Legislative Apportionment Research Articles

Recognizing Communities of Interest in a Legislative Apportionment Plan

Recognizing Communities of Interest in a Legislative Apportionment Plan

The bargaining range in legislative district apportionment

One of the few “laws” of political science is the fairly regular relationship in any given plurality electoral system known as thecube law, transforming vote shares into seat shares. In this paper, we develop an altogether different and more robust paradigm relating seats to votes which generates similar results as the cube law. In our model, political parties bargain with each other for an expected number of seats using the ability to gerrymander in determining their bargaining strength. We find that an arbitrated solution to the seat-vote allocation problem generates solutions remarkably similar to the conventional cube-law-based solutions. Thus our model can in some way replace the cube law paradigm. With our model, we are able to evaluate the impact ofBaker v. Carr (1962) on gerrymandering. We also find that proportional representation results can be achieved within our model by allowing non-zero population deviations between districts.

State legislative apportionment: legal principles in empirical perspective

This paper considers contemporary legal standards for state legislative apportionment from an empirical perspective. Analysis of longitudinal data demonstrates numerous disparities between legal principles and empirical realities of apportionment. The courts have yet to resolve fundamental theoretical and practical questions concerning state legislative apportionment.

Toward consistent legal standards of state legislative apportionment

Toward consistent legal standards of state legislative apportionment

Some Properties of Divisor Methods for Legislative Apportionment and Proportional Representation

Some rather elegant properties of linear divisor methods are derived and used to establish upper and lower bounds on the possible variation between apportionment and exact quota entitlement. A probability distribution is derived for this variation, and it is shown that the probability of the variation exceeding one seat is very small with the major fractions linear divisor method.A less rigorous analysis of the nonlinear equal proportions method shows that in practice it is very similar to the major fractions method, but with a very slight bias in favor of small parties (or states). It is concluded that there is no “best” apportionment method, but a knowledge of the properties of the various methods enables a political choice of the most appropriate method.

Some Properties of Divisor Methods for Legislative Apportionment and Proportional Representation

Some rather elegant properties of linear divisor methods are derived and used to establish upper and lower bounds on the possible variation between apportionment and exact quota entitlement. A probability distribution is derived for this variation, and it is shown that the probability of the variation exceeding one seat is very small with the major fractions linear divisor method.A less rigorous analysis of the nonlinear equal proportions method shows that in practice it is very similar to the major fractions method, but with a very slight bias in favor of small parties (or states). It is concluded that there is no “best” apportionment method, but a knowledge of the properties of the various methods enables a political choice of the most appropriate method.

FORTRAN program for computing a measure of the population quality of Legislative apportionment

Some interest has been shown in the second writer's measure of the population quality of legislative apportionment (Kaiser, 1968). Unfortunately, while this index appears to have some theoretical elegance, its computation requires, at least, a desk electronic calculator with a logarithmic routine, or preferably, a full-blown high-speed electronic computer. In this note, we give a FORTRAN program developed on a CDC 3600 computer for determining this measure. The required inputs to the program are: K, the number of legislative districts; ENJ(J), J : I,K, the vector of district populations. The outputs of the programs are: K, the number of legislative districts; ENJ(J), J = 1, K, immediately after input the vector of district populations which we labeled N(J); EN, the total population across districts which we labeled N; AVE, the average district population; ENJ(J), J = 1, K, at the end of the program the vector of district population ratios which we labeled R(J); G, the geometric mean of the population ratios; B, the measure of the population quality of legislative apportionment. A sample output based on California's delegation to the United States House of Representatives, 89th Congress is provided in Table 1. The program without formal input-output statement follows.

ALLOCATE: A COMPUTER MODEL FOR SALES TERRITORY PLANNING

ABSTRACTRecent years have witnessed a renewal of interest in the application of management science techniques to personal selling related problems. Some early applications are described in [2] [7]. Cloonan has employed simulation in examination of the salesman routing problem [3] [4]. Lodish, in CALLPLAN, has devised an interactive call planning system designed to assist sales management and/or salesmen in allocating sales call time more efficiently [6]. Armstrong has devised a system he labels SCHEDULE which estimates the value of calls on accounts [1]. Hess and Samuels have designed a computer based sales districting model which is an analogue of a legislative apportionment model [5]. The objective of this paper is to explore the nature of a call planning system entitled ALLOCATE. ALLOCATE was designed to be employed by upper sales management either as an input device for sales management decisions such as sales‐territory‐size, or as a vehicle for determining the effects of alternative call allocation strategies on territorial revenue over multiple time periods.

