Regular readers of this blog know that I focus a lot on what I call the “information environment,” and its immense effect on our politics and government. I particularly worry about the increasingly fragmented nature of that environment, and the ability the Internet offers to occupy a “reality” of our individual choosing.
It isn’t only the proliferation of what we might call “alternative fact” sources, and the ease of accessing them. The so-called “legacy media” hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory. Respectable outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times have–for one reason or another (Jeff Bezos or ??) normalized the distinctly abnormal demented and deteriorating President. The recent rise of alternative sources like Substack has included some excellent truth-tellers, but most Americans lack the time, interest or background information needed to seek them out.
To call the present overall media environment unsatisfactory–to point out that the absence of truth-telling journalism endangers democratic decision-making–does not seem an overstatement.
The facts are simple. Hogan was a tabloid celebrity. Gawker published a tape of him having sex with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy. At the time, as Marshall wrote, “It was hard to take seriously that this was a righteous fight for the First Amendment…. publishing someone’s sex tape struck me as reckless, difficult to justify in journalistic terms and frankly hard to defend.”
Hogan got a $140 million judgement…. Without $140 million, Gawker couldn’t appeal. The company and its owner, Denton, were forced into bankruptcy. And that was the end of Gawker and its stable of sites. Some of those — Jezebel, Gizmodo, Deadspin, even the Gawker site proper (Gawker Inc. was the company that owned all these sites) have had post-bankruptcy zombie existences. But basically that was it.
That lawsuit was a critical event of our time, and Gawker’s destruction was a body blow to the First Amendment. Hogan’s lawyer, Charles Harder, wasn’t just any libel lawyer. He had whole new ways of going about it. After Harder’s victory for Hogan, his new approaches to attacking media companies were quickly folded into the Trump political movement, not just the strategies but Harder’s firm itself. You see them again and again in numerous Trump and MAGA world lawsuits.
It turned out that Hogan himself was the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel who funded the entire litigation. Hogan himself must have been a wealthy man but the bills of a major libel suit is a very iffy investment. Denton had suspected that someone was footing the bill behind the scenes — perhaps even Thiel. Money seemed like no object in how the lawsuit proceeded. Thiel took all those worries and risks away. Thiel held a grudge over Gawker’s past negative coverage of him and had been plotting its destruction behind the scenes. Thiel’s use of Hogan presaged the current world of billionaire lawsuits in which limitless money can overcome the weakness of meritless litigation. (See the recent Times story on how Elon Musk and MAGA attorneys general have brought Media Matters to its knees.) The rich have always put their wealth on the scales of justice. But Thiel’s actions opened new terrain, as did the explosion of billionaire wealth taking shape at the same time…
Gawker wasn’t damaged. It was destroyed. It ceased to exist. For what was essentially pocket change, Thiel got his revenge. In that one suit, you can see the evil vapors of Trumpism and its oligarchic billionaire milieu congealing into solid matter for everything that was to come. In so doing, Harder and Thiel radically raised the stakes for all journalism in the United States. The combination of billionaire money, novel legal theories, venue shopping and quirks of civil litigation at the state level (the fact that Gawker was prevented from appealing a judgement that never would have survived appeal) changed everything that goes through a publisher’s mind when they click the publish button.
It’s the new Golden Rule: he who has the gold, rules…and sets the narrative…
In February of this year, a new organization was formed to combat the anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge MAGA administration: Stand Up for Science.
The organization has three policy goals, the most important of which (in my view) is the first: ending censorship and political interference in the conduct of science. As the website reminds readers, science can only thrive when there is open inquiry and evidence-based decision-making. Stand Up for Science therefore demands an end to government censorship, including restrictions on the topics of scientific research that are eligible for federal funding, the restoration of public access to the scientific information that has been scrubbed from federal websites, and full public access to primary scientific sources.
In addition, Stand Up wants legal safeguards against political interference to preserve the integrity of federal research and communication and a commitment to freedom of scientific expression– protection of scientists’ rights to communicate their findings freely, without fear of retaliation or suppression.
