Socially Optimal Districting: a Theoretical and Empirical Exploration
نویسندگان
چکیده
This paper investigates the problem of optimal districting in the context of a simple model of legislative elections. In the model, districting matters because it determines the seat-vote curve, which describes the relationship between seats and votes. The paper rst characterizes the optimal seat-vote curve, and shows that, under a weak condition, there exist districtings that generate this ideal relationship. The paper then develops an empirical methodology for computing seat-vote curves and measuring the welfare gains from implementing optimal districting. This is applied to analyze the districting plans used to elect U.S. state legislators during the 1990s. This paper combines research reported in \Socially Optimal Districting" (NBER Working Paper #11462) and \Socially Optimal Districting: An Empirical Investigation" (NBER Working Paper #12313). We are greatly indebted to Jim Snyder for providing the data on state legislative elections used in this study. For helpful comments and encouragement we thank three anonymous referees, Alan Auerbach, Robert Barro, Tim Besley, Doug Bernheim, Allan Drazen, Andrew Gelman, Alan Gerber, Richard Holden, Antonio Merlo, Tom Romer and seminar participants at NYU, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, Yale, Stockholm University, the 2006 NBER fall public economics meetings, and the 2005 PIER conference on political economy. We thank the National Science Foundation (Grant SES-0452561) for nancial support.
منابع مشابه
Socially Optimal
This paper provides a welfare economic analysis of the problem of districting. In the context of a simple micro-founded model intended to capture the salient features of U.S. politics, it studies how a social planner should allocate citizens of different ideologies across districts to maximize aggregate utility. In the model, districting determines the equilibrium seat-vote curve which is the r...
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