Measuring the Compactness of Political Districting Plans

Roland Fryer () and Richard Holden

No 13456, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The United States Supreme Court has long recognized compactness as an important principle in assessing the constitutionality of political districting plans. We propose a measure of compactness based on the distance between voters within the same district relative to the minimum distance achievable -- which we coin the relative proximity index. We prove that any compactness measure which satisfies three desirable properties (anonymity of voters, efficient clustering, and invariance to scale, population density, and number of districts) ranks districting plans identically to our index. We then calculate the relative proximity index for the 106th Congress, requiring us to solve for each state's maximal compactness; an NP-hard problem. Using two properties of maximally compact districts, we prove they are power diagrams and develop an algorithm based on these insights. The correlation between our index and the commonly-used measures of dispersion and perimeter is -.22 and -.06, respectively. We conclude by estimating seat-vote curves under maximally compact districts for several large states. The fraction of additional seats a party obtains when their average vote increases is significantly greater under maximally compact districting plans, relative to the existing plans.

JEL-codes: H70 K19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-law and nep-pol
Note: LS PE POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Roland G. Fryer Jr. & Richard Holden, 2011. "Measuring the Compactness of Political Districting Plans," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 54(3), pages 493 - 535.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13456.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Measuring the Compactness of Political Districting Plans (2011)
Working Paper: Measuring the Compactness of Political Districting Plans (2011)
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:nbr:nberwo:13456

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13456

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().