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In Davis v. Bandemer and Vieth v. Jubelirer, the Supreme Court has held that partisan gerrymandering is justiciable (i.e. within their scope to regulate), but that a manageable standard does not, in their view, yet exist. Here is a draft of my paper on how to define such a standard. Prong #1 is the subject of my Gerrymandering Theorem post below (and my specific mathematical question is described here). Prongs #2 and #3 have well-defined statistical properties, and are in that sense complete.
A Three-Prong Standard for Partisan Gerrymandering
October 8th, 2015, 11:25pm by Sam Wang
→ 9 CommentsTags: House · Politics
Gerrymandering theorems
October 7th, 2015, 7:05pm by Sam Wang
To me, today’s news that Gallup is sitting out the primaries, and maybe even the general election, is not all that notable. The primaries are a hard-to-poll question; any race with more than two candidates seems to have issues (see the UK and Israel as examples). And the general election? It’s such a well-populated space, so there’s not that much publicity value in polling it. Besides, Gallup says they’re tweaking their methods, which is a good thing for them to be doing after their performance in 2012.
Also, I am considerably more preoccupied with gerrymandering and redistricting. I am developing statistical approaches for detecting a partisan gerrymander that can be used as a standard to be used by federal courts. This builds on work I published in the New York Times and here at PEC. I have done new calculations demonstrating that in the House, the likely total nationwide effect of gerrymandering is larger than the effect of other factors, including the clustering of Democrats in populated areas. So if a standard (mine, or anyone’s) is adopted by courts, the resulting reform can have a rather large effect on fairness of representation.
For law aficionados, the goal is to come up with a manageable standard for partisan gerrymandering, which is a justiciable question due to Davis v. Bandemer in 1986, followed by Vieth v. Jubelirer in 2004. I will be writing about the math of this question in the weeks and months ahead.
In addition to the legal battle, as an offshoot this project leads to a need for what I’ll call “gerrymandering theorems”: ways to derive the relationship between voting and seats from a small number of assumptions. For that, I’m looking for someone who is good with probability distributions, the Central Limit Theorem, and stuff like that. That person would ideally be not far from Princeton. Any takers?
Update: I have now spelled out the problem in the comment section. If I don’t find a proof, I will just end up graphing the outputs of the simulations I did previously. These days people don’t care so much about rigor. It just feels like it should have a closed-form solution, and I hate the thought of somebody pointing that out in the future!
→ 16 CommentsTags: 2016 Election · House · Politics
Happy No-Government-Shutdown Day!
September 30th, 2015, 10:42pm by Sam Wang
The U.S. Congress has reached the point where not shutting down the federal government at the start of a new budget year is considered an accomplishment. Wow.
The other day, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo asked his readers for their favorite government shutdown. My favorite shutdown is the original ones in 1995 and 1996. Why settle for cheap copies when you can have the original?
The ascent of Newt Gingrich was a turning point for the modern Republican Party. The slide toward the right on issue positions began in 1974. This accelerated, and the tone took a sharp turn too, when Newt and Company came in. I was working in the U.S. Senate as a committee staff fellow. People were still adapting to the shock (or rush, depending on one’s party) of the Contract With America, which seemed to be filled with unrealistic goals. As a scientist naive to the appropriations process, I attended a briefing by the GOP budget director. I asked why one would link the debt ceiling with day-to-day funding of the government. To me, it seemed like asking for trouble. She replied that it was “a strategic move.” What an understatement!
All these steps were mind-blowing and extreme at the time. It’s all with us today. Back then it was so fresh, so new.
It seems that the departure of John Boehner as Speaker dramatically decreases the likelihood of a shutdown this year (though we’ll see what happens in December, when the temporary spending bill runs out). Furthermore, if House Republicans have any sense of self-preservation, they’ll refrain from doing so in the run-up to the 2016 election. That’s a big if. Still, one wonders if the next shutdown will have to wait until the first term of a hypothetical President Hillary Clinton (there, I said it).
