The Sunfish Against the Octopus: Opposing Compactness to Gerrymandering

Nicola Apollonio, Ronald I. Becker, Isabella Lari, Federica Ricca and Bruno Simeone
Additional contact information
Nicola Apollonio: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
Ronald I. Becker: University of Cape Town
Isabella Lari: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
Federica Ricca: Università de L’Aquila
Bruno Simeone: Università di Roma “La Sapienza”

A chapter in Mathematics and Democracy, 2006, pp 19-41 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Gerrymandering - the artful and partisan manipulation of electoral districts - is a well known pathology of electoral systems, especially majoritarian ones. In this paper, we try to give theoretical and experimental answers to the following questions: 1) How much biased can the assignment of seats be under the effect of gerrymandering? 2) How effective is compactness as a remedy against gerrymandering? Accordingly, the paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, a highly stylized combinatorial model of gerrymandering is studied; in the second one, a more realistic multiobjective graph-partitioning model is adopted and local search techniques are exploited in order to find satisfactory district designs. In a nutshell, our results for the theoretical model mean that gerrymandering is as bad as one can think of and that compactness is as good as one can think of. These conclusions are confirmed to a large extent by the experimental results obtained with the latter model on some medium-large real-life test problems.

Keywords: Gerrymandering; partition; graph coloring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-540-35605-9_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540356059

DOI: 10.1007/3-540-35605-3_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Choice and Welfare from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().