Related papers: Measures of Partisan Bias for Legislating Fair Ele…
Assuming that partisan fairness and responsiveness are important aspects of redistricting, it is important to measure them. Many measures of partisan bias are satisfactory for states that are balanced with roughly equal proportions of…
We compare and contrast fourteen measures that have been proposed for the purpose of quantifying partisan gerrymandering. We consider measures that, rather than examining the shapes of districts, utilize only the partisan vote distribution…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, the…
We consider the measures of partisan symmetry proposed for practical use in the political science literature, as clarified and developed in Katz, King, and Rosenblatt (2020). Elementary mathematical manipulation shows the symmetry metrics…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
In recent years, in an effort to promote fairness in the election process, a wide variety of techniques and metrics have been proposed to determine whether a map is a partisan gerrymander. The most accessible measures, requiring easily…
Currently, there is currently no effective, standardized way to identify the presence of partisan gerrymandering. A relatively newly proposed method of identification is ensemble analysis. This is done by generating a large neutral ensemble…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
This preprint offers a detailed look, both qualitative and quantitative, at districting with respect to recent voting patterns in one state: Pennsylvania. We investigate how much the partisan playing field is tilted by political geography.…
We explore the Declination, a new metric intended to detect partisan gerrymandering. We consider instances in which each district has equal turnout, the maximum turnout to minimum turnout is bounded, and turnout is unrestricted. For each of…
We introduce simulated packing and cracking as a technique for evaluating partisan-gerrymandering measures. We apply it to historical congressional and legislative elections to evaluate four measures: partisan bias, declination, efficiency…
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
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…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…
Many democratic societies use district-based elections, where the region under consideration is geographically divided into districts and a representative is chosen for each district based on the preferences of the electors who reside…
Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the…
In the context of modern sampling methods for redistricting, we define a natural measurement of the clustering of a political party, and we study how clustering affects the expected election outcome. We first prove general results and then…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…