Matthew Yglesias quotes Richard Cohen presenting a common misconception:
Reality is real. No amount of lofty rhetoric is going to change the way members of Congress are elected. Most of them come from exquisitely gerrymandered districts created by computers that could, if good taste allowed, part the marital bed, separating husband from wife if they were of different political parties. This system created districts that are frequently reliably liberal or conservative. The computer has deleted the middle.
I can’t disagree with Cohen’s first sentence above, but I part company with him after that. When Gary and I looked at the data, we found that redistricting (“gerrymandering”) was not associated with a decline in competitiveness of elections in Congress or state legislatures. Legislative elections have been gradually becoming less competitive, but they are typically more competitive after redistricting.
I’m not saying that “gerrymandering” is a good thing—I’d prefer bipartisan redistricting or some sort of impartial system—but the data do not support the idea that redistricting is some sort of incumbent protection plan or exacerbator of partisan division.
In addition, political scientists have frequently noted that Democrats and Republicans have become increasingly polarized in the Senate as well as in the House, even though Senate seats are not redistricted.
P.S. I’m not saying that gerrymandering is always benign; there are certainly some places where it has been used to make districts with unnecessarily high partisan concentrations. But, in aggregate, that’s not what has happened, at least according to our research. (Also, our above-cited research is over 15 years old, and it’s possible that things have changed since then, with the advent of computer-based redistricting. But I haven’t seen any evidence for such a claim. I’d certainly love to see someone replicate our 1991 and 1994 articles to include the data up to the present.)
P.P.S. Update with more recent research (by Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning) here.
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isn’t the purpose of gerrymandering to ensure that your party gets the most seats? This would involve taking your party supporters from districts with many supporters to those with fewer supporters, thereby ending up with your side winning more seats but by small (or smaller) margins in the new districts. Texas’ last redistricting and Tom Delay’s district are an example.
Basically every vote for your side needs to count. Large victories in single races are anathema for winning the most seats.
Further, another gerrymandering option is to add your side’s supporters into a somewhat vulnerable district currently controlled by the other side, which then leads to a narrow win for your side.
Taking things one more step down the causal chain, I analyzed the CA redistricting of 2001 (one of the outlier plans in terms of “gerrymandering”) and found that it had essentially no effect on the partisanship of CA state legislators. If you’re interested, the report can be accessed here http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=811 .
I’m in the process of analyzing the 2001 plan itself using JudgeIt–the results so far suggest it is indeed an incumbent-protection plan, though not always as much as some have suggested. I agree wholeheartedly that a replication of your earlier analysis would either confirm or put to rest the idea that computers have led to more gerrymandering than in the past. That idea floats around a lot.
BillC: Redistricting is complicated partly because it is decided by many people who have different personal and partisan goals. Also, plans are often litigated.
Eric: See my latest post for a link to more updated research on the topic.
I understand that, Andrew, but was saying that competitiveness of elections after gerrymandering is not the same thing as reliably partisan, so may not be a good way to evaluate the question. I would expect that partisan gerrymandering would lead to more competitive elections and a more reliably partisan representative body as a whole.
I disagree. My district in St. Louis is so reliably democratic, that it was given as an inheritance from William Clay to his son William Lacy Clay.
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