Redistricting

Two articles worth noting, albeit for very different reasons. The first is David Ignatius’s column in today’s Washington Post and the second is a Wall Street Journal article on the impact of the current fiscal “stuff” on Congressional redistricting.

David Ignatius turns to behavioral economics and the work of Daniel Kahnemann to help explain how we wound up in the current financial bog. Kahnemann and his collaborator Amos Tversky developed prospect theory to help explain how people make real decisions in the real world. They found that people are not “rational actors” carefully and consistently weighing options. Instead we treat gains and losses differently, make choices based on how options are described without paying enough attention to the underlying probabilities in the statements, and generally make decisions based on how we feel rather than on how the data indicate we should act.

The piece begs two questions. First, what can those constructing and promoting the rescue packages learn from behavioral economics? If one of the goals is to have us believe we are more economically secure and get us to believe that borrowing, lending and spending money is a good idea, the incentive structure needs to take into account how we feel about money. The legislation needs to recognize that we are not rational decision makers with our own resources – indeed, approaching policy from the perspective of prospect theory might have significant implications for the cost of the bill. A second question is how policymakers themselves are processing the data. The President and his advisors, senior legislators, and all those advising all those people, are themselves just as irrational as the rest of us. Behavior economics applies to people, including those in power. What, then, can prospect theory tell us about how those making the policies are processing information? And can those decision makers use those theories to test their own work and thus improve it?

A second article, on a wholly different topic, is also worth noting. A piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal speculates about the effects of the economic muck on Congressional races in 2012. The 2012 campaigns will of course be based on Congressional districts that are drawn based on the 2010 census. When the economy was humming along people were moving from places like New York to places like Florida. But with the economy slowing people are moving less (and those who are moving, are moving differently). As a result New York may lose only one House seat rather than the projected two, while Florida may gain just one. This matters not only for who is in the House but also for the Electoral College map that will decide the 2012 Presidential election. Given that most members of the House are currently simultaneously running to get re-elected by their current constituents in 2010 and also running for the votes of their potential constituents in 2012 (to say nothing of the impact on those already running for President) this unexpected side-effect of the economic imbroglio is worth paying attention to.

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine (D) is leading an effort to change how the State’s legislative and Congressional districts boundaries are drawn – reports here, here and here.

Kaine joins the Campaign Legal Center , Common Cause and others calling for reform in the ways in which election maps are drawn. Kudos to all of them.

There is no question that the system is broken. As Brookings Institution scholar Thomas Mann put it, “The legitimacy of the American electoral system requires some minimal level of fairness, responsiveness and accountability. Recent elections to the US House of Representatives threaten these principals, as contests suffer from unusually high levels of incumbent safety, a precipitous decline in competitiveness, and a fierce struggle between the parties to manipulate the rules of the game to achieve, maintain or enlarge majority control of the chamber.”

Districts designed by those in power to keep that power inevitably skews the system in their favor. Republicans represent largely Republican districts, Democrats largely Democratic ones. Virtually every seat in the US House of Representatives and in most legislatures is “safe.” In such a system the only way to lose your job is in a primary. Primary voters tend to be party regulars and those with the biggest ideological axes to grind. Elected officials have a disincentive to represent the majority of voters in a district, and an incentive to represent the far ends of their party. The result is a Congress and legislatures in which cooperation, compromise and common ground are punished at the polls. Issues become evidence of fealty to the party line, purity tests that keep activist agitators acquiesced.

If a Democrat can only reasonably lose in a primary, groups that control (or claim to control) groups of Democratic voters have disproportionate power. Such groups don’t tend to be moderate or balanced – we hear a lot more from MoveOn.org than Third Way or the Democratic Leadership Council. The same holds true on the Republican side of the aisle. The number of moderate Republicans in the House and Senate who regularly look to build coalitions across party lines could fit in a phone booth (a dying metaphor, using it where I can).

Of course redistricting reform cannot lead to completely competitive elections in districts that don’t look goofy. There are tradeoffs between competitiveness and compactness (to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district competitive one would have to draw lines to the mountains, trying to make Arizona’s Second Congressional District competitive would require some profoundly creative cartography). Nor will making districts more reasonable solve all of our electoral woes – money will still matter, incumbency will still matter, as will a host of other extraneous variables. But doing what we can to make reasonably make more legislative and Congressional districts reasonable will go a long way to improving the quality of our political discourse, and the quality of the policies that emerge from that discourse.