As long as this geographic polarization continues and Democrats remain an urban party, [Jonathan Rodden] says, they will continue to be dramatically underrepresented in legislative bodies.
Creatively drawn districts that benefit Republican majorities aren’t the main culprits, Rodden says. Rather, the simple fact that districts are drawn at all disadvantages Democrats.
“When you draw winner-take-all districts, it ends up overrepresenting Republicans,” Rodden says. “This is something that we often blame on gerrymandering, but it’s only strengthened and furthered by gerrymandering. We end up with a lot of bias against Democrats purely because of this spatial arrangement of politics.”
[…]In the United States, it would be possible to draw more competitive districts. But that would require a redistricting process that prioritized parity, Rodden says. “We certainly don’t have anything like that.”
Beyond that, the polarization of urban and rural interests could be diminished in a system with more parties, or one that doesn’t rely on geographic representation. “Proportional representation can have the impact of reducing this geographic cleavage that emerges so naturally in a place like the United States,” Rodden says.
“There is nothing about population density that automatically generates this kind of cleavage. There are lots of places that have cities and suburbs and rural areas — and suburbanization is not just an American phenomenon,” he says. “But single-member-district, majoritarian systems that produce two parties that hate each other — that’s the worst of all worlds.”
Source: Stanford University (May 2, 2017)
Subjects: America, Excerpts, International, Politics & Public Policy
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