Neutralizing Politics to Prevent Racial Gerrymandering?: Independent Commissions

• In Event: Poster Session: Elections and Voting Behavior

Abstract

For decades, the issue of Gerrymandering has cast a shadow on the US electoral system and put to question its fairness. In the upcoming 2020 census, a total of 17 states will use some form of a non-partisan redistricting commission in order to allocate congressional districts. These commissions are aimed, first and foremost, to ensure an objective, competitive, and fair reallocation. Such commissions, common wisdom would have it, are less prone to gerrymandering.
Calls for reforms in redistricting were largely motivated by questions surrounding the legality of Racial Gerrymandering, violating the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Several cases have been brought before the Supreme Court on this matter, such as Miller v. Johnson in 1995 and in as late as 2019, Virginia House of Delegates v. Bethune-Hill. Non-partisan redistricting commissions is one key institution formed to ameliorate the vices of gerrymandering. Yet, analyses of the effectiveness of non-partisan redistricting commissions have focused largely on partisan Gerrymandering and district competitiveness. Questions surrounding the effectiveness of these commissions in preventing racial gerrymandering have been virtually overlooked in the literature. Yet, they concern decisionmakers, civil society and the public at large, particularly given the nationwide trend where an increasing number of states adopt such measures.
The current project offers an examination of this issue by identifying the impact of non-partisan redistricting commissions on the rate of representation of racial minorities, African-Americans and Hispanics, in the US House of Representatives. Based on a panel dataset, indicating state-by-state representation rates since the 107th congress, we suggest that in states where non-partisan redistricting commissions are active, the number of African-American representatives is 30% closer to the optimal representation rate, based on the proportion of voters listed as belonging to that minority in the state census. Regarding Hispanic representation, the number is 15% closer to the optimal representation rate. Moreover, our data suggest that this effect becomes stronger with every consecutive election. In other words, as time goes by since the establishment of the commission, its effect on limiting racial gerrymandering increases. More specifically, with every electoral round since the establishment of a non-partisan independent redistricting commission, the representation of minorities is 5-6% closer to the optimal representation rate. We also examine whether different types of non-partisan redistricting commissions have different effects on racial representation and whether these effects are different in Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning constituencies. Finally, we elaborate on the importance of these findings prior to the completion of the 2020 census. Our findings call for the continuation of this research after the 2022 election cycle, in which several additional states will use non-partisan commissions for the first time, and in election cycles thereafter, where, as our findings suggest, the effect should be more pronounced.

Authors

• Eyal Zilberman

• Udi Sommer, Tel Aviv University