![]() It has already been recognized several times by state and federal courts, but not with the unanimity required to systematically outlaw the practice of gerrymandering. ![]() President Obama once said “politicians picking their voters, and not the other way around.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich had to say about the issue “I think it’s wrong,”and “I think it leads to bad government.” Gerrymandering could potentially be seen as being in violation of the United States Constitution. “President Ronald Reagan once called for “an end to the antidemocratic and un-American practice of gerrymandering congressional districts,” characterizing the issue as “a national scandal.” There’s been congressional majorities in Georgia, Florida, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Texas gerrymander the competitiveness of their districts away, and states such as New Jersey, California, and New York redraw their districts in order to protect their necessary seats. “Several states implemented gerrymanders to create majority-minority districts, thereby empowering minority voting blocs in the electoral process”. Gerrymandering has been used to both help allow and stop minority voters. You spread them out into as many districts as possible in order to stop them from gaining sufficient influence in any one district. The second method, usually referred to as “cracking” is achieved by pretty much diluting all the same voters. The first being by drawing districts in a way that packs voters of one kind into a single district, which basically helps stop them from influencing other districts. Congressional districts are gerrymandered usually in two ways. Gerrymandering can simply be described as drawing the boundaries of electoral districts with the main objective of determining the outcome of elections. Also, the finishing touch was when Elkanah Tisdale cartoon appeared in the Boston Gazette it graphically made the districts into an animal, which then finally gave birth to the term “The Gerry-mander”. One of the districts looked like it was shaped like a salamander so that’s how they got the mander part. His last name is the beginning part, of the term because in 1811 he signed a bill which gave an unfair representation and advantage to the Democratic Party over the Republicans. “Gerrymandering” comes from the name of former Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry. It can be generalised in many ways: our analysis is a priori (assuming formal voting and ignoring actual voting behaviour) but can be made empirical with voting data reflecting behaviour it examines the consequences of two blocs but can easily be extended to more.The practice of Gerrymandering has been around as long as the United States Constitution has. This technique of analysis has many real world applications to legislatures and international bodies. We briefly consider incentives to migrate between blocs. We show how the power indices of individual bloc members can be used to study the implications of the formation of blocs and how voting power varies as bloc size varies. We apply the Penrose index (the absolute Banzhaf index) to a hypothetical voting body with 100 members. We argue against the Shapley-Shubik index and show that anyway the Shapley-Shubik index per head is inappropriate for voting blocs. Our starting points are the papers by Riker (Behavioural Science, 1959, "A test of the adequacy of the power index") and Coleman (American Sociological Review, 1973, "Loss of Power"). Our analysis is theoretical, intended to contribute to a theory of positive political science in which social actors are motivated by the pursuit of power as measured by objective power indices. ![]() We investigate the method of power indices to study voting power of members of a legislature that has voting blocs.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |