The boring redistricting thread

You know that recent discussion of how redistricting increases partisanship, and apparently political scientists can't find any evidence of that? Some more.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1154054

So when I copied and pasted the formula they use, that came out. Not sure what to make of it.

Here's the actual forumla:



They say themselves that gerrymandering's upper bound impact is 10-15%:

Which means it most certainly does have an impact on polarization but isn't the whole story.

Finally:

So obviously it matters unless you think an increase in polarization and an increase in Republican voting share are totally keen outcomes.

edit:

I think the blog post you linked sucks and misrepresents this paper.

Literally the only thing I got out of that post was NOM NOM NOM NOM. I think I need coffee.

My first instinct is to say that polarization leads to redistricting, not the other way around. Less polarization means less motivation to make "safe" seats.

Oh hey, I can download it for once.

1. If at least 85% of the increase in polarization is unrelated to polarization that doesn't match the way people talk about gerrymandering at all.
2. Did you read the conclusion? It helped the GOP for a while, it helped the Democrats for a while.

I hadn't heard this before:

1: Most people talking about most things are partly or completely wrong. Including me! Often mostly me! Such is life! But just so we're clear I've mentioned primaries on like a billion occasions as the most likely vector for polarization. Gerrymandering (in my mind) has other nasty effects but I'm not sure whether polarization is one of them. This paper obviously says no but one paper isn't everything.

2: I really don't care who it helped, but I'm guessing the party being helped is the one dominating state legislatures.

I'm not sure what to make of the life cycle of congressional polarization but I'm guessing it has a lot to do with the "don't fix what ain't broke" philosophy. If that's what wins elections, that's what they'll do. As soon as it doesn't (HEY SCOTT BROWN) they'll change tunes. Catastrophic rather than gradual evolution as it were.

fwiw I'm of the opinion that high levels of polarization are the norm in a democracy, and the relatively low-polarization postwar era was a historical aberration. Under this model you don't even need to consider redistricting; it's just a sideshow.

I'm having fun engaging in discussion on the blog under the nom de plume of "likmai ballsplz." That anyone responds politely to an account with that name blows my mind.

jeffd I don't necessarily agree. I'd personally guess that polarization is largely the result of an inability to grab power through elections. I think the primary system allows a small number of partisans to enforce ideological purity (increasing the volume of polarization), that redistricting allows both parties to develop firewalls between them and angry voters who want change and action (reducing the likelihood of reversion to mean), and mass media gives a small number of telegenic (and well connected) partisans the ability to appear far more mainstream by eliminating the vast majority of opposing voices (someone like Palin or Ryan can only get away with spouting bullshit in situations where they can't be shouted down by more moderate voices like, say, a cable news network).

I think in countries where power regularly changes hands and both sides are able to enact their platform regularly polarization declines even if there are other negative factors.

I think another source of polarization is poor economic performance over a long period of time. It reduces budgetary "space" for back scratching and makes everyone feel poor, grumpy and put upon. Which ought to lead to a hardening of ideological positions. Better monetary policy and more focus on improving outcomes might mitigate that aspect.

Hrm, I think there might be two definitions of polarization we're working with. I was talking about the tendency for the two parties to become more ideologically well sorted. It's a phenomenon you witness pretty much everywhere else. I do think that stuff you describe contributes to the degree of polarization, viz, how far apart the poles are.

You said:

They said:

These are not the same thing. These are not kind of the same thing. In fact, they are complete opposites. An accurate summation would be:

"Redistricting *does* increase partisanship, and political scientists have quantified the upper boundary of that effect. It only affects up to 10-15% of the effect, so additional other forces must be at work."

However, if you accurately summarized their findings, most people would shrug their shouders and say "Yeah, that doesn't surprise me." Instead, you go with an inaccurate, sloppy, and sensationalist summary that gets people talking. You were born to be a journalist, Jason.

I think you confused this with a thread of professional journalists. Here on the internet we try to summarize the gist of things.

The complaint is that you've erroneously summarized the underlying data.

SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!

You're still not understanding me. You didn't summarize the gist. What you said was dead wrong. You oversimplified it to the point where the study authors themselves would probably scratch their heads and ask "What is he talking about?" If you had wanted to summarize the gist, you would have gone with something like my summary, which isn't any longer. I do admit that my summary isn't as punchy as yours.

Anyways, sorry to derail the thread with this. It's just a trend I've noticed over the years. But you either don't see it or are unwilling to admit it. Either way... *shrug*. It works to get people talking, so it does have its beneficial effects.