The organization also wants to protect government funding for scientific research, and wants the government to continue prior efforts to ensure that citizens of all backgrounds have an equal opportunity to become scientists.
The site describes several activities that citizens can take to display support for unbiased, rigorous scientific research. Most do not require a science background–just a belief in the importance of intellectual honesty. But perhaps the most significant effort currently being launched is Stand Up’s demand that Congress impeach and remove RFK, Jr. for lying to Congress under oath and for failing to uphold the mission of the department under his charge.
You can read the organization’s entire letter to Congress on its website. A couple of paragraphs will convey the tenor:
Since being sworn in as HHS Secretary, Kennedy has falsely claimed that the Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes death, terminated $500 million in mRNA research contracts, canceled studies in vaccine hesitancy, dismissed all members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and dictated changes to vaccine recommendations and timelines without scientific evidence. The list below—which we update daily—outlines key evidence supporting our charges.
During his brief tenure, Kennedy has continued a years long disinformation campaign promoting pseudo-science that has resulted in preventable deaths, the disruption of the world’s preeminent biomedical research ecosystem, violation of medical data privacy statutes and regulations, billions of dollars in economic losses, removal of public data, ethical and research misconduct in the production of government reports, the adoption of public health policies and guidelines that are in direct opposition of scientific evidence, and the unlawful termination of thousands of dedicated public servants.
I spend a lot of time on this platform advocating resistance. I realize that it isn’t always easy to find opportunities to participate in that resistance, but supporting groups like Stand Up for Science by adding one’s name to their declaration is clearly one such opportunity.
It’s probably too much to hope that the invertebrate Republicans currently dominating Congress will actually act in the people’s interest and rid our government of this massively unfit and dangerous conspiracy theorist, but the louder the calls for his removal and the wider the promulgation of information about why he poses such a threat to the well-being of all Americans can only help Democrats dislodge those poor excuses for legislators during the midterm elections.
I know…”smart” isn’t a word that applies to today’s Republican Party, so “outsmarting” may be a misnomer. And while I don’t know the situation in Texas, there are reasons to think that efforts to further redistrict–further gerrymander–Indiana might well fall into the category of “be careful what you wish for.”
In Indiana’s last, highly partisan redistricting, it was notable that the GOP super-majority did not increase the number of presumably safe seats. In a conversation with a political science colleague, he explained that he saw that decision as a consequence of the fact that the pickings in rural Indiana are getting thin. Like many states, Indiana’s rural precincts are emptying out, so there just weren’t as many reliable Republican voters to constitute safe margins if additional districts were carved out.
The most important effect of gerrymandering, as I have frequently noted, is voter suppression. People in districts that are presumed safe for either party are less likely to vote. They are especially unlikely to cast a ballot if they favor the “loser” party, and more especially if the loser party fails to run a candidate. (There is actually data suggesting that, if turnout were more robust, many supposedly safe districts wouldn’t be safe.)
Trump’s approval ratings are abysmal–even his base of MAGA morons is showing signs of splintering. There is overwhelming data showing that, in midterms, when a President isn’t on the ballot, partisan True Believers are significantly less likely to vote. Even if Indiana simply keeps its current, extremely gerrymandered map, a decent turnout could deliver an unwelcome surprise to the Republican pooh-bas who think the state owes them their electoral positions.
The challenge to Hoosier Democrats is clear: boost turnout. Put every resource you can muster into GOTV–getting out the vote. That means running a candidate in every district, so that people have someone to vote for, and focusing messaging on the fact that a large number of so-called “safe” districts are only safe when Democrats and disaffected Republicans stay home.
There may not be a more accurate phrase coined to describe our current civil conflicts than “culture war.” Because at the base of what we are experiencing is a backlash to significant changes in the culture–the hysterical reaction of White “Christian” folks–mostly but not exclusively male–to the growing participation of women, non-Christians and non-Whites in American society.
There’s some interesting research that suggest that culture will inevitably triumph over reaction–that efforts to return society to previous cultural norms (MAGA’s basic thrust) do not succeed in the long run.
