On redistricting

My first experience with congressional redistricting was as an intern in a district office in 1999. I was asked to hand-match residential addresses to census blocks for reasons I did not know. Shortly thereafter, the state lost a seat, and the member for whom I worked was the guy whose district got cut up. He lost to an incumbent from the other party.

My next memory of redistricting involves writing a report on California. I do not remember what we had been trying to sell. However, I remember that the 1990 census had produced a “sweetheart gerrymander” (incumbent protection) whereas the 2000 exercise had been more about partisan advantage.

News of gerrymandering kept piling up. First came Tom DeLay’s mid-decade exercise in Texas. Then came the gerrymander that reversed control of the U.S. House in 2012. Now we have California Proposition 50, which asked voters explicitly whether they want to do it for partisan advantage.

The current situation has produced a mutual-disarmament case for reform. One flavor is proportional representation (PR). Another is independent redistricting. Rather than play games in states, the argument goes, wouldn’t the major parties be better off tying their hands?

I am weary of mutual-disarmament cases for redistricting reform. I have tried to conjure paths by which such change could happen. The best run up against the Senate filibuster, which is stable because it permits legislators to buck their parties in hiding.

The filibuster thus imagined means that redistricting reform must pass through states. A large literature asks whether this reform can overcome partisan advantage. It reminds me of an old debate in international development about whether an “independent electoral commission” really can be independent of the politicians that create it. That debate concerned unitary states, not federal ones, and so maybe the United States holds promise of letting regional difference find expression through maps.

Two things make me pessimistic about state-based reform. One is California Proposition 50. We still need to see who voted for it and why, but I suspect their eyes were on Washington. Another is the structure of public opinion across states. I recently went looking for the sorts of difference that might make bipartisan reform coalitions possible. Consumers of that paper told me I was barking up a dead tree.