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A Computational Approach to Measuring Vote Elasticity and Competitiveness

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  • Daryl DeFord
  • Moon Duchin
  • Justin Solomon

Abstract

The recent wave of attention to partisan gerrymandering has come with a push to refine or replace the laws that govern political redistricting around the country. A common element in several states’ reform efforts has been the inclusion of competitiveness metrics, or scores that evaluate a districting plan based on the extent to which district-level outcomes are in play or are likely to be closely contested.In this article, we examine several classes of competitiveness metrics motivated by recent reform proposals and then evaluate their potential outcomes across large ensembles of districting plans at the Congressional and state Senate levels. This is part of a growing literature using MCMC techniques from applied statistics to situate plans and criteria in the context of valid redistricting alternatives. Our empirical analysis focuses on five states—Utah, Georgia, Wisconsin, Virginia, and Massachusetts—chosen to represent a range of partisan attributes. We highlight situation-specific difficulties in creating good competitiveness metrics and show that optimizing competitiveness can produce unintended consequences on other partisan metrics. These results demonstrate the importance of (1) avoiding writing detailed metric constraints into long-lasting constitutional reform and (2) carrying out careful mathematical modeling on real geo-electoral data in each redistricting cycle.

Suggested Citation

  • Daryl DeFord & Moon Duchin & Justin Solomon, 2020. "A Computational Approach to Measuring Vote Elasticity and Competitiveness," Statistics and Public Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(1), pages 69-86, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:usppxx:v:7:y:2020:i:1:p:69-86
    DOI: 10.1080/2330443X.2020.1777915
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    Cited by:

    1. Sarah Cannon & Ari Goldbloom-Helzner & Varun Gupta & JN Matthews & Bhushan Suwal, 2023. "Voting Rights, Markov Chains, and Optimization by Short Bursts," Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, Springer, vol. 25(1), pages 1-38, March.
    2. Amariah Becker & Dara Gold, 2022. "The gameability of redistricting criteria," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(2), pages 1735-1777, November.
    3. Benadè, Gerdus & Ho-Nguyen, Nam & Hooker, J.N., 2022. "Political districting without geography," Operations Research Perspectives, Elsevier, vol. 9(C).
    4. Jeanne Clelland & Haley Colgate & Daryl DeFord & Beth Malmskog & Flavia Sancier-Barbosa, 2022. "Colorado in context: Congressional redistricting and competing fairness criteria in Colorado," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 189-226, May.
    5. Swamy, Rahul & King, Douglas M. & Ludden, Ian G. & Dobbs, Kiera W. & Jacobson, Sheldon H., 2024. "A practical optimization framework for political redistricting: A case study in Arizona," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    6. Kiera W. Dobbs & Rahul Swamy & Douglas M. King & Ian G. Ludden & Sheldon H. Jacobson, 2024. "An Optimization Case Study in Analyzing Missouri Redistricting," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 54(2), pages 162-187, March.

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