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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

One of my professors at UT Dallas has a book that argues that districts in fact should be partisan. It's been a few years but the logic is something like if you've got a 50-50 district, you're gonna end up with 50% of the people in the district unhappy. Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.

Not sure if I believe him, but it's interesting.

Redistricting and Representation: Why Competitive Elections are Bad for America

https://www.amazon.com/Redistricting-Representation-Competit...

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That's a super interesting concept. I will look into it; book ordered! From a quick think through - I think that this argument may fall flat on 2 related ideas. 1. Data shows that when seats are more secure like you say (90-10 instead of 50-50), representatives often go towards the extremes of the political spectrum (on both sides). this leads to issue 2... 2. Voters are generally not strictly partisan - that is to say (purely as an example), while I may have right leaning thoughts on how to run the economy, I may have left leaning thoughts on social issues. If I'm in a district with someone that is far right or far left, a portion of the time they're always going to vote against my wishes. Am I better off in general? Hard to tell without getting more in depth on my preferences.

Could this be mitigated by having a system with more than two parties?

Multi party systems tend to favor the most ideologically driven actors in the system. An example of this is Israel.

Furthermore, American politics isn't two ideologies. Each party is composed of multiple groups that compete for dominance. Republicans have business interests, evangelicals, etc., while democrats have progressives, neoliberal, etc.

I'm not sure I follow. American politics isn't two ideologies, but it does have ideologies. Is it better to bundle up these dozens of ideologies and interests into two parties than to have ideologically driven parties?

Part of gerrymandering is diffusing the vote of your opponent among "safe" districts. Look at Austin, Texas for example[1]. One would imagine the city would vote as a block.

I do concede that odd shaped districts can be more representative. I've been told the "famously gerrymandered" Earmuff district in Illinois[2] actually represents a single Latino community that was split.

[1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/3468/h309.jpg [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...

I think single transferable vote is a much better way of addressing that criticism. We have it where I live and it has tended to produce fairly boring yet representative elections.

Ireland has it, I'm not sure you would call the last few elections "boring" (Probably more to do with the financial crisis hitting us like a ton of bricks though)

The problem is gerrymandering results in only one district that's 90-10 while 9 other districts are 55-45.

Without gerrymandering, districts would have a normal distribution from 60-40 to 40-60.

It doesn't seem implausible that like-minded people would choose to live near each other.

Most people don't chose, they are just born in some place and stay nearby.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...

And even when choosing, they do it for job, etc reasons, not necessarily or primarily with political criteria.

That's assuming a polarizing representative (one that 50% like and 50% are unhappy with. Could more balanced districts lead to more centrist representatives?

Maybe even having a system that makes more than two choices viable?

That position only proves true if you live in a society where compromise is seen as a negative.

I don't know when this shift occurred, but it is certainly the case now that any compromise is generally seen as a loss and failure to represent your constituents. Hence our very partisan climate and the increasing success of radical politicians. If all you have to do is vote the party line and never try to work things out, your job suddenly becomes quite easy to keep.

Now if things were to change and people would agree to discuss issues and meet midway, then more would get done and progress on long stalled issues would be made. In a country where small yet constant steps are being made, I would argue that the general populace would be far more happy than the one presented in that book by your professor.

There are issues where compromise is impossible. Reproductive rights, marriage equality, and separation of church and public schools come immediately to mind. There are also issues where compromise leads to a death of a thousand cuts with one position becoming more and more extreme to force movement in their preferred direction.

The basic problem is that government at all levels has too much power. Less coercion and more voluntarism is the only long term solution to battles over power.

But gerrymandering is ALSO an important factor behind today's political polarization.

In a district that's strongly biased one way or another (which is the goal of gerrymandering), the general election is a foregone conclusion: the nominee of the majority party will win, even if (as it's been famously demonstrated) he's dead, or if he endorses his opponent, etc.

The result is that the actual electoral process occurs during the party primaries. And middle-of-the-road folks are a lot less likely to participate in that. The make-up of the primary voters is far more extremist and partisan.

And so what we wind up with are candidates that are extremists partisans, and fewer candidates that are appealing to the median, centrist voter.

There's a lot of good comments pointing out potential flaws in his argument, but responding to yours since it's the most recent...

You're preaching to the choir. I disagreed with him at the time I read it and still do. The single party south is a "great" example of what happens when primaries become what matter.

On the other hand, the current political polarization and problems are due to the old system, so conceivably changing the structure could change things for the better. It's just fun to consider.

I'd also note that he worked in Congress (not elected) for awhile and taught for a couple decades, so his 160 page book anticipates a lot of the obvious criticisms thrown out here.

> Where as if you intentionally designed districts to be like like 90-10 (or whatever possible), more people are happy.

Right, and that's the right way to do it. The wrong, current way, is to design the districts so their own party has a slight majority everywhere, thus winning more seats overall, not a significant majority in the areas where they are strongest.

The problem is that there's a conflict of interest, so redistricting shouldn't be in the hands of the politicians with a vested interest in winning.

Except most people derive happiness from and prefer to have equitable power at the national level, not just who their personal congressperson is.

This is running on the egregious assumption that people can only choose one option to make them happy, and that there are only two options to choose from. It may be applicable now for the most part (when people worry about spoiling the vote, they will support one of the two) but in a situation where other parties have a serious chance of gaining a seat and people have multiple choices they approve of, this theory begins to break down.

Surely the point of a democratic election is for there to be the possibility of change? If every district is 90% in favour of one party or another then that will never happen. Assuming there are an equal number of districts then every election would be a tie, and any party that wanted to win would have to resort to gerrymandering in order to affect a change.

Many argue for multi-member districts to avoid that problem.

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