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Partisan Dislocation: A Precinct-Level Measure of Representation and Gerrymandering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2021

Daryl R. DeFord ,
Nicholas Eubank  and
Jonathan Rodden Open the ORCID record for Jonathan Rodden [Opens in a new window]
Daryl R. DeFord
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Data Analytics, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Washington State University, Pullam, WA, USA. E-mail: daryl.deford@wsu.edu
Nicholas Eubank
Affiliation:
Assistant Research Professor, Duke Social Science Research Institute, Durham, NC, USA. E-mail: nick@nickeubank.com
Jonathan Rodden*
Affiliation:
Professor, Department of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. E-mail: jrodden@stanford.edu.
*
Corresponding author Jonathan Rodden
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Abstract

We introduce a fine-grained measure of the extent to which electoral districts combine and split local communities of co-partisans in unnatural ways. Our indicator—which we term Partisan Dislocation—is a measure of the difference between the partisan composition of a voter’s geographic nearest neighbors and that of her assigned district. We show that our measure is a good local and global indicator of district manipulation, easily identifying instances in which districts carve up clusters of co-partisans (cracking) or combine them in unnatural ways (packing). We demonstrate that our measure is related to but distinct from other approaches to the measurement of gerrymandering, and has some clear advantages, above all as a complement to simulation-based approaches, and as a way to identify the specific neighborhoods most affected by gerrymandering. It can also be used prospectively by district-drawers who wish to create maps that reflect voter geography, but according to our analysis, that goal will sometimes be in conflict with the goal of partisan fairness.

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Type
Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 403 - 425
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

References

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Supplementary material: Link

DeFord et al. Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MERAIC
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