“How to Do Things with Boundaries: Redistricting and the Construction of Politics”

Jim Gardner has posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

The partition of the electorate through districting matters for politics. It matters in the crass sense that where district boundaries lie can influence who wins office. But it also matters in the sense that such decisions influence the quality of democratic politics. What issues come to life in political contestation, how they are contested, and in what institutional venues are all aspects of political life that may be influenced by the drawing of lines on a map.

Judicial attempts to control partisan gerrymandering by focusing on the bottom line – who wins and loses elections – have been unavailing. What is needed is a standard that measures districting according to criteria that are not endogenous to the process of partisan contestation for power.

On the state level, courts have developed an account of politics in which localities such as counties and towns are understood as discrete, homogeneous economic communities that function as appropriate constituencies for a state-level politics of economic distribution. On the national level, a similar approach might offer a way to constrain partisan gerrymandering. First, congressional districts should be drawn according to the partisanship of their inhabitants, without regard to local considerations such as compactness or respect for local government boundaries and communities of interest. Drawing districts in this way will help keep national constituencies and legislators focused on ideological issues of national dimension. Second, redistricting authorities should be required to make choices about districting by developing a policy on politics, including a policy on district heterogeneity, justified in terms of its impact on the quality of democratic politics. Having made such choices, districting authorities should then be required to stick to them when drawing district boundaries, thereby impeding the opportunistic adoption and abandonment of district heterogeneity policies that is the hallmark of partisan gerrymandering

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