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Why does the US put up with gerrymandering, which barely exists in most countries?

mseebach 14y ago
The same reason anyone puts up with anything: It's difficult (very costly in political capital) to change for an intangible benefit.
aptwebapps 14y ago
The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways. A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage. If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them. In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states. I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.
alexqgb 14y ago
For the longest time, it was also a very technical issue, of issue only to wonks. The general public simply didn't understand it well enough to recognize how pernicious an effect it really had, the news media (which is resolutely pro-status quo) wasn't going to make an issue of anything that would shift the balance of power away from the establishment, and activists realized that organizing against it was a fool's errand, since it would come down to petitioning the corrupt and asking them to give up their power and get nothing in return. But as Leonard Cohen noted, there is a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in. And those cracks appeared in California. Starting with the special election that recalled Gray Davis, and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger (which put the kind of pro-reform candidate who would have never made it through the party machine into the Governors' Office) and the often-problematic-but-in-this-case-fantastic direct initiative system (which allows voters to route around obstructionist legislators) the change got through in the biggest state. The last election, which gave the GOP a huge majority in the House with a slight minority of the vote, showed people in unambiguous terms that something was very clearly wrong. And as California gets itself out from under this awful system, it'll do what it does best: drive change by demonstrating that another future is possible.
T-hawk 14y ago
Catch 22. The gerrymandering itself creates the predestined elections that keep the gerrymanders in power.

The same reason anyone puts up with anything: It's difficult (very costly in political capital) to change for an intangible benefit.

aptwebapps 14y ago

The lazy answer is that the people who practice it also happen to be the people who make all the rules. Of course, they're supposed to be accountable to the general public, but then said public has already been gerrymandered and managed in countless other ways. A little more to the point is that each state gets to choose how to draw their Congressional districts at the time of a new census which happens every ten years. Unless a given state legislature is fairly evenly split there is a great deal of incentive for them to draw the districts in such a way as to give themselves the greatest possible advantage. If they lose control of the legislature by the time the next census rolls around, then the other party will just do the same to them. In order for a state to stop gerrymandering (not all states do it to the fullest extreme) there would need to be some groundswell of opinion that would cause a freshly elected legislature to setup some rules. It has happened in a very few states. I don't know all of them but Iowa has a system that is designed to be completely neutral in execution and Colorado has a mandate that the resulting districts must be as competitive as possible. I'm not really sure which approach I like better. Colorado's system should make elected representatives more responsive to the will of their constituents, but at the same time seems to rule out third-party candidates ever having much of a chance.

alexqgb 14y ago

For the longest time, it was also a very technical issue, of issue only to wonks. The general public simply didn't understand it well enough to recognize how pernicious an effect it really had, the news media (which is resolutely pro-status quo) wasn't going to make an issue of anything that would shift the balance of power away from the establishment, and activists realized that organizing against it was a fool's errand, since it would come down to petitioning the corrupt and asking them to give up their power and get nothing in return. But as Leonard Cohen noted, there is a crack in everything - that's how the light gets in. And those cracks appeared in California. Starting with the special election that recalled Gray Davis, and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger (which put the kind of pro-reform candidate who would have never made it through the party machine into the Governors' Office) and the often-problematic-but-in-this-case-fantastic direct initiative system (which allows voters to route around obstructionist legislators) the change got through in the biggest state. The last election, which gave the GOP a huge majority in the House with a slight minority of the vote, showed people in unambiguous terms that something was very clearly wrong. And as California gets itself out from under this awful system, it'll do what it does best: drive change by demonstrating that another future is possible.

T-hawk 14y ago

Catch 22. The gerrymandering itself creates the predestined elections that keep the gerrymanders in power.