What brought that research to mind was my recent experience in the Emergency Room (number #3, don’t ask–but I’m fine). During that visit, every doctor I interacted with (and there were four of them) was a woman, and every nurse who came to drink my blood and/or take my vitals was a male.
Those doctors are highly unlikely to discard their professions for a “trad wife” existence.
It isn’t just women. Rates of intermarriage between people of different races and religions have soared. Same-sex marriage has largely been normalized. I think of a woman who approached me after I’d given a talk at her church on anti-Semitism; she explained she was concerned about its growth because she had Jewish grandchildren.
These days, lots of nice White Christian Americans have grandchildren who are Black or Brown, Jewish or Muslim. Significant numbers of American families are “mixed” in one way or another. Even in small towns, more traditional families have come to know and work with immigrants of varying backgrounds, and are angrily objecting to ICE kidnappings.
In short, American culture has changed, and most of those changes are both positive and irrevocable. We are now engaged in an effort to protect those changes–an effort which requires us to protect democracy and the American Idea that made them possible.
Long-time readers of this blog are probably weary of my frequent diatribes about gerrymandering, and my insistence that the practice–aptly described as allowing elected officials to choose their voters, rather than the other way around–is at the heart of our democratic dysfunctions. But given the blatant effort currently underway in Texas, I think it is appropriate to repeat my basic description of the process and its multiple effects–all of which undermine the very basis of a fair and democratic vote.
I’m sharing an academic article I published in 2016–written before the Supreme Court declared that gerrymandering was a “political question” beyond the Court’s ability to forbid. It’s long, so my apologies, but I think it “covers the waterfront,” as the saying goes…sorry for the academic prose, but I wanted to share an article firmly founded in the research rather than one of my frequent, opinionated “takes” on the subject.
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If there has been a constant theme running through 2016 political campaigns, it is that the “system” is rigged and democratic processes no longer work. To the extent that culprits responsible for this state of affairs are identified, political activists on the Left (most prominently Bernie Sanders) point to money and the outsized influence of the 1%, while those on the Right (most prominently Donald Trump) attack “political correctness,” immigrants and minorities. Among members of the general public, dissatisfaction with the country’s current direction is attributed to a wide number of additional grievances. One such grievance that has gained traction over the past several years is the perceived impact of state-level partisan redistricting, or gerrymandering, on both state and federal elections.
The public’s widespread belief that gerrymandering is largely responsible both for “gaming the system,” via the growth in the number of noncompetitive electoral districts and for current extremes of partisanship has revived efforts to reform the way in which states handle redistricting, and has reignited scholarly disputes over the degree to which the ills ascribed to partisan redistricting are accurate. At the same time, pending lawsuits challenging both redistricting practices and certain of those reforms will soon require the Supreme Court to revisit its redistricting jurisprudence.
Popular opinion would seem to weigh in on the side of those who argue that partisan redistricting has distorted the electoral process. (Li 2015, Hulse 2015, Draper 2012) Popular concern about the deleterious consequences of partisan redistricting is augmented by activism undertaken by think tanks and good government organizations, among them the Brennan Center, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause. Belief in the efficacy of partisan line-drawing is also exhibited by the political insiders who go to great lengths and significant expense to draw lines favorable to their electoral prospects. (Draper 2012)
It is thus timely to revisit not just the contending academic arguments about gerrymandering’s influence on political polarization and partisan outcomes generally, but also the existing constitutional jurisprudence and especially the issue whether political rather than racial gerrymandering is justiciable, and if so, the appropriate standard to be applied. Redistricting reforms in states like California, Arizona and Iowa have prompted efforts to revise redistricting processes in a number of other states, and cases pending before or on their way to the Supreme Court are poised to clarify the extent to which the Court will intervene in state redistricting decisions when partisan advantage, rather than race, is at issue. Finally, emerging analyses of the experiences of the states that have implemented reforms may provide evidence of the efficacy or lack thereof of redistricting reform, and confirm or fail to confirm the belief that such reforms can generate increased electoral competition, increase turnout, or decrease partisanship to any appreciable degree.
