Causally Identifying Non-Legislative Bodies Fairness on Redistricting Fairness

• In Event: Poster Session: State Politics and Policy & Law and Courts
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Law and Courts

Abstract

The 2020 redistricting cycle reached the greatest diversity of redistricting bodies seen to date. Redistricting reformers proposed and implemented these alternative bodies to legislature-led redistricting on the premise that these alternatives would result in more “fair” maps, broadly defined. However, the question must be raised, to what extent do these non-legislative bodies improve upon their legislative counterparts, and why might they be better? I conduct a multimethod analysis of Congressional maps from the 2000 – 2020 redistricting cycles to measure the degree of bias and responsiveness present within these non-legislative authored maps. I first analyze bias and responsiveness metrics of enacted plans by court and commissions from the 2000 and 2010 cycles. I find that courts and independent commissions overwhelmingly outperform legislative proposals in reducing bias. Through a legal analysis, I identify that insofar as a few court authored maps display some element of bias, these result from constitutionally and partisan influenced decisions to pursue a “minimal remedy” approach to adapting maps from the offending plaintiffs. Through an analysis of 2020 maps from the Princeton Gerrymandering project, I find that judges co-partisan with the plaintiff party accused of gerrymandering choose maps with higher degrees of overlap with their co-partisans. These results suggest that while non-legislative bodies are superior to crafting more fair maps, the risk exists for partisanship justified through the minimal changes approach to enable Congressional gerrymanders.

Author

• John Alexander Curiel, Ohio Northern University