So what would have changed in regards to US politics and domestic/international policies if Gerrymandering(gerrymandering is the practice of making the congressional districts be convuluted and onyl favoring one paerty) was outlawed in 1888? The law in question mandates that all states have non-partisan commissions on the model of present day Iowa.
Straha wrote: > So what would have changed in regards to US politics and > domestic/international policies if Gerrymandering(gerrymandering is the > practice of making the congressional districts be convuluted and onyl > favoring one paerty) was outlawed in 1888? The law in question mandates > that all states have non-partisan commissions on the model of present > day Iowa.
It is curious. Canada created non-partisan redistricting a while back (in fact one of my professors was on a boundary commission, another investigating a possibl transition to PR in Ontario) while the U.S election institutions are both highly partisan and highly balkanzied. One would think the progressives would have dealt with it, as they did with municipal government.
Courts hate getting stuck in sensitive issues Judges define sensitive issues as "a decision that will piss off the politicians who decide on my raise this year." Given a choice, they will not deal with it.
So what if there is a statute on the books saying gerrymanders are illegal? Judges are going to be reluctant to rule in the affirmative in such a case. And it is tough to define a gerrymander: as most countries are not laid out in perfect squares and have distinct and uneven population concentrations, An irregular shape, by itself, ought not automatically invalidate a voting district.
So long as there is a law that requires that each district has roughly the same number of people in it, gerrymanders are okay, tolerated by most people. Only twice in my life do I recall a lot of steam over the bounderies of election districts ___ California under Phil Burton's map and Texas under Tom DeLay's map. Both of those gerrymanders were drawn for partisan advantage and the judiciary utterly failed to do anything.
> So what would have changed in regards to US politics and > domestic/international policies if Gerrymandering(gerrymandering is the > practice of making the congressional districts be convuluted and onyl > favoring one paerty) was outlawed in 1888?
Actually, many gerrymanders are bipartisan--they create convoluted districts to favor incumbents of *both* parties.
Incidentally, Congress did pass some laws which could be considered anti- gerrymandering:
"An apportionment act in 1872 (17 Stat. 28) again reiterated the requirement of districts composed of contiguous territory and added that they should contain "as nearly as practicable an equal number of inhabitants." The apportionment act of 1882 (22 Stat. 5) and an act in 1891 repeated the provisions of contiguous territory and equal population of the 1872 act. An apportionment act in 1901 (31 Stat. 733) added that districts should not only be of equal population and contiguous but also be of "compact territory." These provisions were also included in 1911's apportionment act (37 Stat. 13).
"Change in Requirements after 1932 Court Ruling
"In 1929 Congress passed a combined census-reapportionment bill which established a permanent method for apportioning House seats according to each census. This bill neither repealed nor restated the requirements of the previous apportionment acts -- that districts be contiguous, compact, and equally populated.
"It was not clear if these requirements were still in effect until the Supreme Court ruled in 1932 in Wood v. Broom that the provisions of each apportionment act affected only the apportionment for which they were written. Thus the size and population requirements, last stated in the act of 1911, expired immediately with the enactment of the subsequent apportionment act.
"Thus, the permanent act of 1929 gave little direction concerning congressional districting. It merely established a system in which House seats would be reallocated to states which have shifts in population." http://www.fairvote.org/reports/monopoly/mast.html
So perhaps a question is: What if Congress had retained the compactness (as well as equal population) requirements of the 1901 and 1911 Act--and the courts had actually enforced them? Of course "compact" is a somewhat vague standard, and in any event one can have districts that are neatly shaped (and approximately equal in population) and still designed to give one party an advantage.
One interesting thing about gerrymandering is that it does not seem to have prevented the party getting the largest nationwide popular vote for House seats gaining a majority in the House in any election since that for the 78th Congress in 1942. http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/85c481b41dbb1698 (As I noted there, the fact that the Democrats narrowly retained control that year, despite the Republicans getting slightly more votes, "is easily explained by the fact that many of the Democrats elected in 1942 were elected from southern districts where hardly anyone voted in the general elections at all...") I suppose that this is partly due to the gerrymanders of each side cancelling each other out, and partly due to the fact that over-ambitious partisan gerrymandering can backfire within a few years: if you seek to defeat too many of the opposition party's Representatives, you may weaken some of your own (though this weakness may only become evident when the political tide turns against your party in a later election). What happened in Pennsylvania this year is a good example of this.: see the Wall Street Journal article at http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116312053645719332-h26eY_g0XmF...
> The law in question mandates > that all states have non-partisan commissions on the model of present > day Iowa.
