Now, granted, reporting the fact that rightwing activists would criticize this President falls under the “sun rose yesterday” category of news, but this reaction was unusually revealing, given the point the President was making: that evidence should trump theory.
Here’s Obama’s entire paragraph, so that the context is clear:
I guess to make a broader point, so often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist. And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property. And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.
The point being made in the rest of the article is the fairly obvious one (obvious, at least, to folks who follow politics in the real world)–the reactionaries who currently control the GOP are obsessed with ideology to such an extent that when reality doesn’t confirm their beliefs, they opt to retain the beliefs rather than acknowledge the reality. Thus
A simple statement from the President that economies should simply pick solutions that work, somehow becomes a fundamental betrayal.
We see this reaction everywhere. The article refers to Kansas and Louisiana, both of which are in a world of hurt after several years of GOP orthodoxy, and the very different experience of blue states like California. I’ve previously compared Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, where Koch brothers ideology reins, to Mark Dayton’s Minnesota, where the economy is booming despite the imposition of new and higher tax rates and increased public investment in education.
In a functional political ecosystem that would be a cause for reckoning and introspection, but no acknowledgement of failure has been forthcoming from the GOP. Instead its candidates are doubling down on more of the same. For them, conservative orthodoxy cannot fail; it can only be failed.
In the alternate reality built by committed ideologues, changing one’s position because the evidence has demonstrated that the position is in error makes one a “flip flopper.” In the real world, amassing evidence of what works and what doesn’t is called “research,” and successful humans do it in order to bring our beliefs into conformity with facts that can be empirically demonstrated. (In the academy, we call that process “learning.”)
A popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. By that definition, the GOP has gone insane.
There is a book review in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly of “No Freedom Without Regulation: The Hidden Lesson of the Subprime Crisis.” It was written by a Professor Singer of Harvard Law School, and in it, he considers a type of freedom that gets short shrift from the various special interests who are constantly insisting that any and all government regulation constrains our liberties.
I found this passage illuminating:
When the state sets minimum standards of safety and transparency for the manufacture and sale of consumer products, it affords me the freedom to buy a toaster oven without first hiring a lawyer to read the fine print and an electrician to look over the specs to make sure it won’t catch on fire. Other restrictions protect us from negative externalities. Building codes may limit my neighbor’s ability to contract for the construction of a house with cheap material and bad wiring, but it protects my house from the fire likely to erupt in his.
As I have noted in previous posts, I’m grateful for the Food and Drug Administration that relieves me of the need to test that chicken I bought at Kroger for e coli. (Before the recent news from Flint, Michigan, I used to be more grateful for the EPA’s monitoring of water quality–now, I’d like to see those regulations stiffened up a bit…)
The ongoing debate about government regulatory activity displays all the deficiencies of American policy arguments generally: it oversimplifies, assumes an “either/or” answer, and focuses on the wrong questions.
Can regulation be too stifling? Can a “nanny-state” approach impose unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers? Sure.
Can the lack of appropriate regulation endanger innocent people, and impose additional costs on those same businesses and consumers? You betcha!
The questions we should be addressing are the “how” questions: is this particular regulation necessary? Is it “narrowly tailored” to accomplish its goal? Does it make sense from a cost-benefit standpoint?
We’ll still disagree, still argue about the extent and substance of regulatory activity. But at least we’d be arguing about the right things.
Bernie Sanders says he’s a Democratic Socialist, and that doesn’t seem to bother the young folks who support him–although it certainly scandalizes a lot of older Americans. Of course, as a friend of mine recently noted, no one–young or old– seems to know what a “Democratic Socialist” or just a garden-variety socialist is–or how socialism differs from either capitalism or communism, for that matter.
Why am I not surprised? After all, Americans long since stopped using labels to communicate information; we just throw them at each other as insults.
Economic terminology is yet another part of those civic literacy deficits I keep talking about–deficits I addressed in my ebook Talking Politics? What You Need to Know Before You Open Your Mouth. (Shameless plug: it’s cheap–under $5 from Georgetown University Press.) I promised my friend that I’d share what I wrote there:
Socialism is the collective provision of goods and services. The decision whether to pay for certain services collectively rather than leaving their production and consumption to the free market can be based upon a number of factors. First, there are some goods that free markets cannot or will not produce. Economists call them public goods, and define them as both “non-excludable” –meaning that individuals who haven’t paid for them cannot be effectively kept from using them—and “non-rivalrous,” meaning that use by one person does not reduce the availability of that good to others. Examples of public goods include fresh air, knowledge, lighthouses, national defense, flood control systems and street lighting. If we are to have these goods, they must be supplied by the whole society, usually through government, and paid for with tax dollars.
Not all goods and services that we provide collectively are public goods. Policymakers have often based decisions to socialize services on other considerations: we socialize police and fire protection because doing so is generally more efficient and cost-effective, and because most of us believe that limiting such services only to people who can afford to pay for them would be immoral. We socialize garbage collection in more densely populated urban areas in order to enhance the livability of our cities and to prevent disease transmission.