This article makes two arguments: first, that many of the data-driven conclusions of political scientists who dismiss the impact of gerrymandering —although accurate as far as they go—don’t go far enough; that is, they ignore the extent to which redistricting may be implicated in the phenomena to which they do attribute the growth in the number of noncompetitive districts; and 2) the existence of a widespread public conviction that gerrymandering is undermining democratic legitimacy by depriving voters of voice has political consequences that may be difficult if not impossible to measure, but should not for that reason be dismissed as inconsequential. (As the Supreme Court noted in Shaw v. Reno, reapportionment is one area in which appearances do matter.)
The Scholarship
There is a copious scholarly literature dealing with gerrymandering, the practice of partisan redistricting that takes its name from then-governor of Massachusetts Elbridge Gerry. Over the years, scholars have disagreed about the actual impact of such practices. One group of researchers has argued that, although redistricting may matter at the margins, it is only one cause among many for the lack of competitiveness that characterizes state-level elections and elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. One of the most frequently cited authorities for the proposition that redistricting is not the primary cause of non-competitiveness is a study by Abramowitz, Alexander and Gunning (2006). They tested three causal hypotheses: redistricting, partisan polarization and incumbency, and concluded that only the latter two were part of the “pattern of reinforcing advantages” that had led over the years to “extraordinarily uncompetitive” elections. They particularly noted the fundraising disparity between incumbents and challengers, although they did not consider the extent to which creation of safe seats via gerrymandering might contribute to that particular advantage of incumbency. Campbell and Jurek ( 2003) also attribute the decline of competition to the fundraising and other advantages enjoyed by incumbents.
Both political polarization and the lack of electoral competitiveness have been attributed to the growth of polarization between the states (Enten 2013), to geographical self-sorting (Wasserman 2014) and to single-member Congressional districts (Drutman 2016) rather than to gerrymandering.
A widely-cited article by McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal (2006) also dismissed the importance of gerrymandering to political polarization. (Finding “little evidence” for such a link, they did note that gerrymandering operates to increase Republican seat share in the House of Representatives, but concluded that this fact was not an important source of polarization.) However, their final paragraph is worth quoting, because it recognizes both the role of gerrymandering in reducing competition and the importance of public perceptions of legitimacy:
“Nothing we say should be interpreted as contentment with congressional districting as it is currently practiced. The protracted political and legal battles over the boundaries cannot help but diminish the legitimacy of American democracy. And redistricting does appear to have a negative value on electoral competition. There are many reasons to do something about gerrymandering. But reducing polarization is not one of them.”
Other researchers and political figures have connected gerrymandering to both non-competitiveness and polarization. Carson, Crespin, Finocchiaro and Rohde (2007) concluded that redistricting is one among other factors producing polarization in the House of Representatives; former Congressman Lee Hamilton (2000) has written that the way in which congressional districts are drawn contributes to the “overwhelming” advantages enjoyed by incumbents; and Sam Wang of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs has statistically calculated the number of voters effectively disenfranchised by gerrymanders (Wang 2013). In 2006, Thomas Mann implicated gerrymandering in the polarization of the House of Representatives, and in a book co-authored with Norman Orenstein (2008), Mann argued that the decline in electoral competition and the entrenchment of partisan behavior has diminished incentives for compromise and bipartisan behaviors.
Interestingly, one of the most complete reviews of recent scholarly literature on the effects of partisan redistricting appears in an amicus brief filed by Mann and Orenstein on behalf of Arizona’s independent commission in Harris v. Arizona Redistricting Commission. Mann and Orenstein are political scientists who have written extensively about redistricting, and about “packing” (creating districts with supermajorities of the opposing party) “cracking” (distributing members of the opposing party among several districts to ensure that they don’t have a majority in any of them) and “tacking” (expanding the boundaries of a district to include a desirable group from a neighboring district). They cite to studies tying redistricting to the advantages of incumbency (Hirsh 2003, Issacharoff and Nagler 2007, Kang 2006, Levitt 2011), and also note that the reliance by House candidates upon maps drawn by state-level politicians operates to reinforce partisan rigidity.
