2018 general elections in North Carolina and show that it allows credible and precise evaluations of maps. I also show that the method is better than existing approaches at predicting gerrymandering outcomes in excluded elections. The remainder of Chapter 2 concerns the causal effects of gerrymandering. Specifically, I examine whether the probability that someone turns out to vote is influenced by the competitiveness of his or her legislative districts. I do this by comparing outcomes over time for individuals in North Carolina who were placed into more or less competitive districts in 2011 as part of the decadal ``redistricting" process. I compare individuals who shared the same districts in each legislative chamber (U.S. House, NC Senate, NC House) before redistricting and who differed in districts for only one chamber after redistricting. Within these comparison groups, I match individuals on demographics and history of turnout and party registration. I find that being placed into a less competitive district reduces turnout. Effects grow over time and exist in both midterm and presidential elections. By 2018, having been placed in a district in which one party is always predicted to win versus one in which the parties have an even chance of winning reduces turnout by 1.9 percentage points for U.S. House districts and 1.4 percentage points for NC House and NC Senate districts. These results highlight the importance of considering district competitiveness when drawing legislative maps. Chapter 3 is work that is joint with Rajeev Dehejia, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Miguel Urquiola. It examines how schools' incentives are influenced by the way in which households make school choice decisions. A summary is as follows. Recent work examines whether households choose schools based on school value added (Abdulkadiroglu et al. 2020; Beuermann et al. 2019). Given that value added is difficult to observe, households' choices are likely to depend on both (i) how much they care about value added and (ii) how well informed they are about which schools have high or low value added. We examine this concern using administrative data, a survey, and an experiment in Romanian high school markets. Using the survey, we can explain households' preferences based on their beliefs about school traits, rather than on the values of these traits that are measured by researchers. In the administrative data, we find that households' choices are better explained by measured values of peer quality than by measured values of value added. By contrast, in the survey data, we find that households' beliefs about value added and peer quality have equal explanatory power for their choices. This motivates an experiment in which we provide households with information on school value added. We find that the information has a positive but heterogenous effect on the extent to which households prioritize value added in their school choices. Effects are largest for households who were initially less certain of their choices and for households with low-scoring students.

This diploma thesis opens a new deep insight into the issue of electoral systems in Czech and Central European political science. The mid-point of this research is the electoral bias in the electoral system to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. The electoral bias is researched on all general elections from 1996 until 2013. To find out the electoral bias I apply mathematical method created and used by professor Galina Borisyuk from University of Plymouth. This method is based on several mathematical methods used by the American and the British political scientists for decades. However, the new method created by Galina Borisyuk is the most convenient for many reasons. Mainly this method isn't necessarily connected with plurality majority system, which was essential variable so far. Second key attribute of this method is the possibility to apply it on the three party systems, which is important variable for our political system in the Czech Republic as well. In analytical part of this research I apply the new mathematical method in all elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. Ascertained results are analysed in the conclusion together that I have set the feasible ways to develop a new path the research of bias in the future.

gerrymandering é uma prática comum que prevalece na política. Surgiu nos Estados Unidos da América, mas está, atualmente, bastante difundida. A presente dissertação pretende clarificar se estratégias do tipo do gerrymandering são uma realidade em Portugal, dado estas ocorrerem com frequência aquando reformas territoriais. Refletindo no ano de 2013, realizou-se uma importante reorganização administrativa do território das freguesias (RAFT) em Portugal, que levou a alterações na composição das freguesias, o que, por sua vez, levou a alterações no número de eleitores por freguesia. Portanto, foi esta reforma realizada com o intuito de melhorar a eficiência, reduzindo os custos para o país e consequentemente para a União Europeia (UE), ou foi, na verdade, um esquema político ordenado antecipadamente para favorecer certo(s) partido(s). Terá o processo de reorganização territorial sido realizado com uma estratégia de gerrymandering? O distrito do Porto, os seus municípios e as respetivas freguesias foram escolhidos para analisar a existência de enviesamento político, de enviesamento partidário e de gerrymandering. Usando as eleições autárquicas de 2009, 2013 e 2017, e comparando-as através de uma análise de dados e de uma regressão linear, concluímos que o enviesamento partidário existe e é significativo no distrito do Porto. Podemos também afirmar que o gerrymandering ocorreu na sequência do aumento do enviesamento partidário no sentido do partido do governo, tendo este sido beneficiado nas eleições autárquicas de um terço dos municípios pertencentes ao distrito do Porto, em consequência da aplicação da RAFT em 2013.
Gerrymandering is a common practice that prevails in politics. Emerged in the United States of America, it is now widespread. The present dissertation intents to clarify whether gerrymandering alike strategies are a reality in Portugal as they are frequent when there is a territory reform. Reflecting at the year 2013, there was a major reorganization of the territory of the parishes in Portugal (RAFT) which led to changes in the parishes’ composition, which, in turn, let to changes in the number of voters per parish. So, was RAFT a way to improve efficiency, reducing costs for the country and therefore for the European Union (EU), or was it, in fact, just a preordain political scheme to favour some party(ies). Was the process of territorial reorganization carried out with a gerrymandering strategy? Porto’s district, its counties and respective parishes were chosen for the analysis of political bias, partisan bias and gerrymandering. Using the local elections of 2009, 2013 and 2017, and comparing them through a data analysis and a linear regression, we were able to conclude that partisan bias exists and is significant in Porto’s district. We can also say that gerrymandering occurred as a result of the increase in the partisan bias towards the government party, which benefited in the municipal elections of one third of the counties belonging to the district of Porto, as a result of the application of RAFT in 2013.

While drawing electoral districts and its special type called gerrymandering (redistricting with a certain purpose in mind) has been present in American politics since the founding of the United States, it has recently received a lot of attention and criticism. Gerrymandering has been accused of ruining electoral competition, contributing to the gridlock in Congress, and hampering the spirit of American democracy. Moreover, legislators responsible for redistricting are frowned upon for choosing their own voters and thus ruining the purpose of the electoral process. Redistricting currently follows certain principles, the most important of which and the only two recognized at the federal level are population equality and minority representation. These principles were designed to limit the redistricting bodies when drawing districts. State legislatures remain the most common redistricting institution. However, for the criticism that they face various redistricting commissions with different powers were established. The current trend in the redistricting reform is to delegate the redistricting power to independent commissions which can adopt a redistricting plan without the consent of a legislature and whose members have no connections to politics. Competition and partisanship are the two most discussed...