Interesting bit on US Congress and compromise: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/as-swing-districts-dwindle-can-a-divided-house-stand/?hp&gwh=
The short version: the number of very safe Republican and Democrat seats have been increasing over time, reducing the incentives for Representatives to compromise.
Mind your own affairs :angry:
Quote from: derspiess on December 27, 2012, 04:24:32 PM
Mind your own affairs :angry:
I have interests in the US. As such, they are my affairs.
Not exactly breaking news Yake.
I think gerrymandering is the most damaging remnant of flawed democracy we have left. Slaying it would be the next great leap forward for democracy.
Unfortunately, I just don't see how it can be slayed by the same politicians that enjoy the spoils of the rotten system. I can definitely see where Supreme Court has the mandate to do something about it, but unfortunately this Court is not exactly known for strengthening democratic institutions.
Even if we were to outlaw gerrymandering we would still have self-segregation.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 04:27:18 PM
Not exactly breaking news Yake.
I didn't suggest it was. Sometimes it's nice to have a look at the numbers.
Ugh. It's like something that Dguller would jerk off to.
Quote from: Jacob on December 27, 2012, 04:50:10 PM
Quote from: derspiess on December 27, 2012, 04:45:18 PMDon't tread on me.
Don't be a whiner.
He's a Republican. It's not like he can be a
winner, he has take what he can get.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 04:31:39 PM
Even if we were to outlaw gerrymandering we would still have self-segregation.
Yeah, so? How is that nearly as bad as compared to a bunch of politicians getting together and deciding on how much power your vote has?
Quote from: DGuller on December 27, 2012, 04:57:57 PM
Yeah, so? How is that nearly as bad as compared to a bunch of politicians getting together and deciding on how much power your vote has?
I'm not sure it is, and I certainly didn't say it is. But even in the absence of gerrymandering we would still have a large number of safe seats.
I think the argument against gerrymandering isn't that it creates partisanship, but that it's corrupt.
Jolly Olde England is where the term actually comes form, and had extreme forms of gerrymandering, rotten boroughs and other such craziness for many years. I imagine the politicians of the time benefited from the status quo. So how did the UK get rid of gerrymandering?
I'm almost positive it's named after some Massachussets politician named Gerry something or other.
Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 27, 2012, 05:14:47 PM
Jolly Olde England is where the term actually comes form, and had extreme forms of gerrymandering, rotten boroughs and other such craziness for many years. I imagine the politicians of the time benefited from the status quo. So how did the UK get rid of gerrymandering?
Um... no. It's from Boston.
Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering)
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 05:17:06 PM
I'm almost positive it's named after some Massachussets politician named Gerry something or other.
:yes:
Elbridge Gerry
Actually based on my exhaustive 30 second Wikipedia research, it appears the term Gerrymandering actually comes from Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, who used it notoriously while governor of Massachusetts. That being said, while wrong about the name the point stands...it was historically common in other countries like the UK but was done away with. How did those measures get enacted over the objections (presumably) of the people who benefited from them?
Looks like I'm not the only one using Wikipedia today.
Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 27, 2012, 05:19:48 PM
Looks like I'm not the only one using Wikipedia today.
I knew before I checked Wiki, but wanted to provide verification of my memory. :sleep:
I've also never heard of gerrymandered boroughs in England.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 05:00:24 PM
Quote from: DGuller on December 27, 2012, 04:57:57 PM
Yeah, so? How is that nearly as bad as compared to a bunch of politicians getting together and deciding on how much power your vote has?
I'm not sure it is, and I certainly didn't say it is. But even in the absence of gerrymandering we would still have a large number of safe seats.
Of course, but at least it won't be by design. And you don't really need to specifically design uncertainty into the seats, you just have to make enough of them responsive to what is actually happening on the ground.
Sure, urban Congressional seats will always go overwhelmingly to the Democrats, and rural to Republicans. However, if districts were defined solely by the geographical numbers, there have to be some seats that would fall in the middle, and be sensitive to shifts in public sentiment.
Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 27, 2012, 05:19:48 PM
Looks like I'm not the only one using Wikipedia today.
Some people actually know stuff. You are confusing Rotten Boroughs with Gerrymandering. Rotten Boroughs occur when the legislative districts don't change and you have people who end up representing ghost towns and the like.
Quote from: Razgovory on December 27, 2012, 05:28:06 PM
Some people actually know stuff. You are confusing Rotten Boroughs with Gerrymandering. Rotten Boroughs occur when the legislative districts don't change and you have people who end up representing ghost towns and the like.
I believe rotten boroughs resulted from large landowners who had the ability to tell the handful of voters in the borough how to vote, because they were all his tenants.
At least that's how it works in the Aubrey and Maturin novels.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 05:22:00 PM
I've also never heard of gerrymandered boroughs in England.
Would depend on how you define it. If you mean it in the American sense, where they try to draw borders of equal size but with "desired political outcomes" that would not be the case in British/English history as I don't believe they had any sort of normal process for regularly redistricting, nor was it even thought you needed equally sized districts. That's how rotten boroughs came to be, towns would be given representation and 800 years later would be abandoned so usually a local noble would control the vote by bribing/threatening the 20 or so residents into voting his interests.
But if you define gerrymandering as "drawing of political boundaries to effect political outcomes", then yes, definitely before the Boundary Commission Act the British definitely did that, as it appears did every English speaking former British colony at some point in their history. I understood gerrymandering to be a general term relating to drawing the borders to affect political outcomes, in contravention to "norms" of geography.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 05:35:02 PM
Quote from: Razgovory on December 27, 2012, 05:28:06 PM
Some people actually know stuff. You are confusing Rotten Boroughs with Gerrymandering. Rotten Boroughs occur when the legislative districts don't change and you have people who end up representing ghost towns and the like.
I believe rotten boroughs resulted from large landowners who had the ability to tell the handful of voters in the borough how to vote, because they were all his tenants.
At least that's how it works in the Aubrey and Maturin novels.
That is the function not the cause.
Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 27, 2012, 05:18:13 PMThat being said, while wrong about the name the point stands...it was historically common in other countries like the UK but was done away with. How did those measures get enacted over the objections (presumably) of the people who benefited from them?
Nothing similar actually. The problem in the UK wasn't that politicians would create new seats or redistrict them but that we had ancient constituencies - virtually unchanged for centuries - which didn't reflect population changes and, especially with a restricted franchise, were often in the gift of individuals. Also, I think, the counties had two MPs and so did the historic boroughs.
So the issue wasn't gerrymandering but pocket boroughs and lack of representation. So it was addressed in the Great Reform Act and the Second Reform Act due to popular anger. I think there was also reforms after the First World War that made things like modern constituencies. Apparently the modern system of an independent commission drawing constituency boundaries roughly starts with reforms during the Second World War - so a time of consensual, technocratic politics. Though it's since been reformed.
It's probably significant that boundaries before then were set, I believe, by the Commons not by each county - so the urban and reformist interest could outvote those who gained from it which probably wouldn't be the case if, say, Old Sarum had to be abolished by Wiltshire.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 27, 2012, 05:35:02 PMI believe rotten boroughs resulted from large landowners who had the ability to tell the handful of voters in the borough how to vote, because they were all his tenants.
That's a pocket borough. A rotten borough is roughly what Raz described, like Old Sarum a 12th century constituency that by the time of the Great Reform Act was a set of ruins and fields that had 11 electors - all of whom were landowners who lived elsewhere.
Note that Nate Silver doesn't actually make the claim, at least in the article linked to, that the landslide districts necessarily has anything to do with gerrymandering. I'm not actually sure how much of it is actually related to gerrymandering or not. I know the FairVote website has highlighted some badly gerrymandered districts, but I haven't seen an analysis of the total numbers and how they effect elections.
A common falsehood that is asserted in Democratic circles is, Democrats won a "majority of the popular vote" in House elections in 2012, so the fact that they did not win a majority of House seats is evidence of gerrymandering. But in a first past the post voting system there are perfectly valid reasons a district basically drawn to maximize "compactness and geographic uniformity" (which is usually what non-partisan geographers claim should be the standard for district drawing) could still end up being a "landslide district."
