Redistricting

With a reelection rate (In the House of Representatives.) of over 98%, are you sure there are really two classes?

Is it really 98%? As in less than 10 incumbents ousted per cycle? Seems awfully high.

As an example of perhaps a third class see http://www.elections.org.nz/esyst/repcomm.html, specifically the report from the Representation Commission. There are representitives of the Government and Opposition, and members from the administration – technically appointees but really part of the bureaucracy. I would suggest that the New Zealand model of MMP has been a good example of increasing third party representation and maintaining civil government.

Actually, I think that this aspect of the American system to some degree accounts for its stability. It probably also explains the dominance of two parties. Elections in the United States can’t be won suddenly. Rather, they are the culmination of a long-process that involves winning local elections, controlling state legislatures and governorships, influencing redistricting, electing the state election officials (Kathleen Harris) and so forth. The current Republican domination is the result of a thirty-year recovery effort rising from the ashes of Nixon’s resignation. In 1974, the Republicans controlled a small fraction of the state legislatures, they had something like 12 governors (that number may be a bit low), and the Democratic majorities in Congress were so dominent that it was said to be “veto proof.” That process was not reversed with Reagan’s election in 1980 — it took until 1994 for the Republicans to win control of the House of Representatives (which they had not controlled for more than 40 years!), and that victory was to some degree the product of Republican progress in the state legislatures before the 1990 redistricting. The point is, it takes a very long time to build a true electoral majority in the United States, and those who want to change the system to speed the process of electoral change do not, it seems to me, generally acknowledge that it will make American politics less stable.

1998 represented the recent high-water mark of the incumbency advantage. In other years the percentage of incumbents reelected is between 87% and 98%. One other thing to remember: incumbency reelection rates don’t include House Members who don’t run, for whatever reason. So the net number reelected is closer to 80%. I can’t find the numbers per election at the moment, but in 1998 395 of 435 from the previous Congress were reelected. While I agree that the rates of reelection are dispiriting, they are not a new phenomenon and therefore don’t explain current political problems. Incumbency rates have been high for decades; the lowest rate of reelection is 87% (since 1962).

What Matt Weiner said, the US is a very big country, and I see no reason that State politics should not have a very large second-order influence on national politics. If you want to influence redistricting, you should take strong interest in who your State Representative and State Senator are.

Real representation should not be automatic, but a reward for political involvement and activity.
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The 98% figure is horrible, but I am not sure how horrible. I opposed term limits. If we were to prefer our congressmen serve for say, at least six years on average, for the sake of experience, then we should look at turnover over ten or twenty year periods, not two.

Exactly how competitive would we like it to be? If the figure were a 50% turnover every election, we would have a nightmare.

There is a lot more variation in state laws governing redistricting than the discussion here presupposes. For example, Kentucky has a constitutional provision that limits the degree to which counties can be divided for purposes of representation. The 1992 state redistricting scheme was struck down by the Kentucky state supreme court, and a new scheme was created by the courts for the 94 elections.

The US state of New Jersey is another interesting example. In NJ, districts are formed by a redistricting commission formed of six appointees of each party, plus a thirteenth “tiebreaker” who is elected by a majority vote of the other twelve. I believe that in practice the thirteenth member has been an officially non-partisan academic or judge.

My understanding is that in the past, this has worked out by the Republicans and Democrats separately working out their own proposals, which are presented to the non-partisan member, who then chooses the plan he or she finds to be the most “fair”. At very least, this system will encourage the parties not to go overboard when formulating their plans, though they can probably get some considerable agreement on protecting the status quo…

Regarding the two classes of country: It is an article of perverse pride among certain conservatives and libertarians here that “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.” I’ve never quite understood why they think that that is a good thing, since the list of nations which are demonstrably republics but not democracies is similar to your class one, above, and congruent with the conservative/libertarian definition of evil.

Although I’ve never heard a conservative or libertarian voice pride in the US being ‘a republic, not a democracy’ perhaps they mean a) the federal structure, which is hardly unique, though they may think it is, or b) more checks and balances on majoritarianism and more limited power to the federal gov’t?

I don’t know if the latter is actually true compared to other countries though … surely there must be other federal republics out there… Germany? Canada? How are their checks on majoritarianism?