E.g., the vast bulk of it comes from other sources near as they can tell, and the evidence they find doesn't seem to be related to redistricting, so how would it even work then? Similarly, see the other mentions they have of research; there's some small effects here and there in some papers, but none of them come close to even calling it a major contributor, and some of them don't even call it a minor contributor.

Gerrymandering doesn't disadvantage the democrats - the concept of districting itself does, because Democrats are packed into small urban areas.

This is getting old, Jason. From the very first fucking sentence in Nicholas Goedert's article:

Important word bolded.

Oh... hey. And the very next paragraph has this sentence already bolded in the original article:

Stop it, Jason. Just stop it. You're not stupid. You can read. Stop disregarding details in order to make your point more punchy.

I have no idea what you're talking about. The article title:

They work through the details and land on this:

If you just randomally pick sentences I guess you can make different arguments. The short version appears to be "some effect of gerrymandering, but a ton is baked into the cake regardless":

Every single one of those sentence is qualified to account for the fact that it's not gerrymanders alone but they are still important. So you can refute that one guy somewhere who said "the gerrymander is ALL that matters to ensuring Republican control of the House." Congrats.

It's not that these different studies aren't interesting, I just don't get where you found this axe or why you are grinding it.

Repiblicans gained benefits across the board from gerrymandering. How the is that selective quoting?

"Several states" where Democrats fall short by 7% is pretty different from how they are getting their asses handed to them in R. gerrymandered states, and without knowing more about what constitutes a "bipartisan or court-drawn" map it's hard to say how fair the process is or how the rules and historical precedents might, you know, favor white people, white people with money, and white old people. Because that's never happened.

And then they go on to explain how in some instances some heavily urban states seem to disadvantage Democrats more than they should if it were just redistricting. Etc. It's interesting stuff but your crusade is mystifying.

Also, I should say I don't particularly care about some abstract measure of overall "partisanship" that pretends we are on a level playing field between political extremes. I'm interested in how the Republican party can consistently put in office stupid, terrible people who say stupid, terrible things into office short of outright implosion on the national stage that draws funding from outside. I'm interested in how they can do that and maintain a majority. And gerrymandering is a clear and well-supported significant part of that process, as the studies you cite show.

Near as I can tell they gained benefits across the board this election cycle, because they happened to be in control of most of the state governments. It appears to work like this from the stuff in this thread:

Cross-party
1. The party controlling redistricting gets a small benefit from the practice. It doesn't appear to be consistently be either party though historically; this may be an artifact of the way the Democrats used to be the rural party, but aren't anymore. I haven't seen this specifically drilled down into.
2. The concept of districting itself inherently biases results against the party with more tightly packed population centers, for whatever reason. This is the new result in the last thing linked.

Inter-party
3. Gerrymandering contributes a small amount to polarization.

That's about it. My crusade here is that "fixing gerrymandering will only fix a small amount of the problem", so I don't see why it so overwhelming dominates the discussion of institutional biases against Democrats.

As to "why are Republicans so crazy?" that's sort of "why are Republican nominated officials so far against the edge, when they aren't for Democrats?" If I recall correctly the smoking gun there is that the average GOP primary voter is really conservative, while the average Democratic primary voter is a moderate. Here's a discussion of registered voters where you can see the gap; I think primary voters are more extreme, but can't find the data.

Ah, here we go. GOP, Democrats. Take Ohio, which is nearly dead even with the overall national partisan margin. Democrats are 14/27 very/somewhat liberal; Republicans are 30/35 very/somewhat conservative. It's basically impossible for moderates to win a GOP primary, but really easy in a Democratic primary.

Seems to me that the house electoral system has all the problems that every first past the post system has, in that the most efficient distribution of voters is just enough to beat the other guy by a handful of voters in every district. Any place you beat the other guy by more than a handful you have wasted voters that could have been used in other districts.

To sort it out you need proportional representation across the entire electorate but that will never happen because the current system suits the majority of individuals elected much better (representatives in 'safe seats' will like the current system where they don't have to work for re-election and the party benefiting overall from the system will likely be in power more often than not and therefore also have a majority against) even though it screws the voters and creates undemocratic outcomes. The situation gets even worse if you throw third parties into the mix.

We have the exact same problem in the UK but even minor reform to the mess was defeated thanks to a coalition between the two main parties against it and the championing of it only by the leader of a third party who had, just prior to the referendum, made himself into national joke. Basically what I am saying is that this situation will always be undemocratic but it will never change, so get used to it.

