Electoral Maldistricting

The Economics of Partisan Gerrymandering

“…Creating uncompetitive districts is usually viewed as a socially undesirable feature of a districting plan, but see Buchler (2005) and Brunell (2008) for opposing views. Finally, lower within-district polarization under POP may be socially desirable if voters benefit from being ideologically close to their representative, as in Besley and Preston (2007) and Gomberg, Pancs, and Sharma (2023). These and other implications of optimal districting for political processes and outcomes could be studied more fully in a model that endogenized additional aspects of political competition beyond districting.…”

“…The broader literature on gerrymandering and redistricting addresses a wide range of issues, including geographic constraints on gerrymandering (Sherstyuk, 1998;Shotts, 2001;Puppe and Tasnádi, 2009), gerrymandering with heterogeneous voter turnout (Bouton, Genicot, Castanheira, and Stashko, 2023), socially optimal districting (Gilligan and Matsusaka, 2006;Coate and Knight, 2007;Bracco, 2013), measuring district compactness (Chambers and Miller, 2010;Fryer and Holden, 2011;Ely, 2022), the interaction of redistricting and policy choices (Shotts, 2002;Besley and Preston, 2007), measuring gerrymandering (Grofman and King, 2007;McGhee, 2014;Stephanopoulos and McGhee, 2015;Duchin, 2018;Gomberg, Pancs, and Sharma, 2023), and assessing the consequences of redistricting (among many: Gelman and King, 1994b;McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal, 2009;Hayes and McKee, 2009;Jeong and Shenoy, 2022). As the partisan gerrymandering problem interacts with many of these issues, our analysis may facilitate future research in these areas.…”

“…This observation also implies that models with only two types of voters or precincts (e.g.,Owen and Grofman 1988) cannot closely approximate the problem facing actual gerrymanderers, who must decide how to allocate many different types of precincts. 6 Contemporaneous papers byLagarde and Tomala (2021) andGomberg, Pancs, and Sharma (2023) also emphasize connections between gerrymandering and information design, albeit in less general models. Lagarde and Tomala assume two voter types, as inOwen and Grofman (1988); Gomberg, Pancs, and Sharma assume no aggregate uncertainty.…”