Mann and Orenstein also cite to a 2009 article by Oedel, Lynch, Mulholland and Edwards, in which the researchers investigated whether representatives from districts drawn by independent commissions become less partisan.
“Contrary to the initial expectations of the authors, the evidence reviewed here suggests that politically independent redistricting seems to reduce partisanship in the voting behavior of congressional delegations from affected states in statistically significant ways.
There is a copious literature examining numerous other aspects of redistricting: questions of compactness and respect for communities of interest, the legal requirements imposed by various states, the mechanics of line-drawing, and especially the ways in which the mandates of the Voting Rights Act, both before and after its partial evisceration by the Court in 2013, interact with redistricting. Those issues are important, but ultimately tangential to the questions of competition, partisanship and perceived legitimacy considered here.
Whatever the scholarly doubts about the effects of partisan redistricting, a number of states are engaging in efforts to address the perception that district boundaries drawn as a result of political bias allow officeholders to choose their voters rather than the other way around, thus diminishing the integrity of the democratic process. The major challenge reformers face is the absence of judicial agreement on a standard of measurement that can be applied by mapmakers and courts to determine whether a given district’s boundaries have been drawn so as to make them constitutionally improper.
The Jurisprudence
The question whether gerrymandering violates the Constitution did not arise until 1962, when the Supreme Court decided Baker v. Carr, often referred to as the “one person, one vote” decision. In Baker, Tennessee citizens eligible to vote brought suit to redress what they alleged was a deprivation of their federal constitutional rights. Under the terms of a 1901 statute, Tennessee had apportioned seats in the state’s General Assembly and had subsequently failed to reapportion them, despite substantial growth in and redistribution of the State’s population. The plaintiffs asserted that , as a result, they suffered a “debasement of their votes” and were denied the equal protection of the laws. Lower courts had dismissed the suit on the grounds that political reapportionment was not justiciable, but the Supreme Court reversed, holding that an apportionment case may be reviewed on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, so long as these grounds are independent from questions clearly assigned to political decision-makers.
Subsequently, the Court has heard cases involving both racial and partisan gerrymandering; however, only two of those cases—Davis v. Bandemer and Vieth v. Jubelirer—focused exclusively on the issue of partisan redistricting. (A third case, League of American Citizens v. Perry (LULAC), challenged the propriety of a mid-decade redistricting in Texas, the only purpose of which, plaintiffs alleged, was to expand partisan advantage.)
In Davis v. Bandemer, Plaintiffs alleged that Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature had gerrymandered state legislative districts after the 1980 census.
The Court narrowly held claims of partisan gerrymandering justiciable under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, but found that the mere fact of an adverse effect on proportional representation (the discrepancy between the percentage of votes garnered by a political party and the number of seats that party ultimately won) was not a sufficient standard to demonstrate both partisan purpose and effect.
The problem identified by the Court was the lack of a reliable standard for determining when a district had been intentionally gerrymandered for partisan advantage. Justice White led a plurality of the Court in holding that plaintiffs would be required to prove both discriminatory intent and discriminatory effect, and that “unconstitutional discrimination occurs only when an electoral system is arranged in a manner that will consistently degrade a voter’s or a group of voters influence on the political process as a whole” (at 132). The plurality’s standard thus required evidence of continued frustration of the will of the majority or continued frustration of the ability of an identifiable minority to influence the political process. The Bandemer challenge lost because only one election had been held since redistricting.