Getting the “mix” right between goods that we provide collectively and those we leave to the free market is important, because too much socialism hampers economic health. Just as unrestrained capitalism can become corporatism, socializing the provision of goods that the market can supply reduces innovation and incentives to produce. During the 20th Century, many countries experimented with efforts to socialize major areas of their economies, and even implement socialism’s extreme, communism, with uniformly poor results. Not only did economic productivity suffer, so did political freedom. (When governments have too much control over the means of production and distribution, they can easily become authoritarian.)
Virtually all countries today have mixed economies. The challenge is getting the right balance between socialized and free market provision of goods and services.
In our highly polarized politics today, words like Socialism, Fascism and Communism are used more as insults than descriptions. There are numerous disagreements about the essential characteristics of these systems, probably because the theories underlying them were so different from the actual experiences of those who tried them.
Socialism may be the least precise of these terms. It is generally applied to mixed economies where the social safety net is much broader and the tax burden is correspondingly higher than in the U.S.—Scandinavian countries are an example.
Communism begins with the belief that equality is defined by equal results; this is summed up in the well-known adage “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” All property is owned communally, by everyone (hence the term “communism”). In practice, this meant that all property was owned by the government, ostensibly on behalf of the people. In theory, communism erases all class distinctions, and wealth is redistributed so that everyone gets the same share. In practice, the government controls the means of production and most individual decisions are made by the state. Since the quality and quantity of work is divorced from reward, there is less incentive to innovate or produce, and ultimately, countries that have tried to create a communist system have collapsed (the USSR) or moved toward a more mixed economy (China).
Fascism is sometimes called “national Socialism,” but it differs significantly from socialism. The most striking aspect of fascist systems is the elevation of the nation—a fervent nationalism is central to fascist philosophy. There is a union between business and the state; although there is nominally private property, government controls business decisions. Fascist regimes tend to be focused upon a (glorious) past, and to uphold traditional class structures and gender roles as necessary to maintain the social order.
Three elements commonly identified with Fascism are 1) a national identity fused with racial/ethnic identity and concepts of racial superiority; 2) rejection of civil liberties and democracy in favor of authoritarian government; and 3) aggressive militarism. Fascism has been defined by this radical authoritarian nationalism, with fascists seeking to unify the nation through the elevation of the state over the individual, and the mass mobilization of the national community through discipline, indoctrination, and physical training. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy are the most notable examples of Fascist regimes.
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 following the 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 surplusvotes 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.
References
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Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, 576 U.S. ___ (2015)
Butera, J. (2015). Partisan Gerrymandering and the Qualifications Clause. Boston University Law Review, 95, 303-334.
Campbell, J. E., & Steve J. J. (2003). The Decline of Competition and Change in Congressional Elections. In Congress Responds to the Twentieth Century. Ahuja and Dewhurst, eds. (pp. 43-72) Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
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Cottrill, J. B. (2012, March) Non-Legislative Redistricting and the Public Trust: The Indirect Benefits of Electoral Reform. Paper presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Portland, OR.
Davis v. Bandemer, 478 US 109 (1986)
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Indiana’s Institute for Working Families conducts research on Indiana’s economy–more specifically, the ways in which the state’s economy is or is not working for low-income Hoosiers who work.
The news, you will not be shocked to discover, is not good.
Recently, the Institute posted a list of 16 reasons why Indiana’s minimum wage should be raised. I encourage you to click through and read them all, but I want to highlight some of the most compelling.
There is not one county in Indiana where where working full time at the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is sufficient to support even a single adult.
Waiters and waitresses in Indiana are paid $2.13 per hour by their employers (29% of the minimum wage). The last time they saw a raise was a quarter-century ago (1991), even as the industry has seen strong growth and profitability.
In Indiana, the median number of work hours at the minimum wage for a single adult to become self-sufficient is 48 hours per week. The number of hours increases significantly to 108 hours for a single adult with one preschooler and one school-age child. For a family with two adults, a preschooler, and a school-age child, each adult would need to work 64 hours for the family to be self-sufficient.
Standard and Poor’s cites rising income inequality as “contributing to weaker tax revenue growth”, making it more difficult for state and local governments to invest in education and infrastructure.
Children whose parents work for the minimum wage live below the federal poverty line. Research has found that children being raised in poverty have lower academic achievement, poorer nutrition, fewer job prospects as adults, and worse physical health than their more affluent peers.
The usual objection to raising the minimum wage makes superficial sense: if businesses have to raise what they pay, they will hire fewer workers. Logical as that seems, the evidence from decades of research says otherwise. As the Institute notes,
Two recent meta-analyses of research on minimum wage increases during the 1990s found that “the minimum wage has little or no discernable effect on the employment prospects of low-wage workers.”
There is a reason for this seemingly counter-intuitive result: when the minimum wage goes up, the buying power of low-wage workers also goes up. Unlike wealthier Americans, low-wage workers spend those extra dollars, and that increased spending boosts the economy. Increased buying power translates to increased sales of goods and services; employers who see improved bottom lines hire more workers.
A raise in the minimum wage to 10.10 per hour would affect 637,000 Hoosiers (23.4% of the workforce). That number includes 436,000 who are currently making less than $10.10 and another 201,000 whose wages would be pushed up due to pay scale adjustments. That’s a lot of additional buying power.
And as an added bonus, paying a living wage to hard-working Americans might ameliorate some of the rage and resentment currently fueling our toxic politics.
