The boring redistricting thread

Plainly people are rational (and in a more arguable and asterisked way rational in the sense of results-maximizing, be it for self, in-group, whichever) a lot of the time. There's no question of rejecting the idea of rational decision-making and interest-weighing in politics. It's just the exceptions to that rule - people acting out on the basis of irrational considerations like identity feelings or personal or group honour, or moral sentiment - are better considered as genuine exceptions than as something that can be integrated into an (excessively) broad rationality model.

For that one need not even look to the historical record (although it'd certainly do the job) but merely one's own life experiences. Often, people are rational, often enough for it to be a basic framework for understanding behavior. Quite often, they aren't. Think of the most irrational things you and others have done - best understood as some sort of topsy-turvy "special rationality on the basis of unusual information," or just as irrationality, most easily understood on its own terms (sentiment, etc.)?

fwiw, the impression I get as a student regarding the whole rational utility maximizers thing is that humans simply aren't. We're comically irrational and we're constantly failing to maximize our utility.

Rational utility maximizing agents are a useful starting point for talking about microeconomic theories. Nothing more.

If you want to stick in "way people actually make decisions" in for "rational" I can buy that, but at that point you're using "well, people are insanely racist" as an assumption and then modelling the outcome. Surprise! They're racist.

Pretty much. "Rational" and "utility maximizing" are loaded terms that simply have no utility (trololololol) when discussing the voting behavior of a bunch of racists.

A really interesting look at partisanship. The partisan bias of a district has very, very little influence on how the members vote; it's almost entirely defined by party.



There's still the second-order effect of "ok, where does party ideology come from?" but the lack of correlation was surprising.

Who the fuck is the Republican that got elected in a district that went 92% Obama?

OK, I answered my own question. It was Michael Grimm in NY-11. Which was apparently just re-districted. It used to be the 13th, and it voted against Obama 49-51 in 2008.

I'm not sure if this is a critical flaw in the methodology, but I'm not sure that comparing across a redistricting cycle is legit.