Districting without Parties: How City Council Maps Shape Minority Representation

• In Event: Local Elections, Institutions, and Bureaucracies in the Global South and North

Abstract

District elections have long been considered a tool for promoting minority representation in local government. But surprisingly little is understood about how electoral maps themselves shape political outcomes. We collect over one hundred new districting plans from cities across California that converted from at-large to district elections in the wake of the California Voting Rights Act of 2001. Applying a state-of-the-art automated redistricting simulator, we find that most of these cities could not feasibly produce a plan with even one Latino-majority seat, though those that could generally tried to maximize this quantity. We introduce alternative metrics of descriptive representation that are tailored to a city’s political dynamics and risk tolerance around securing at least one Latino seat. Contrary to intuitions from partisan districting, we see no conflict between the goals of guaranteeing minimal representation and maximizing seats overall; rather, we find that concentrating Latinos within districts often achieves both goals.

Authors

• Michael Hankinson, George Washington University

• Asya Magazinnik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology