Author : Charles S. Bullock
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 14,61 MB
Release : 2021-03-10
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 153814963X
A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title This authoritative overview of election redistricting at the congressional, state legislative, and local level provides offers an overview of redistricting for students and practitioners. The updated second edition pays special attention to the significant redistricting controversies of the last decade, from the Supreme Court to state courts.
Author : Thomas Brunell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 15,29 MB
Release : 2010-04-02
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1135925216
Pundits have observed that if so many incumbents are returned to Congress to each election by such wide margins, perhaps we should look for ways to increase competitiveness – a centerpiece to the American way of life – through redistricting. Do competitive elections increase voter satisfaction? How does voting for a losing candidate affect voters’ attitudes toward government? The not-so-surprising conclusion is that losing voters are less satisfied with Congress and their Representative, but the implications for the way in which we draw congressional and state legislative districts are less straightforward. Redistricting and Representation argues that competition in general elections is not the sine qua non of healthy democracy, and that it in fact contributes to the low levels of approval of Congress and its members. Brunell makes the case for a radical departure from traditional approaches to redistricting – arguing that we need to "pack" districts with as many like-minded partisans as possible, maximizing the number of winning voters, not losers.
Author : Richard L. Hasen
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 11,86 MB
Release : 2018-03-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0300228643
An eye-opening look at the influential Supreme Court justice who disrupted American jurisprudence in order to delegitimize opponents and establish a conservative legal order
Author : J. Michael Bitzer
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 168 pages
File Size : 50,77 MB
Release : 2021-09-14
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 3030807479
This book gives a historical and contemporary overview of the redistricting process, using North Carolina for the different political, electoral, and legal issues and debates over the practice of drawing legislative district boundaries. Redistricting has been characterized as “the most political activity in America,” and North Carolina has often been at the heart of recent controversies over this particular activity. In fact, the Tar Heel state was once described as “long notorious for (its) outrageous reapportionment.” Through legislative construction to significant legal challenges, the Tar Heel state has been a noted case study for the past thirty years. From the contentious issues of redistricting principles to the matters of gerrymandering, based on race and politics, North Carolina’s past three decades have seen major U.S. Supreme Court cases deal with redistricting controversies. By exploring this state’s dealings with gerrymandering and redistricting, readers will have a better sense of the dynamics facing the nation as it confronts the 2020 Census and the subsequent redistricting efforts in 2021.
Author : Michael Waldman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 30,47 MB
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1982198931
On cover, the word "right" has an x drawn over the letter "r" with the letter "f" above it.
Author : David Daley
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 286 pages
File Size : 38,31 MB
Release : 2016-06-07
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1631491636
David Daley’s “extraordinarily timely” (New York Times Book Review) account uncovers the fundamental rigging of our House of Representatives and state legislatures nationwide. Lauded as a “compelling” (The New Yorker) and “eye-opening tour of a process that many Americans never see” (Washington Post), David Daley’s Ratf**ked documents the effort of Republican legislators and political operatives to hack American democracy through an audacious redistricting plan called REDMAP. Since the revolutionary election of Barack Obama, a group of GOP strategists has devised a way to flood state races with a gold rush of dark money, made possible by Citizens United, in order to completely reshape Congress—and our democracy itself. “Sobering and convincing” (New York Review of Books), Ratf**ked shows how this program has radically altered America’s electoral map and created a firewall in the House, insulating the Republican party and its wealthy donors from popular democracy. While exhausted voters recover from a grueling presidential election, a new Afterword from the author explores the latest intense efforts by both parties, who are already preparing for the next redistricting cycle in 2020.
