The democratic malady known as gerrymandering was foisted on the American people even before there was a United States. During the recent decade, in the wake of the Republican Party’s REDMAP project’s self-congratulatory claim to have pulled off what one commentator called the “Great Gerrymander of 2012,” and the admission by Democrats of gerrymandering in Maryland, the manipulation of districts lines for partisan advantage has captured more attention than at any time in its long history. The US Supreme Court heard three cases over the course of the decade, ultimately deciding that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the reach of the federal judiciary for want of a manageable standard. State supreme courts have stepped into the breach in a few situations to void their state’s districts as gerrymanders. The people in several states have used referenda to turn line drawing over to various forms of commissions. And the 117th Congress had bills pending that called for state commissions to draw post-2020 congressional district lines and, in doing so, to meet particular standards designed to avoid gerrymanders—pending being the operative word.
The clear manipulations of district boundaries in various states introduced at the beginning of the past decade have drawn a good deal of attention from political scientists and, not to be parochial, from geographers, legal academics, statisticians, computer and data scientists, mathematicians, and even a neuroscientist. Likely in anticipation of the 2021–22 round of redistricting and gerrymandering, Stephen Medvic’s Gerrymandering offers readers a wide-lens overview of gerrymandering from a political scientist steeped in the literature. Alex Keena, Michael Latner, Anthony McGann, and Charles Smith’s Gerrymandering the States offer their second installment this decade, earlier on congressional districts and here on a thoroughgoing analysis of 2012–22 state legislative districts. As one can surmise, the two books have different purposes in mind, take different approaches, reach different conclusions but, in the end, offer similar reform recommendations. In combination they offer a complementarity: a wide-angle perspective on gerrymandering and an intensely applied focus of gerrymandering actions over the past decade.
Medvic’s Gerrymandering presents readers with a self-described introduction to redistricting and gerrymandering directed at answering two questions: How does gerrymandering work, and does it offend democratic principles? He opens with a thoughtful, evenhanded back and forth between arguments over whether gerrymandering is antithetical to the common good or just plain old politics that applies as much to choosing rules as to choosing policies. It is clear, though not announced, from this early discussion that, for Medvic, gerrymandering is a fascinating process of partisan politics more so than one of pernicious politics. His steadfast evenhandedness remains the most consistent theme as he opens his inquiries with a well-written brief history of districting in the United States, reaching back to choosing districts in the seventeenth century and working his way through to the reapportionment revolution in the 1960s. From there, Medvic offers as comprehensive an overview of the Supreme Court’s decisions on gerrymandering, racial and partisan, as anyone might be able to construct in a 25-page chapter. Because, as he puts it, the Court slammed the door on federal constitutionally based remedies for partisan gerrymandering in Rucho v. Common Cause, he turns to describe how partisan gerrymanders are constructed, what consequences they have, and what nonjudicial reform remedies remain available.
After working through the basics of the “who and how” of redistricting processes, Medvic concludes with a forecast for the following chapter by arguing that gerrymanders can be effective, but that the facts on the ground place their own limits on them. From this it follows, in Medvic’s telling, that claims about gerrymandering’s consequences are often hyperbolic. Are they really exaggerated, or is this where the evenhanded approach without much hint of a critical, analytic, evaluative commentary turns against itself? His impressive review of a large swath of literature on gerrymandering’s consequences reports conclusions both for and against reduced/increased competitiveness, enhanced/transient/no partisan advantages, help/hindrance to incumbents, and increased/reduced voter turnout. No doubt these are accurate reports, but not all conclusions have equal standing. There are reasons for the “for and against,” but what are those reasons is not explored by Medvic. So, instead, he asks what could be done to curb gerrymandering, even if the only reform purpose is to generate more public confidence in elections. That is Medvic’s last question (followed by a useful pointing to further reading). He answers that independent commissions are one possibility; in deeper reflection he advises recognizing the legitimacy of the desires to organize a representational process around territory, on the one hand, versus around partisanship, on the other. To seek both requires a solution resting not on process (as in commissions) or standards (as in requiring partisan symmetry) but, he indicates, on a wholesale revision of rules to something similar to the German mixed-member proportional system.