See? Was that so hard? When you work at it, even you can understand nuance & detail, as demonstrated in the quoted bit.

Well done.

Perhaps now you have some inkling as to what I'm talking about. And if not... *shrug*. I'm not going to belabor the point. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force it to drink.

Edit - And for those who wanted a truly boring thread, I apologize in advance, and promise not to criticize Jason anymore. I thought that if I pointed out how he systematically ignored details & misrepresented studies, I would get through to him, and a poster who posts tons of interesting links would stop being disingenuous. I was wrong. But I'll go back to ignoring him, and he'll go back to lying, and everything will be as it was: lots of interesting links, and incorrect summaries of those links.

Thanks for looking out for us Mark!

Some analytics on the history of the House seat margin vs. the popular vote margin.



Then:

From the comments:

Hopefully I didn't subtly misstate something!

No, but you did just quote a study from 1972. PoliSci isn't my discipline, but I'd guess substantially more recent and more mathematically awesome studies are available. Maybe not. PoliSci is, after all, the science of girlymen. Either way I'd be hesitant to make a definitive statement using something from the (functionally) pre-computer era.

I'd also point out again that no one really disagrees with the concept of a cocktail of fuckwaddery affecting electoral totals. The disagreement is whether or not we can remove gerrymandering as a potential ingredient. You just quoted a thing that says we can't. It also says that we can't know for sure how much weight to assign gerrymandering relative to those other factors. It could very well be the smallest part in a pie that includes primary voting as the dominant element. Or it could be dildoes all the way down. Fuck if I know.

Finally, come on bro rehost that shit to imgur. Nobody likes getting vampired.

So, I dunno if this already featured upthread but the specific seats/votes disparity for Pennsylvania was beyond hilarious.

I mean the Prussian three-class voting system ain't got nothin' on that.

The PA result is amazingly fucked up. PA has very low amounts of swing voters, and the Democratic voters are very tightly packed, so I wonder if it's more evidence for the "tight geographical distribution leads to bad results in district-based systems".

Illinois was apparently the big redistricting win for Democrat this time, at +16% Obama with a 12-6 Democratic margin in House seats.

I don't know what the deal is with political science, but every time I read a linked paper in the subject it's amazingly old. Maybe there just aren't many researchers.

Myself I'm curious how much of American stupidity is institutional accidents - does our voting system really favor conservatives, like you occasionally see in analysis like this? - or does "I'm going to vote myself poorer to stick it to black people" dominate?

I think you underestimate the average voter. They might not have a firm grasp of the nuances of every issue, but they absolutely are rational*, utility maximizing** individuals.

All of which is a gassy way of saying I don't think anyone much votes for repression of an outside group so much as they vote for an improvement in their economic standing relative to that group. I also don't assign much weight to the stupid argument. I think it's intellectually lazy to assume that a group holds a different set of values due to their idiocy.

*Rational of course means that the average voter would not accept two pennies for a dollar. They might conclude crappy stuff, but we've seen time and again that that has way more to do with the superficial or biased education they receive about political topics than some inherent failing in their wiring. It's difficult to make the right decision when you're surrounded by bullshit, but given that bullshit you'll come to the best decision you can.

** We all want the best education possible for our society, but some think that the existing system is fiendishly corrupt and can only be saved through radical change while others prefer the existing system for fear something worse is in store. Neither side is actively malicious, they merely differ in opinion about which is the worst form of management for natural monopolies.

Maybe you can clue me in to the non-stupid reason people voted for Wallace, then.

If racism is equal to stupidity, then neither is a very useful category.

Well pick your own noun then, but I wouldn't call the 1940-1990 race-driven upheavel in voting patterns "smart." It's only "rational" if you admit "really don't like black people, don't get anything but racial pride for it" as a weighting factor; if that's the case, how the hell are you stuffing that into your utility maximization model? What's the units?

I am really not a fan of reducing everything to utility maximization.

2/100, no, but research shows incredible "non-rational" risk aversion in people's decision making in experiments.

I agree with you that economic analysis premised around rational actor abstractions is a dead end. I just also think that "stupid" is overused as a catch-all for opinions people don't agree with. If you are racist, it's not crazy or stupid to vote for a person that promotes aspects of racism. Racism in particular tends to absorb other issues into it, and at the end of the story it's really hard to tell what was the priority.

