Measuring the circularity of congressional districts

Unbiased Congressional Districts

This paper presents a strategy for dividing a state into congressional districts using a modified version of Smith and Ryan’s recursive shortest splitline algorithm (2007). Our strategy reduces the cost of the computation by approximating the population of a ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) as a point mass at its population centroid. If there are N ZCTAs in the state with E total edges, and k di...

The Impact of Majority-Minority Districts on Congressional Elections

We utilize the Cox and Katz (1998, 2002) bargaining model of the redistricting process and data from the 1972-2000 House elections to answer two questions: first, does the creation of majority-minority districts increase the likelihood that minority candidates will be elected in those districts? Second, does the creation of majority-minority districts also generate pro-Republican gerrymanders? ...

The Circularity of Evolutionary Reliabilism

Evaluating the 1986 Congressional

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Circularity of Planar Graphs

A circular cover of a graph G is a cover {X0, · · · , Xn−1} of the topological space G by closed connected subsets, indexed over Zn, with the following properties: Each element in the cover contains a vertex of G, each vertex of G is contained in at most two elements of the cover, and Xa ∩ Xb 6= ∅ if and only if b − a ∈ {−1, 0, 1}. The circularity of G is the largest integer n for which there i...