As one legal scholar noted,
“In terms of a legal standard, requiring litigants to suffer a continued burden makes sense, as a single election cycle has too many variables to definitively show that gerrymandering caused the election outcome. Conversely, if there has been a constitutional violation, requiring litigants to continue to suffer the violation seems like a perverse result.” (Butera 2015)
The standard applied by the plurality in Bandemer did not survive the Court’s analysis in Vieth v. Jubelirer. In that case, Democratic voters challenged the legislative districts drawn by Republicans in Pennsylvania followingthe 2000 census. There was agreement that Justice White’s standard was unworkable, but there the agreement ended. The four conservative judges argued that redistricting is a political question, and should not have been held to be justiciable; the four liberals argued that the Equal Protection Clause should apply; and Justice Kennedy disagreed with both positions. Kennedy rejected the Plaintiffs’ gerrymandering claim, but also rejected the argument that the issue was non-justiciable. The problem, for Kennedy, was the inability of litigants or members of the Court to devise a workable standard for determining whether a gerrymander had occurred. (Interestingly, the four Justices who believed the issue to be justiciable proposed three separate standards, none of which has been adopted.)
Even in LULAC, where the highly irregular mid-decade redistricting would seem to be convincing evidence of a partisan motive, Kennedy found legitimate legislative objectives sufficient to uphold the validity of the new districts.
In the wake of LULAC, a number of social scientists and lawyers have tried their hand at devising a standard that the court—and especially Justice Kennedy—will see as workable. Two cases, the Arizona case previously discussed and another from Maryland, may offer the Court opportunities to consider two very promising efforts to fashion such a standard.
In “Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap,” Stephanopolous and McGee (2014) proposed a standard incorporating the concept of “wasted votes.” As Stephanopolous has described this standard, the efficiency gap is the difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. “Wasted” votes are ballots that don’t contribute to victory for candidates; they may be lost votes cast for candidates who are defeated, or surplus votes cast for winning candidates in excess of what they needed to win. When a party gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing what Stephanopolous and McGhee call an efficiency gap. In a state with perfect partisan symmetry and no gerrymandering, both parties would have the same number of wasted votes. As a matter of simple arithmetic, the efficiency gap is equal to a party’s undeserved seat share.
In their paper, Stephanopolous and McGhee go through several calculations based upon recent elections to demonstrate the relative simplicity and reliability of the efficiency gap.
Another proposed standard has been offered by Samuel Wang, in a paper for Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Affairs (2015). Wang observes that identification of partisan asymmetry requires examining all of the districts in a state, and says “this is a job for statistics.” In a New York Times op-ed explaining the approach developed in his paper (2016), Wang writes:
“An easy test is available that directly measures overall bias: the difference between the average and the median. This century-old statistic uses math that is in the Common Core standards for sixth grade. It also won this year’s competition for a gerrymandering standard sponsored by the nonpartisan organization Common Cause.”
The average-median difference is simple enough that a busy judge can calculate it in the margin of a brief. Here’s how it works. First, calculate the targeted party’s median vote share, which is defined as the middle district on a list that is sorted in order of increasing party vote share. If the targeted voters have been packed into a few districts , they are counted in the average but have little effect on the median. Thus, perhaps counter-intuitively, it is possible for more than half the districts to have a below-average number of partisan supporters.
Wang applied his standard to the Arizona district that is at issue in the case pending before the Supreme Court and concluded that the median Democratic vote share was less than the average by 3.3 percentage points, “a direction that slightly benefitted the Republicans….If the Commission was trying to show special favor to Democrats, it did a poor job.” (In that case, Republicans are claiming that one of the districts drawn by Arizona’s nonpartisan commission intentionally and unconstitutionally favored the Democrats. The Commission attributed the population discrepancy to requirements of the Voting Rights Act, and defended its magnitude as falling within allowable bounds, a defense with which Wang agreed.) In Wang’s paper, he supplements this first statistical test with two others, and demonstrates that the tests can be used singly or in tandem, to determine the statistical likelihood of a particular outcome, that is, whether the outcome falls within or outside of what Wang calls “the zone of chance.”