Legislative Apportionment and Fiscal Policy in the American States

ELIBERATE changes in major public policy are seldom dramatic, tending to come instead in minor increments. Only in retrospect can these increments be totaled in a way that enables whole epochs of policy change to be clearly identified. The transition from a patronage to a merit public service was surely epochal, but the policy was changed gradually by minor increments. And so it has been in the widening of the franchise, the regulation of industry and commerce, the expansion of government's responsibility for the poor, municipal reform, and other major epochs in American politics. The incremental character of policy change has always provided a challenge to the political scientist. As he develops hypotheses asserting relationships between policy and policy results, he has great difficulty identifying and measuring specific policy changes and tracing them to particular changes in policy results. As a question of policy, the apportionment of state legislative bodies has been an exception to these generalizations for several reasons. First, apportionment is rather easy to measure. Second, there is no dearth of hypothesized relationships about the quality of the apportionment of state legislative bodies and the policy behavior of those bodies. Third, the change from general malapportionment to relative equity occurred, in policy-making terms, during a very short span of time. Between the Supreme Court's decision in 1962 and 1968 all significant malapportionment in state legislatures had virtually disappeared. Fourth, because reapportionment was more dramatic than most policy change, it is presumed to be easier to trace apportionment equalization to changes in policy outcome. For these reasons, almost all studies of policy results and their correlates include a measure of apportionment as a potential predictor. The results have not been impressive. The three best known measures of apportionment (Schubert-Press, Dauer-Kelsay, David-Eisenberg) have not been robust determinants of either expenditure or non-expenditure policy outcomes. Thomas Dye's well-known analysis of policy outcomes in the American states concludes that legislative apportionment is unimportant as an indicator of policy behavior. All of his political measures are similarly unimpressive as predictors: .. . the political choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy

Legislative Apportionment and Fiscal Policy in the American States

Legislative Apportionment and Fiscal Policy in the American States

The Policy Impact of Reapportionment

A considerable amount of conflict has been generated over the selection of legal standards for legislative apportionment. Prior to 1962, seats in state legislatures were generally assigned to counties. In some houses of some state legislatures, a limited number of additional seats were given to the most populated districts. Population (size) was seldom used, however, either as the sole basis for designing districts or as the sole basis for determining the number of seats for given districts. With the development of the social force of urbanization, a limited number of counties became the residence for a majority of the citizens. Since state legislatures continued to operate with counties as the fundamental unit of legislative apportionment, significant differences in the population of districts were created.

Legislative Apportionment: Multimember Districts and Fair Representation

Legislative Apportionment: Multimember Districts and Fair Representation

Experiences with a Sales Districting Model: Criteria and Implementation

Previously reported research documented the analogue between sales districting and legislative apportionment and described the first applications of computer techniques to the redrawing of sales and service areas. This paper summarizes what we have learned from these seven applications. We emphasize —motivation for re-alignment: Better coverage, fairer work load and change in size of sales force, —criteria for measuring “good” districting: Single, multiple and weighted measures of salesman activity; relationship to sales objectives; and correlation between activity measures, —implementation: Top management involvement and presentation to the sales force, —demonstrated effectiveness of the new alignments.

Economic Development, Representative Mechanisms, Administrative Professionalism and Public Policies: A Comparative Analysis of Within-State Distributions of Economic and Political Traits

In recent years a number of studies have compared the economic, political, and policy traits of the American states. The literature is marked by the use of quantitative measures, sophisticated statistical techniques, and a conscious effort on the part of scholars to make their work comparable-and thus additive-to the work of others. This article is written for the literature on comparative state politics. It is concerned with two traits that are found in much of the writing: (1) a tendency to limit political variables to the mechanisms of party, voting, and legislative apportionment; and (2) a tendency to rely on measures of average state economic and political traits rather than on measures that show how those traits are distributed within each state. This article introduces some new measures of state economic and political traits that emphasize the within-state distributions of economics and politics, and that tap the professionalism of administrative personnel as well as the representative mechanism of party competition. It reports state-by-state scores for each measure and demonstrates their usefulness in explaining state-by-state differences in measures of public policy. The measures of state politics that have been studied most in recent literature concern the degree of inter-party competition, the incidence of voter turnout, and the degree of urban-rural equity in legislative apportionment prior to Baker v Carr.' For the most

Sixties' reapportionment: Is it victory or delusion?

Development of new variables for equity and time to measure effects of legislative apportionment.

Representation and the Rotation Agreement

SThere is now a vast literature dealing with representation in general. To mention only a few: Malcolm E. Jewell (ed.), The Politics of Reapportionment (New York: Atherton Press, 1962); Robert B. MacKay, Reapportionment: The Law and Politics of Equal (New York: Twentieth-Century Fund, 1965); Howard D. Hamilton (ed.), Legislative Apportionment: Key to Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). However, these and other studies have barely mentioned the floterial district or the rotation agreement. Likewise, two leading studies of the constituencies did not treat these aspects of representation. See George H. Haynes, Representation in State Legislatures, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 16 (July and September 1900), 93-119 and 67-96, and Maurice Klain, A New Look at the Constituencies, American Political Science Review, 49 (December 1955), 1105-19. One book which does discuss the rotation agreement is Malcolm E. Jewell, Legislative in the Contemporary South (Durham: Duke U. Press, 1967). 2The questionnaire contained a total of 40 questions dealing with the legislators' personal and political background, their districts, and their experiences with and attitudes toward rotation agreements. Of the 83 completed questionnaires returned, 32 were from representatives who had worked under rotation agreements and 51 were from representatives who had not. Some might consider the sample too small to be representative of a universe, but we decided it was adequate for our purposes since the data obtained from the questionnaire were being supported by material from other sources, notably primary election results and interviews. Although we have not presented the data in tabular form in order to conserve space, the complete results of the questionnaire are available upon request to the author. Names, addresses, and districts for the legislators polled were obtained from the Tennessee Blue Book, 1951 through 1968.

