A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes

Chapter 5 - Welfare I

This chapter uses a simulation model to generate predictions about the effects of gerrymandering institutions on four different measures of voter welfare, with interactions for partisan tides and party polarization. Four representation norms are defined: policy median, compositional, personal, and discursive. The simulation generates three major predictions with respect to these norms: (a) bipa...

Examples that illustrate how compactness and respect for political boundaries can lead to partisan bias when redistricting

To reduce the unfairness incurred by partisan districting, citizen reformers usually advocate applying the conventional criteria of compactness and respect for political boundaries of subdivisions. Simple examples are constructed to address whether optimizing these criteria also minimizes partisan bias, measured as the difference between the seats-votes curves for the two parties. One set of ex...

Non-Partisan ‘Get-Out-the-Vote’ Efforts and Policy Outcomes

This paper utilizes a simple model of redistributive politics with voter abstention to analyze the impact of nonpartisan ‘get-out-the-vote’ efforts on policy outcomes. Although such efforts are often promoted on the grounds that they provide the social benefit of increasing participation in the electoral process, we find that they have a meaningful impact on policy outcomes and are an important...

Using Legislative Districting Simulations to Measure Electoral Bias in Legislatures

When one of the major parties in the United States wins a substantially larger share of the seats than its vote share would seem to warrant, the conventional explanation lies in overt partisan or racial gerrymandering. Yet this paper uses a unique data set from Florida to demonstrate a common mechanism through which substantial partisan bias can emerge purely from residential patterns. When par...

The Effect of Partisan Information On Voters in Nonpartisan Elections