Phil Henshaw posted a comment (via Aleks) on my entry on redistricting. I’ll repeat Henshaw’s comments, followed by my reactions.

Phil Henshaw writes,

Redistricting for better debates

I [Henshaw] also don’t think the objective of redistricting should be to have elections produce party representation to match voter affiliation. Glaring asymmetry is just a symptom. I would more favor having districts drawn so every community would have good debates leading up to elections. Removing the need to debate the issues is what I see as the real crime of politicians drawing safe districts for themselves. It’s been cited by the reformist state senator Eric Schneiderman, among others, as a main source of New York’s perennial political gridlock. Compromise becomes unnecessary and irrelevant. I also know other people who’d like to know how to solve this.

What I’d like is a way to draw election districts using a statistical model that would maximize swing districts, where the unpredictable voters hold the balance of power. I don’t actually know how to write a map drawing rule for equal population districts to do that, but I assume there are lots of ways, some more or less desirable for other reasons. You’d have to experiment with it. Granted, almost anything would be better than the present arrangement where politicians can treat voters as property to be packaged for their own convenience.

On thing I’d like is if redistricting both maximized swing districts, and also respected natural community boundaries. One way to do that would be to let everyone “vote” the boundaries of their own perceived neighborhood. It could be done with crude or fancy tools, basically letting people draw on a map what they think of as their neighborhood and look at the overlay. Do it with sophisticated statistics, or just view the composite in Photoshop and adjust the levels and contrast. The rule I’d have in mind is that district boundaries not divide a cohesive neighborhood more than once. I think local community structures are something to value and make important again, and this is one way to do it.

I’d also put some value on diversity in other variables, income and cultural diversity, for example. If you put too high a value on assuring diversity in every district, of course, it could have negative effects. Then every debate would become bland and might turn on the same homogenous inconclusiveness. One thing you want in good debates is good interplay between the local debates. I’m sure we could make headway with how to write the design rules if we understood now really important it is to the health of our democracy and the welfare of the Earth in the both the near and long term. We may be at a special moment of crisis right now, but life is perennially at moments of crisis, and our supposedly liberating form of government seems perennially subject to the abuse of power or frozen in stasis partly because of this minor design flaw.

My comments: Phil H. is setting up several different goals, the most important of which, I think, are (1) increasing the number of “swing” districts with close elections, and (2) having a diverse population in every district. He also has a goal of better debates, but presumably this would be more likely to happen if elections were closer. And he mentions the idea of preserving community boundaries–this is always a goal in redistricting, I think, but my impression is that redistricters give up on this one because of the requirement that districts have equal populations.

The specific idea of having people vote on their communities is interesting; perhaps it could be tried in local elections. (Maybe it’s more difficult in Congressional districts with 700,000 people each.)

Anyway, the only point I wanted to make is that the goal of having more close elections is in direct conflict with proportionality. It’s not in conflict with symmetry, but it’s in conflict with proportionality. Proportionality implies a swing ratio of 1, and having many close districts implies a higher swing ratio. In England and the U.S., a swing ratio of 3 has tradtionally been thought of as a Good Thing, with lower values suggesting serious problems, the decline of democracy, etc. But in Europe, any swing ratio greater than 1 is considered a violation of proportionality and thus a Bad Thing. On the other hand, countries with proportional representation tend to have more than two parties, so that you can have a change in power without a large change in votes or in seats for the major political groupings.

This is not to criticize Phil H.’s proposal, just to point out that the goal of having closer elections must be considered in the context of other aspects of the electoral system. Yet another issue is that if there are more close elections, we’d expect to have more elections where the vote-count is contested. This is fine with me–it’s just funny to sometimes see proposals that are designed to reduce the number of electoins that would be decided by just a few votes. That’s what close elections are all about, ultimately–you can’t get around it.

(See also my 1992 paper in Chance for more on this.)