So just the fact that the Democrats won more total votes in the 2012 House elections is no immediate evidence gerrymandering is the cause.
In the British elections in 2010, the Tories won 47% of the seats but only 36.1% of the popular vote. In 2005 Labour won an absolute majority of seats with only 35.2% of the popular vote.
So what is your explanation for the large discrepancy?
That's all true.
But current British politics is a bad comparison. In England we've got 3 parties and in Scotland and Wales 4 (Northern Ireland's altogether different). The only real comparison would be the 50s when Labour and the Tories between them routinely attracted around 95% of the vote. So, the Republicans won around 54% of the seats with 48% of the vote, which was around a million votes less than the Democrats got.
It's not unheard of in the US either, apparently it's happened four times before last in 1996 and before that 1942.
But, yeah it's not all necessarily about gerrymandering (though I think that's part of it) it can be a feature of an enthused base, for example in 1951 there was a swing to Labour but it apparently mostly happened in their safe seats while the Tories won the swing seats.
It'll probably be a combination of factors this year too. For example I believe Romney won independent voters so I can imagine that in the US equivalent of swing seats the Republicans did well, while a key thing for Obama was that his original coalition of minorities and college grad whites stuck together - I imagine often turning out in safe-ish Democratic areas.
Quote from: Razgovory on December 27, 2012, 06:00:27 PM
So what is your explanation for the large discrepancy?
Like Sheilbh, a combination of factors.
Gerrymandering is but one of those factors. Romney did a lot better among independents than McCain did, for example. So it isn't unreasonable to suspect that the GOP may have done well in districts with heavily split registration and with large independent numbers.
Many of the right were not enthusiastic about Romney, and some have said the GOP base didn't support him with turnout as they should have. If that is true (I haven't bothered to check) it could also mean in a lot of "landslide Republican districts" instead of winning 80-20% GOP, maybe the GOP only won 60-40. Then in the Democratic districts, where Obama did very well with his base of minorities, Obama won by more than 60-40. So in the Republican districts the GOP didn't do as well as they thought they would, in the Democratic districts the Democrats did very, very well.
FWIW I don't know if the GOP has
any districts that are as massively one party as the majority-minority districts in America. A black district is basically 90%+ going for the Democrats, and there are few analogues because even in strongly GOP country, many rural counties have viable white conservative Democrats who run and get at least 30-40% of the vote.
Quote from: OttoVonBismarck on December 27, 2012, 06:16:09 PM
Quote from: Razgovory on December 27, 2012, 06:00:27 PM
So what is your explanation for the large discrepancy?
Like Sheilbh, a combination of factors.
Gerrymandering is but one of those factors. Romney did a lot better among independents than McCain did, for example. So it isn't unreasonable to suspect that the GOP may have done well in districts with heavily split registration and with large independent numbers.
Many of the right were not enthusiastic about Romney, and some have said the GOP base didn't support him with turnout as they should have. If that is true (I haven't bothered to check) it could also mean in a lot of "landslide Republican districts" instead of winning 80-20% GOP, maybe the GOP only won 60-40. Then in the Democratic districts, where Obama did very well with his base of minorities, Obama won by more than 60-40. So in the Republican districts the GOP didn't do as well as they thought they would, in the Democratic districts the Democrats did very, very well.
FWIW I don't know if the GOP has any districts that are as massively one party as the majority-minority districts in America. A black district is basically 90%+ going for the Democrats, and there are few analogues because even in strongly GOP country, many rural counties have viable white conservative Democrats who run and get at least 30-40% of the vote.
That's not entirely an accident. The whole point of gerrymandering is to give your opponent 90% districts, and to give yourself 60% districts, and that's exactly the strategy that Republicans pursued in the many states that they managed to seize during anti-Obama hysteria.
It's a lot easier for Republicans though, as their voters don't tend to pack themselves into geographically small enclaves.
Down with foreigners.