maxpalmer · HackerTrans

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Suppose you're defining as Party B, and you draw 8 majority-B districts (2:3) and 2 majority-A districts. Then, when Party A is combining, they would pair each of the majority-A districts with a majority-B district with a smaller margin, resulting in 2 A districts and 3 B districts. This is an improvement compared to if B drew 5 districts unilaterally, where it could draw 4 majority-B districts.

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

You're right that this method doesn't protect incumbents. However, protecting incumbency and avoiding open-seat elections isn't necessarily a bad thing, and could increase electoral competition in some places. Some states don't allow incumbency to be taken into account when redistricting already.

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Yes, that would work. The paper has a note about excluding districts like this:

> "Valid districts are contiguous and have equal population. Strict constraints on compactness, geographic splits, or other restrictions are not necessary, but such limitations could be included. However, valid districts may not include “donuts,” where one district entirely encircles another."

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Yes! A lot of modern political science research uses computational methods, big data, etc. Here are some interesting papers on redistricting, by the research group that wrote the package we use in this paper. https://alarm-redist.org/applications.html

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

Potentially in some form, but we haven't investigated it. The utility functions for each party would be very different. Instead of trying to maximize the seats that they win, parties would also need to think about the coalitions that could form if no party won a majority of the seats.

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

We have an analytic solution in the supplementary materials [1]. One of the biggest challenges to optimality proofs is how to capture the importance of geography as a constraint. I don't believe there are any papers on redistricting that include geographic constraints in analytic/formal solutions. That's why we prefer simulations for our main results.

[1]: https://static.cambridge.org/content/id/urn%3Acambridge.org%...

maxpalmer

hace 2 añosdiscuss

I'm one of the authors. Thanks for reading our paper. Happy to answer any questions.

If you're interested, here is a (still in-progress) simulator I wrote where you can try out Define-Combine on a simple grid. https://mpalmer.shinyapps.io/DefineCombine/

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