Pruning Thorns from the Thicket: An Empirical Test of the Existence of Racial Gerrymandering

Engstrom, Richard L.; Wildgen, John K.

doi:10.2307/439420

Cited by 34 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…In our view, then, the appropriate way to test for gerrymandering (where the impact of a districting scheme or election rule can be projected, or judged in retrospect, with a high degree of certainty) is to look at a Monte Carlo simulation or some other technique for generating a random sample of all legally permissible redistricting plans, and then to use standard statistical tests to estimate whether the anticipated effects of the scheme under scrutiny could reasonably have been expected to have occurred,by chance alone. An earlier presentation of this view is Grofman (1982b); similar views have been set forth by Backstrom et al (1978), Engstrom and Wildgen (1977), and Gudgin and Taylor (1979).…”

Section: 5mentioning

confidence: 62%

Reformers, politicians, and the courts: a preliminary look at US redistricting in the 1980s

Grofman

1982

Political Geography Quarterly

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ABSTRACT. This paper reviews a variety of criteria which have been proposed for legislative and congressional redistricting in the US and discusses the political and legal factors which have shaped 1980s redistricting. Particular attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between incumbents (seeking re-election), party organizations (seeking aggregate partisan advantage), minority interests (seeking proportional minority representation or at least enhanced minority influence), liberal reformers (seeking to take the 'politics' out of the redistricting process), and courts (seeking largely to implement 'one person, one vote' guidelines by minimizing deviation from population equality across districts but also concerned with avoiding dilutions of minority voting strength). It calls attention to three phenomena which have made redistricting in the 1980s different from that of earlier decades: (1) the striking role of the Justice Department in using the pre-clearance provision of the Voting Rights Act to assure greater minority voting strength and to eliminate discriminatory use of multi-member districting schemes; (2) the increased political and legal sophistication of minority groups; and (3) the role of the computer in making available a plethora of districting plans, all of which satisfy court equipopulation guidelines but which differ dramatically from each other in their substantive implications for the representation of political, racial, linguistic, and socio-economic groupings, and in their implications for the likely political fate of incumbent politicians and their potential challengers.

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Section: 5mentioning

confidence: 62%

Reformers, politicians, and the courts: a preliminary look at US redistricting in the 1980s

Grofman

1982

Political Geography Quarterly

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“…Actual districting plans can then be compared with this probability distribution to determine how unlikely or contrived particular plans may be. This approach, which follows a line of work in geography and political science (see, e.g., Cirincione, Darling, & O'Rourke, in press;Engstrom & Wildgen, 1977;McDonald & Engstrom, 1990;Morrill, 1976;O'Loughlin, 1982), is applied here to city council wards in Buffalo, New York.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Spatial Population Distributions and Political Districting on Minority Representation

Rogerson

Yang

1999

Social Science Computer Review

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In this article, the authors explore the relationships between the geographical distribution of population, potential political redistricting schemes, and the resulting level of minority representation. The maximal fraction of districts that are minority districts is twice the fraction of minorities in the total population. The authors show how this maximum declines with increasing residential segregation. Finally, they provide some simulation results for both hypothetical cities and Buffalo council wards showing the degree of minority representation under random districting plans. This gives a baseline indicator of how population distribution is expected to influence representation and can then be compared with actual plans.

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“…Female representation is even more lopsided with little more than 5°7o of our representatives being women. There have been a number of explanations for this disparity including; voting biases (Eckstrand and Eckert, 1981), differing participation rates (Shingles, 1981), skewed nomination procedures (Rule, 1981), racial gerrymandering (Engstrom and Wildgen, 1977) and funding inequities (Wilhite and Theilmann, 1986). This study investigates the possibility that political parties discriminate among candidates by distributing campaign aid based on race and/or sex.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political parties, campaign contributions and discrimination

Wilhite

1988

Public Choice

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Pruning Thorns from the Thicket: An Empirical Test of the Existence of Racial Gerrymandering

Cited by 34 publications

References 13 publications

Reformers, politicians, and the courts: a preliminary look at US redistricting in the 1980s

Reformers, politicians, and the courts: a preliminary look at US redistricting in the 1980s

The Effects of Spatial Population Distributions and Political Districting on Minority Representation

Political parties, campaign contributions and discrimination

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