Big City vs. the Great Outdoors: Voter Distribution and How It Affects Gerrymandering
Big City vs. the Great Outdoors: Voter Distribution and How It Affects Gerrymandering
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大城市与户外：选民分布及其如何影响选区划分
DOI：
10.24963/ijcai.2018/14
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
5.4
通讯作者：
Tyrone Strangway
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
A. Borodin;Omer Lev;Nisarg Shah;Tyrone Strangway
选区划分是政党操纵选区边界以最大限度地增加其获胜选区数量的过程。人口趋势显示，居住地和政党归属之间的相关性越来越强;一些政党的支持者聚集在城市，而其他人则留在农村地区。我们从理论和实证两方面研究了这种趋势对一个政党在两党模型（“城市党”和“农村党”）中重新划分选区的能力的影响。沿着的方式，我们提出了一个定义的一方的gerrymandering权力，并在大的情况下，近最佳gerrymandering的算法方法。
我们的研究结果表明，除了一个相当小的集中城市政党的选民，一个政党的gerrymandering权力几乎完全取决于浓度的水平，而不是党的人口的份额。随着党派分离的加剧，两党的不公正划分权力趋于一致，因此每个政党都可以不公正地划分选区，以获得略高于其投票份额的保证，最终带来更具代表性的结果。此外，各政党之间似乎存在不对称的不公正划分选区的权力，农村政党更有能力进行不公正划分选区。
Gerrymandering is the process by which parties manipulate boundaries of electoral districts in order to maximize the number of districts they can win. Demographic trends show an increasingly strong correlation between residence and party affiliation; some party’s supporters congregate in cities, while others stay in more rural areas. We investigate both theoretically and empirically the effect of this trend on a party's ability to gerrymander in a two-party model ("urban party" and "rural party"). Along the way, we propose a definition of the gerrymandering power of a party, and an algorithmic approach for near-optimal gerrymandering in large instances.
Our results suggest that beyond a fairly small concentration of urban party's voters, the gerrymandering power of a party depends almost entirely on the level of concentration, and not on the party's share of the population. As partisan separation grows, the gerrymandering power of both parties converge so that each party can gerrymander to get only slightly more than what its voting share warrants, bringing about, ultimately, a more representative outcome. Moreover, there seems to be an asymmetry between the gerrymandering power of the parties, with the rural party being more capable of gerrymandering.