Back in 1888 this idea would have appealed only to a few Mugwumps. Most members of Congress believed in robust partisanship. True, they did agree to limited civil service reform, but there was much more public demand for that (especially after Garfield's assassination) than there was to change congresional redistricting. After all, gerrymandering in those days did not prevent *drastic* shifts in Congress when public opinion changed: consider how in 1894 the House went from a 218-124 Democratic majority to a 254-93 Republican one! http://clerk.house.gov/histHigh/Congressional_History/partyDiv.html One can actually argue that the current gerrymander-riddled system is fairer than this, because it reflects the fact that even in "landslide" years voters are fairly evenly divided between the two major parties. True, the gerrymanders, partisan and bipartisan, leave relatively few seats "in play" but these seats are sufficient to allow changes in public opinion, as in 1994 and 2006, to be represented with reasonable fairness in the makeup of the House. As against this, of course, one can argue that while gerrymandering may not result in any great unfairness in the total *number* of Representatives from each party, it does have an effect (which some regard as undesirable) on how they vote, encouraging a greater number of "extremists" and fewer "moderates" in each party than if there were more competitive districts.
Probably very little would be different. Even with gerrymandering, legislatures frequently switch in states in which there are two viable parties (perhaps ignoring New York in which each party controls one house). Single party dominance is usually due to local ideology rather than gerrymandering. Also, votes in gerrymandered districts tend to be resentful, creating an opening for upsets. BUT IF YOU WANT A DIFFERENT SYSTEM: ask what proportional representation might mean to the US.
: So what would have changed in regards to US politics and : domestic/international policies if Gerrymandering(gerrymandering is the : practice of making the congressional districts be convuluted and onyl : favoring one paerty) was outlawed in 1888? The law in question mandates : that all states have non-partisan commissions on the model of present : day Iowa.
Aaron Kuperman wrote: > Probably very little would be different. Even with gerrymandering, > legislatures frequently switch in states in which there are two viable > parties (perhaps ignoring New York in which each party controls one > house). Single party dominance is usually due to local ideology rather > than gerrymandering. Also, votes in gerrymandered districts tend to be > resentful, creating an opening for upsets. BUT IF YOU WANT A DIFFERENT > SYSTEM: ask what proportional representation might mean to the US.
A PR system needs strong parties work, something the U.S lacks.
> Aaron Kuperman wrote: >> BUT IF YOU WANT A DIFFERENT >> SYSTEM: ask what proportional representation might mean to the US.
> A PR system needs strong parties work, something the U.S lacks.
Actually, proportional represeantion has been tried in the US--on the municipal level.
"In New York City, fear of communism proved the undoing of proportional representation. Although one or two Communists had served on the PR- elected city council since 1941, it was not until the coming of the Cold War that Democratic party leaders were able to effectively exploit this issue. As historian Robert Kolesar discovered, the Democrats made every effort in their repeal campaign to link PR with Soviet Communism, describing the single transferable vote as 'the political importation from the Kremlin,' 'the first beachhead of Communist infiltration in this country,' and 'an un-American practice which has helped the cause of communism and does not belong in the American way of life.'(3) This 'red scare' campaign resulted in the repeal of PR by an overwhelming margin.
"Just as the adoption of the single transferable vote in New York City prompted other cities to consider this reform, its well-publicized defeat there also encouraged repeal efforts in other PR cities. PR was abandoned in neighboring Long Beach and Yonkers in 1947 and 1948. Repeal campaigns also won in Boulder (1947), Toledo (1949), and Wheeling (1951). The PR movement never recovered from these defeats; and although supporters remained optimistic, the 1950s saw the repeal of PR in one city after another. By 1962, only Cambridge, Massachusetts retained this system.
"While the repeal of proportional representation in these American cities is taken by opponents as evidence that this voting system failed, proponents argue that it is more accurate to conclude that this system was rejected because it worked too well. They note that PR worked well in throwing party bosses out of government--bosses who never relented in their attempts to regain power--and it worked well in promoting the representation of racial, ethnic, and ideological minorities that were previously shut out by the winner-take-all system. For advocates of PR, then, it was the very political successes of this system that set the stage for a political backlash that was effectively exploited by its opponents and eventually led to the its demise in most of these cities."
See also Robert J. Colesar, "Communism, Race, and the Defeat of Proportional Representation in Cold War America." http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/kolesar.htm This article raises an interesting what-if: Suppose PR advocates had linked themselves with the Civil Rights Revolution, and had put more emphasis on the potential of PR to elect more members of ethnic minorities? True, this would make PR more unpopular than ever with many whites, yet it would at least give it a substantial favorable constituency in minority communities. (And in any event, PR could hardly have fared *worse* than it did in OTL!) Colesar explains the failure of advocates to press this point by noting that "While PR proponents had always vigorously championed the utility of the representation of minority opinion, they were less enthusiastic about racial, ethnic, or religious group representation. They never denied the reality that voters made judgments on such grounds, and never denied their right to do so. But they were not interested in encouraging voting by racial preference, and went to some pains to demonstrate that under PR, such divisions played no greater a role that they did in districting..."
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