Rather than taking something out of its time and assessing it according it to contemporary values and norms (like Wallace), you might look at something more like the Tea Party today. What I think someone like Aeon is getting at in a roundabout way is similar to what Chomsky said on the topic. Namely, writing them off by possibly external symptoms of crazy or stupid risks ignoring underlying real issues that could have broad traction in other contexts. It's tough because there is value in calling things out by what they are connected in terms of setting boundaries for discourse and actually winning arguments, but you have to be able to shift to that more generous brand of analysis to look at them in an academicized manner.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Race is a logical thing to give a shit about if you view it as surrendering in group power/economic advantage to the out group. Obviously it makes society as a whole richer and more productive but from the point of view of the winners under the current system there's every reason to do whatever it takes to maintain their entrenched advantages and not create a new group of potential hostile competitors. Especially when those racially outcast groups make for easily exploited low wage labor.

Just look at the gradual disintegration of 1940-1990 power structures in the new less openly racist era, or the more modern phenomenon of the right-less Laspanic migrant worker. How else can you explain widespread racial denigration for groups that are a cornerstone of low wage labor everywhere? You could view it as cultural friction, or you could view it as a convenient tool for depressing the net outlay on workers whose creativity, hard work and determination would otherwise command a more princely sum.

Am I being reductive? Sure, I'll cop to that. But in a society that out and out worships the almighty dollar it seems silly to resist looking for economic explanations of social phenomena when they're readily available and have at least some explanatory power.

The problem I have with that in this specific instance is that that poor and middle class whites just didn't benefit economically from the US implementation of apartheid. You have to come up with a "well, they had someone to shit on and that has emotional value" power structure thing, which is not economic.

The low-wage labor surplus went to the plantation owners and related owners and urban middle class consumers outside of the south who got cheaper products.

Yeah, uhh, seriously Aeon. The idea that the average American is a robotic utility maximizer - especially when it comes to politics - is pretty zany. Utility maximization is a useful assumption when constructing models, but it's simply not born out by any kind of empirical evidence.

When I say rational, I mean rational within the bounds of the available information. If that information is false, misconstrued or incomplete then the actor will make a rational decision that appears rational to them even if the rest of society outside of that bubble of horror views it as wildly irrational.

The apartheid era Southern US wasn't exactly top of the list on ensuring free and unfettered access to information, even in that benighted era. Nor was there much incentive to fight against an economic and political elite that controlled the livelihoods and social standing of large swathes of the population. Fight and lose and you end up a broke, well, use your imagination.

Could people have done so? Sure. But why would they when the most respected figures of their communities predicted dire economic and cultural consequences for eliminating the system? Given the toxic environment, was there really a better option than aping the opinions of the upper crust? Is it idiotic to believe something that all the leaders of society believe, that all the papers repeat and that your peer group all seems to believe? Of course not. Not unless you have evidence to the contrary. We can therefore conclude that for a lower class southern white it would be rational to believe that eliminating apartheid would be bad for them personally and for their society as a whole.

And then there's the other big concern, one that you should be familiar with: distributional impact. The removal of apartheid resulted in an aggregate increase in incomes, but an aggregate increase doesn't preclude the existence of relative losers. If you can't accurately assess whether you'll be one of those losers, how badly would you want to risk a change to a life that (in an information restricted environment) seems perfectly agreeable? Would you personally be willing to accept a more inclusive society if it meant your income falling to the federal poverty level? Sure, you might say that in an argument, but we've seen time and again that people will do all sorts of horrible things to maintain their standard of living.

Like, for instance, maintain a system that exploits the poor, minorities, the ill educated and pretty much everyone else!

I am not going to spot you US working class southerners getting "bad information" about the economic impact of slavery and making wrong decisions for 100+ years. The northern working class didn't go for the anti-union line their elites were selling them; what's the difference?

I'd also note that the bulk of Southern rhetoric about slavery, and then later apartheid, was not about the economics. It was about how blacks were sub-human monsters who would rape all the white women and destroy society given half the chance.

I mean one could spot him that with a sufficiently broad definition of both "bad information" and "rationality" such that encompassed things like visceral dislike of "inferior races," bound up with basic emotions and concepts of identity - I just don't think it's a useful exercise.

You can always add a few more epicycles on to make "rational actor" mechanics work, but you can probably tell by my choice of analogies that I don't find it compelling.

Well, I'd argue that a defense of an economic system that relies on cultural stereotypes rather than cold hard numbers is one in which sleight of hand is being practiced to defend the indefensible.

The problem is we're arguing about an era that I honestly don't know much about beyond what I've read in Flannery O'Conner. So that's a substantial handicap to interesting debate on my part.