How Apportionment With Selected Demographic Variables Relates To Policy Orientation

WITH Baker vs Carr' and the companion decision in Reynolds vs Sims2 legislative apportionment has won official recognition as a national political problem. As with most political phenomena, however, theoretical explanations as to the relationship between apportionment and the content of public policy have been obfuscated by old myths and modulated by new realities. Two apparently contradictory explanations subsequently will be examined here. They are: first, that an inverse relationship exists between representative imbalance and liberal-welfare orientation so that where malapportionment is flagrant liberal-welfare legislation is vitiated;3 and, second, that socioeconomic variables more readily explain the policy orientation of a legislature than structural variables, including the character of apportionment.4 While the former proposition has long passed as conventional wisdom among large numbers of political scientists, the weight of the present study with respect to the California state Senate gravitates toward the latter. Consequently, the thesis advanced here is that despite severe malapportionment, the policy orientation of the state Senate has been profoundly affected by the geographic distribution and actual overrepresentation of demographic variables positively associated with liberal-welfare legislation, variables which are not necessarily urban, and finally by the role conceptions and areal-focal orientation of state senators.5 The derivation of the thesis will follow an explanation of the method used to test it.

The Diffusion of Innovations among the American States

We are now in the midst of a notable revival of interest in the politics of the American states. During the last decade many studies have been conducted of the social, political and economic determinants of state policy outcomes. Several of these writers have argued that the relative wealth of a state, its degree of industrialization, and other measures of social and economic development are more important in explaining its level of expenditures than such political factors as the form of legislative apportionment, the amount of party competition, or the degree of voter participation. It has been claimed that such factors as the level of personal income or the size of the urban population are responsible both for the degree of participation and party competition in a state, and the nature of the system's policy outputs. By making this argument these writers have called into question the concepts of representation and theories of party and group conflict which, in one form or another, are the foundations for much of American political science.There is a growing awareness, however, that levels of expenditure alone are not an adequate measure of public policy outcomes. Sharkansky has shown, for example, that levels of expenditure and levels of actual service are seldom correlated; presumably, some states are able to reach given service levels with much less expenditure than others. Besides establishing the appropriate level of expenditure for a program, policy makers must also decide about the program's relative scope, provisions for appeal from administrative orders, eligibility requirements, the composition of regulatory boards and commissions, and many other matters which have little to do with money.

The Diffusion of Innovations among the American States

We are now in the midst of a notable revival of interest in the politics of the American states. During the last decade many studies have been conducted of the social, political and economic determinants of state policy outcomes. Several of these writers have argued that the relative wealth of a state, its degree of industrialization, and other measures of social and economic development are more important in explaining its level of expenditures than such political factors as the form of legislative apportionment, the amount of party competition, or the degree of voter participation. It has been claimed that such factors as the level of personal income or the size of the urban population are responsible both for the degree of participation and party competition in a state, and the nature of the system's policy outputs. By making this argument these writers have called into question the concepts of representation and theories of party and group conflict which, in one form or another, are the foundations for much of American political science.There is a growing awareness, however, that levels of expenditure alone are not an adequate measure of public policy outcomes. Sharkansky has shown, for example, that levels of expenditure and levels of actual service are seldom correlated; presumably, some states are able to reach given service levels with much less expenditure than others. Besides establishing the appropriate level of expenditure for a program, policy makers must also decide about the program's relative scope, provisions for appeal from administrative orders, eligibility requirements, the composition of regulatory boards and commissions, and many other matters which have little to do with money.

Malapportionment Party Competition, and the Functional Distribution of Governmental Expenditures

Most students of American politics traditionally have argued that it is desirable that legislative apportionment systems conform as closely as possible to an ideal of numerical equality, and that it is desirable that major political parties actively compete for elective office. Admittedly this argument has been in large part only implicit, but, since most theoretical argument in political science has been implicit, this does not imply that apportionment or party competition have not been considered to be important by students of politics. Indeed several recent articles in professional journals have been published which seem to derive at least a portion of their appeal andraison d'êtrefrom a “demonstration” that students of politics have been guilty of the sin of credulity by holding these implicit beliefs.The tone of much of this work is aptly expressed by the title of a popularizing article by David Brady and Douglas Edmonds, “One Man, One Vote—So What?” Brady and Edmonds—after some extensive, but, unfornately not very discriminating statistical computations—concluded “that the whole Pandora's box of evil consequences which supposedly result from malapportionment—from right-to-work laws to not spending enough on school children—really has little to do with malapportionment.” Although somewhat more cautious in his approach, Thomas R. Dye reached the similar conclusion that “on the whole, the policy choices of malapportioned legislatures are not noticeably different from policy choices of well-apportioned legislatures.”