Redistricting ≈ Redistricting
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The use of differential privacy for census data and its impact on redistricting: The case of the 2020 U.S. Census Open
New Census privacy protections may introduce both bias and noise into redistricting and voting rights analysis.
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Race and Representation in Campaign Finance Open
Racial inequality in voter turnout is well-documented, but we know less about racial inequality in campaign contributions. Using new data on the racial identities of over 27 million donors, we find an unrepresentative contributor class. Bl…
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Automated Redistricting Simulation Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Open
Legislative redistricting is a critical element of representative democracy. A number of political scientists have used simulation methods to sample redistricting plans under various constraints to assess their impact on partisanship and o…
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Demand and Supply: Racial and Ethnic Minority Candidates in White Districts Open
Do voters in white districts systematically obstruct minority representation? Despite a great deal of public and scholarly attention, this question remains largely unresolved. We demonstrate that the narrow focus on the relationship betwee…
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Widespread partisan gerrymandering mostly cancels nationally, but reduces electoral competition Open
Congressional district lines in many US states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting r…
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Cause or Effect? Turnout in Hispanic Majority-Minority Districts Open
Legislative redistricting alters the political and electoral context for some voters but not others, thus offering a potentially promising research design to study many questions of interest in political science. We apply this design to st…
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Has the Top Two Primary Elected More Moderates? Open
Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one…
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Evaluating Partisan Gerrymandering in Wisconsin Open
We examine the extent of gerrymandering for the 2010 General Assembly district map of Wisconsin. We find that there is substantial variability in the election outcome depending on what maps are used. We also found robust evidence that the …
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A New Approach for Developing Neutral Redistricting Plans Open
Computers hold the potential to draw legislative districts in a neutral way. Existing approaches to automated redistricting may introduce bias and encounter difficulties when drawing districts of large and even medium-sized jurisdictions. …
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The Police as Place-Consolidators: The Organizational Amplification of Urban Inequality Open
Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the po…
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Considering the Prospects for Establishing a Packing Gerrymandering Standard Open
Courts have found it difficult to evaluate whether redistricting authorities have engaged in constitutionally impermissible partisan gerrymandering. The knotty problem is that no proposed standard has found acceptance as a convincing means…
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Recombination: A Family of Markov Chains for Redistricting Open
Redistricting is the problem of partitioning a set of geographical units into a fixed number of districts, subject to a list of often-vague rules and priorities. In recent years, the use of randomized methods to sample from the vast space …
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The Measure of a Metric: The Debate Over Quantifying Partisan Gerrymandering Open
Over the last few years, there has been an unprecedented outpouring of scholarship on partisan gerrymandering. Much of this work has sought either to introduce new measures of gerrymandering or to analyze a metric—the efficiency gap— that …
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Computational Redistricting and the Voting Rights Act Open
In recent years, computers have been used to generate ensembles of districting plans: collections of large numbers of electoral maps that are used to assess a proposed map in the context of valid alternatives. Ensemble-based outlier analys…
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From the dark end of the street to the bright side of the road: Automated redistricting of areas using physical barriers as dividers of social space Open
This study examines the properties of administrative areas compared to a new method of automated redistricting when measuring social differentiation and segregation. Using physical barriers, such as roads, railways, streams, areas of uninh…
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Big City vs. the Great Outdoors: Voter Distribution and How It Affects Gerrymandering Open
Gerrymandering is the process by which parties manipulate boundaries of electoral districts in order to maximize the number of districts they can win. Demographic trends show an increasingly strong correlation between residence and party a…
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Partisan Gerrymandering and Political Science Open
Recent years have seen a tremendous surge of public interest in partisan gerrymandering, including robust reform efforts and multiple high-profile court cases. Political scientists have played an important role in this debate, reaching an …
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Disproportional Threat: Redistricting as an Alternative to Proportional Representation Open
Analyzing the voting behavior of Swiss members of parliament (MP) using newly collected individual, district, and cantonal level data, we show that both electoral disproportionalities and the insurgent parties’ electoral potential are impo…
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Reform and Representation: A New Method Applied to Recent Electoral Changes Open
Can electoral reforms such as an independent redistricting commission and the top-two primary create conditions that lead to better legislative representation? We explore this question by presenting a new method for measuring a key indicat…
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Redistricting: Drawing the Line Open
We develop methods to evaluate whether a political districting accurately represents the will of the people. To explore and showcase our ideas, we concentrate on the congressional districts for the U.S. House of representatives and use the…
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Privileging One’s Own? Voting Patterns and Politicized Spending in India Open
How do politicians allocate public resources? Despite the extensive literature on distributive politics, we have limited micro-level evidence for why and under what circumstances politicians choose various allocation strategies. India’s di…
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The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation Open
As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation met…
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Simulated redistricting plans for the analysis and evaluation of redistricting in the United States Open
This article introduces the 50 stateSimulations , a collection of simulated congressional districting plans and underlying code developed by the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project. The 50 stateSimulations allow fo…
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Gerrymandering and Computational Redistricting Open
Slides for Gerrymandering and Computational Redistricting https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.04640
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Geospatial Clustering for Balanced and Proximal Schools Open
Public school boundaries are redrawn from time to time to ensure effective functioning of school systems. This process, also called school redistricting, is non-trivial due to (1) the presence of multiple design criteria such as capacity u…
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A Merge-Split Proposal for Reversible Monte Carlo Markov Chain Sampling of Redistricting Plans Open
We describe a Markov chain on redistricting plans that makes relatively global moves. The chain is designed to be usable as the proposal in a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Sampling the space of plans amounts to dividing a grap…
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A Logical Model for Predicting Minority Representation: Application to Redistricting and Voting Rights Cases Open
Understanding when and why minority candidates emerge and win in particular districts entails critical implications for redistricting and the Voting Rights Act. I introduce a quantitatively predictive logical model of minority candidate em…
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Quantifying Gerrymandering in North Carolina Open
By comparing a specific redistricting plan to an ensemble of plans, we evaluate whether the plan translates individual votes to election outcomes in an unbiased fashion. Explicitly, we evaluate if a given redistricting plan exhibits extrem…
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Crafting a Judicially Manageable Standard for Partisan Gerrymandering: Five Necessary Elements Open
Beginning with a definition of gerrymandering, and after a brief review of the evolution of the case law on partisan gerrymandering, I propose five necessary elements of a test for when partisan gerrymandering rises to the level of unconst…
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Mapping Inequalities in Local Political Representation: Evidence from Ohio School Boards Open
Elected representatives’ place of residence can reveal information about their socioeconomic status, their likely social networks, and potential biases in the constituencies they represent. Using data on home addresses we collected from lo…