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 manipulation of maps by the party that controls the redistricting process. Yet this paper uses a unique data set from Florida to demonstrate a common mechanism through which substantial partisan bias can emerge purely f...

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? ...

Imagine that one could stretch a geographical map so that areas with many people would appear large, and areas with few people would appear small. If such a map could be made one would expect all voting districts to be the same size for they should contain equal numbers of people. Drawing on such maps should simplify the process of creating district boundaries. The construction of maps of the r...

Political districting is an intractable problem with significant ramifications for political representation. Districts often are required to satisfy some legal constraints, but these typically are not very restrictive, allowing decision makers to influence the composition of these districts without violating relevant laws. For example, while districts must often comprise a single contiguous are...

Political districting has been one of the most contentious issues within American politics over the last two centuries. Since the landmark case of Baker v. Carr, in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the constitutionality of a state’s legislated districting is within the jurisdiction of a federal court, many within academia have attempted to produce a rigorous system for determini...

This paper reviews a variety of criteria which have been proposed for legislative and congressional redistricting in the US and discusses the political and legal factors which have shaped 1980s redistricting. Particular attention is paid to the conflicts of interest between incumbents (seeking re-election), party organizations (seeking aggregate partisan advantage), minority interests (seeking ...

Use of optimization models in science and policy applications is often problematic because the best available models are very inaccurate representations of the originating problems. Such is the case with electoral districting models, for which there exist no generally accepted measures of compactness, in spite of many proposals and much analytical study. This paper reports on an experimental in...