The Arizona challenge is to the state’s use of an independent commission, and is unlikely to involve a direct consideration of potential standards. However, a case working its way to the Court from Maryland may offer an opportunity to directly evaluate the utility of various proposed standards. Shapiro v. McManus challenged Democratic redistricting in that state. The District Court dismissed the challenge as insubstantial without convening a three-judge panel, despite the fact that the rules call for such a panel unless the case is “obviously frivolous.” The Supreme Court reversed, finding that a three-judge panel should have heard the arguments. That ruling was procedural, and did not address the merits, but Court observers are cautiously optimistic about the case’s potential to resolve the standards issue, because rulings by three-judge panels go straight to the Supreme Court, bypassing the usual appeals process. The Maryland case could thus give the Court its first opportunity in nearly a decade to revisit the issue of partisan gerrymandering.
Another case, from Wisconsin, is also in the pipeline, albeit further from Supreme Court consideration; in Whitford v. Nichol, Democrats are challenging a 2012 redistricting plan that they allege is the product of extreme gerrymandering, and they are relying upon the efficiency gap test to demonstrate the accuracy of that allegation. The District Court declined to dismiss the claims, despite noting that plaintiffs will face significant challenges proving their case.
Reforms and Consequences
Over the past several years, a number of organizations and citizen groups have worked toward redistricting reform. In addition to the Brennan Center, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, mentioned earlier, organizations like Fair Vote, End Gerrymandering, Ballotpedia, Redistricting Online, the National Council of State Legislatures, and the Public Mapping Project all maintain active and informative websites devoted to providing information and assistance to grassroots reform efforts.
Complicating these efforts is the fact that state redistricting procedures vary widely. Even the six states with independent commissions have varying membership requirements and procedural rules governing the establishment of boundaries for both state legislative and congressional districts. Although a number of other states have advisory commissions with varying degrees of input in the process, the six states that have thus far committed the redistricting process to independent commissions are Alaska, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana and Washington.
Despite the continued insistence of many social scientists that gerrymandering is not a significant causal factor in non-competitive districts or political polarization, the early results of redistricting reforms have been salutary. This article has previously cited Oedel, Lynch, Mulholland and Edwards, who were surprised to find that redistricting reform moderated the partisanship of Representatives. Stephanopoulos has found that the use of neutral institutions such as commissions produces fairer and more competitive elections. (DATE) In a 2008 study, Mark Dunkelman calculated that truly competitive House districts could generate up to eleven million additional votes, and that those votes would come disproportionately from states with particularly egregious gerrymandering practices. There is also emerging research supporting the proposition that redistricting reforms reduce the incidence of uncontested elections and increase the likelihood of a quality challenger entering the race (Cottrill 2012). At Lead or Leave, an Indiana Foundation formed to advance redistricting reform, Iowa is held up as a success story; in the wake of its redistricting reforms, elections in that state have more closely reflected the actual partisan preferences of Iowa voters (Zellner and Nierzwicki, 2014).
Conclusion
The scholarship may be contested, but if the numerous citizen organizations, editorials and letters to the editor are to be believed, the public is convinced that partisan redistricting is a major contributor to democratic dysfunction. It is difficult to quantify the extent to which perceptions of gerrymandering contribute to voter cynicism and apathy, but that difficulty does not justify dismissing the importance of those perceptions to political legitimacy.
In a 2012 paper delivered to the Western Political Science Association, James Cottrill made an important and frequently overlooked point: there are consequences of redistricting reforms that scholars have overlooked, because they are difficult or impossible to measure.
“In an era of heightened mistrust of government, there may be intrinsic benefits to redistricting reform that are not directly related to electoral outcomes, such as greater trust in government and increased political participation.”
Marc Hetherinton (1998) has also assessed the importance and role of political trust in the electoral process. If the Supreme Court accepts one of the proposed standards for evaluating whether a gerrymander has occurred, we may have the opportunity to find out whether those benefits are real, and if so, how extensive they may be. As this is written, pundits are attributing the appeal of extremism and support for “outsider” candidates in the 2016 election cycle to voter anger and frustration. To the extent that gerrymandering contributes to voters’ cynicism, reforms that encourage more competition and less partisanship, while no panacea, couldn’t hurt.