Author : J. Morgan Kousser
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 603 pages
File Size : 32,15 MB
Release : 2000-11-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0807862657
Challenging recent trends both in historical scholarship and in Supreme Court decisions on civil rights, J. Morgan Kousser criticizes the Court's "postmodern equal protection" and demonstrates that legislative and judicial history still matter for public policy. Offering an original interpretation of the failure of the First Reconstruction (after the Civil War) by comparing it with the relative success of the Second (after World War II), Kousser argues that institutions and institutional rules--not customs, ideas, attitudes, culture, or individual behavior--have been the primary forces shaping American race relations throughout the country's history. Using detailed case studies of redistricting decisions and the tailoring of electoral laws from Los Angeles to the Deep South, he documents how such rules were designed to discriminate against African Americans and Latinos. Kousser contends that far from being colorblind, Shaw v. Reno (1993) and subsequent "racial gerrymandering" decisions of the Supreme Court are intensely color-conscious. Far from being conservative, he argues, the five majority justices and their academic supporters are unreconstructed radicals who twist history and ignore current realities. A more balanced view of that history, he insists, dictates a reversal of Shaw and a return to the promise of both Reconstructions.
Author : Michael P. McDonald
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 35,48 MB
Release : 2018-11-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1501738569
The Laurence and Lynne Brown Democracy Medal is an initiative of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Pennsylvania State University. It annually recognizes outstanding individuals, groups, and organizations that produce exceptional innovations to further democracy in the United States or around the world. Micah Altman and Michael P. McDonald unveil the Public Mapping Project, which developed DistrictBuilder, an open-source software redistricting application designed to give the public transparent, accessible, and easy-to-use online mapping tools. As they show, the goal is for all citizens to have access to the same information that legislators use when drawing congressional maps—and use that data to create maps of their own. Thanks to generous funding from The Pennsylvania State University, the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Author : Kyle Kondik
Publisher : Ohio University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 45,22 MB
Release : 2021-10-26
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0821447343
An incisive study that shows how Republicans transformed the US House of Representatives into a consistent GOP stronghold—with or without a majority. Long-term Democratic dominance in the US House of Representatives gave way to a Republican electoral advantage and frequently held majority following the GOP takeover in 1994. Republicans haven’t always held the majority in recent decades, but nationalization, partisan realignment, and the gerrymandering of House seats have contributed to a political climate in which they've had an edge more often than not for nearly thirty years. The Long Red Thread examines each House election cycle from 1964 to 2020, surveying academic and journalistic literature to identify key trends and takeaways from more than a half-century of US House election results in order to predict what Americans can expect to see in the future.
Author : Billy Corriher
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 15,27 MB
Release : 2021-05-19
Category :
ISBN : 9780578915883
The book discusses the Republican-led North Carolina legislature's quest to control state courts. The legislature in 2011 drew biased election districts that ensured Republicans kept their majority, even when Democrats got more total votes. In 2013, Republicans even passed a law designed to keep African Americans from voting. Civil rights lawyer Anita Earls took the legislature to court for discriminating against Black voters in their voter ID law and their election districts. She laid out the undeniable evidence of racial discrimination. And the legislators' attorney, Thomas Farr, justified their actions as attempts to comply with the Voting Rights Act. The federal courts struck down the voter ID law and the racially gerrymandered districts. When lawmakers redrew the districts, Lewis stated clearly that the new boundaries would discriminate against Democrats. To keep the courts from blocking their power grabs, legislators tried to control the judicial branch. A 2013 memo from a GOP consultant advised legislators that "supreme court races are critical for long-term Republican dominance." Republicans tried to cancel the 2016 North Carolina Supreme Court election. When that failed and voters elected a progressive majority, they briefly considered a proposal to pack the court and overturn the results. Instead, legislators passed bills giving themselves more power over the other branches.Legislators passed bills that gerrymandered judges, un-packed the court of appeals, and manipulated election ballots to help Republican judicial candidates. Lawmakers passed a constitutional amendment that would give themselves control over filling vacant judicial seats. It would've opened the door to another court-packing scheme.Republicans in Washington, D.C., were pushing to nominate Farr, the GOP's lawyer, to a federal court in Eastern North Carolina, where around half of the population is Black. Rev. Barber and other activists around the country raised concerns about Farr's history of defending discrimination and his ties to a racist lawyer. In 2018, as Republicans were reshaping the federal courts, Earls ran for a seat on the state supreme court. It was a challenge for a quiet, reserved lawyer. She campaigned on a platform of judicial independence, as legislators passed laws intended to hurt her campaign.