Keena and his team’s second installment rests on the same premise as their 2016 book. The post-2010 undemocratic redistricting machinations by state legislatures were all but invited by the Supreme Court’s hands-off decision in Vieth v. Jubelirer. Here the authors explore the effect of this decision for state legislative districts. They are able to check on partisan bias—aka, partisan asymmetry—in 95 of the 99 state legislative chambers (data from Alabama and Mississippi are incomplete), finding that 45 of the 95 maps are biased, and of these, 43 are biased in favor of Republicans. They proceed to investigate whether the 43–2 (pro-Republican to pro-Democratic) imbalance is the likely result of favorableness to Republicans because of residential concentrations of Democrats in and around urban centers or the connections among race, party, geography, and adherence to the Voting Rights Act. Their careful analysis provides this answer: “not really.” The residential and race–party circumstances are there to be exploited if Republicans choose to do so, and they often do. But the team’s evidence also shows that adding or introducing pro-Republican bias is easy enough to avoid when line drawing is in the hands of bipartisan, nonpartisan, or Democratic Party decision makers. In fewer words, bias is a choice, a political choice. In competitive states where bias makes its most meaningful difference, substantial bias shows up three-quarters of the time when one party controls the line drawing (for 25 of 33 chambers in competitive states). In the other 62 cases, substantial bias appears only about one-third of the time (20 of 62 chamber cases).
According to Keena et al.’s definition of partisan gerrymandering, it occurs only when there is a deliberate manipulation of boundaries to gain advantage. For there to be an identifiable gerrymander, this definition has them adopt an analytical framework requiring mapmakers to have both motive and opportunity to exploit a situation. It follows that 25 of their 45 cases of substantial bias drawn by one party in competitive states are gerrymanders, but the other 20 cases are something else. To wit: “predicting partisan gerrymandering is hardly rocket science; it occurs only when politicians, who stand to gain from biased maps, are in charge of the process and do not need bipartisan support to enact the district plan” (p. 12). The definition and its attendant analytical framework are of no major consequence standing alone; as a factual inference. Keena et al. find 25 gerrymanders (24 of which are extreme Republican gerrymanders) and 20 miscues.
However, such a definition and framework invite confusion as the coauthors turn to a series of interesting analyses of gerrymandering’s policy consequences. They find that the most gerrymandered legislatures—or are they the most biased, deliberately chosen or not?—were more likely than others to enact restrictions on voting rights, abortion, Obamacare, and COVID-19 responses. The confusion arises again when they argue that partisan gerrymandering is a fundamental assault on democracy for, among other reasons, how it dilutes the value of votes. But, of course, dilution is the consequence of biased maps, regardless of whether the lines are drawn by politicians who stand to gain from them.
Modest degrees of ambiguity or not, the central message is clear: the pernicious politics of gerrymandering over the past decade teaches us that something needs to be done. What is that something? Here, Keena et al. meet up with Medvic in seeing two paths forward: line drawing could be handed over to independent commissions (or courts), or the single-member district plurality system could be abandoned in favor of multimember districts with proportionality rules (MMD PR).
Because, as Keena and coauthors show, the obvious answer to why we see gerrymandering is (more often than not) politics and because, as Medvic emphasizes, choosing the rules to adopt commissions or MMD PR is also a matter of political choice, it is difficult to see a path out of the gerrymandering thicket through the political choice to adopt commissions or MMD PR. Absent a constitutionally derived, enforceable rule that the Rucho decision says does not exist, “no way out” is that decision’s woeful but likely legacy for at least the next generation. All those interested in the quality of democracy in the United States should read these books, expand the readership by enlisting them in undergraduate and graduate courses, and consider their implications.
