A recent article published in Publius: The Journal of Federalism, explores and measures partisan fairness, competitiveness, and minority representation in newly enacted redistricting maps across the states. A summary of the results is below. Read the article here.
Christopher Warshaw (George Wash. Univ.), Eric McGhee, (Public Policy Institute of California) and Michal Migurski (Planscore.org, USA) are coauthors of this study and they describe their findings with this statement in their abstract:
“We find that both parties have enacted increasingly extreme partisan gerrymanders when they control the redistricting process. The combination of Republicans’ control of the redistricting process in far more states than Democrats and the inefficient concentration of Democrats in cities has enabled Republicans to largely maintain an advantage in the translation of votes to seats in both Congress and many state legislatures. As a result, the policymaking process in many states will continue to be skewed in a conservative direction. At the same time, nonpartisan commissions appear to offer a consistent means to produce less biased and more competitive maps than when parties draw[n] the lines. Finally, while Black and Latino representation has improved in some places, both groups of voters remain underrepresented.”
Publius:The Journal of Federalism volume 52 number 3, pp. 428-451
Last Friday, the authors published this article in the Washington Post where they describe their methodology and results in detail regarding how they measured Black and Latino representation in newly enacted congressional and state legislative redistricting maps. Here are some notable findings in that regard:
- In Illinois, Michigan and Missouri, congressional districts (above a certain population threshold) either matched the Black population share or exceeded it.
- Generally, state legislative plans often come closer to proportionality. Maryland, Michigan and Virginia added more Black-influence districts to their state legislatures.
- Some states formerly covered by the VRA’s Section 5 significantly cut Black representation in congressional maps: North Carolina and Florida.
- Latino influence declined in Colorado, Florida, New York, Rhode Island and Texas state legislatures.
- California’s independent commission significantly increased the number of Latino-influence districts on the congressional map.
- Latino voters also had moderate map gains in Florida (congressional) and New Jersey (State legislative).
The authors warned that despite these results, whether or not minority influence has declined to a level that would constitute a legal violation would depend on many outside factors not measured by the study.
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