Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
determined, and separate procedures were
developed in the various states. In the 1960s,
however, the Supreme Court upheld cases brought
by plaintiffs who claimed that congressional
districts violated the equal protection clauses of
the American Constitution because they had
unequal electorates: malapportionment was
outlawed, and districts with equal electorates were
mandatory. Subsequent judgements made this a
very stringent demand, culminating in a case that
rejected a recommended redistricting of New
Jersey—in which the congressional districts varied
in their populations by less than 1 per cent around
an average of more than 600,000—because
plaintiffs showed that even greater equality was
possible.
Fairness to individuals dominates US
redistricting as a consequence of these judgements.
Fairness to communities has not been claimed (in
large part because States are equally represented in
the Senate, irrespective of their size). Fairness to
minorities became important after the 1960s civil
rights movement and was interpreted in the states
covered by the
Voting Rights Act
as requiring each
to have a proportion of its Congressional Districts
with a black majority equivalent to the black
proportion of the State's population (i.e. if 40 per
cent of a State's population is black and it has ten
Congressional Districts, then four of them should
have a black majority—what is known as the
minority-majority requirement): recent decisions
suggest that this requirement should not be
implemented if to do so involves race as the
predominant factor in the redistricting plan. Some
interpret this as being the case if minority-
majority Districts are oddly-shaped but the task
of choosing a set of Districts is extremely large
and race may predominate even though there are
no oddly shaped districts—as Box 27.2 shows.
The fourth criterion—fairness to parties—has
been introduced in some States, where the
redistricting procedure was vested in the party
controlling the State legislature and resulted in an
'unfair' outcome for the other party (two
parties— Republican and Democratic—
predominate in American politics). Legal
complaints against such gerrymandering led to the
democracies for two main reasons: they
provide stability for a government within a
legislature, and continuity of support
among a portion of the electorate. They are
the focus of electorate mobilisation and
government organisation, and therefore, it
is argued, should achieve a level of
representation in the legislature consistent
with their electoral support—hence the term
proportional representation.
Only the first two of these are implemented in
the UK, through the rules for redistribution that
the independent Boundary Commissions are
required to apply under the
Parliamentary
Constituencies Act 1986.
(The first criterion is
violated by the rules, however, since Scotland and
Wales are over-represented relative to England and
Northern Ireland: such over-representation is not
explicitly linked to the third criterion.) For each
administrative area, the Commissions determine
the number of constituencies they are entitled to
and then draw up provisional recommendations
for their composition using local government
electoral wards as the building blocks. They are
required to make constituencies as equal as is
practicable in their number of electors (meeting
the fairness to individuals criterion) and to respect
local community ties (i.e. to group together areas
with common interests, according to the second
criterion). Those recommendations are subject to
public consultation when the major participants
are the political parties, which want to ensure
constituencies are created to their electoral
advantage; they may present alternatives to an
assistant commissioner at a public local inquiry,
whose report is used by the commission to
determine whether to alter its provisional
recommendations before making final
recommendations to Parliament. (For a full
discussion, see Rossiter
et al
. 1998.) Electoral
considerations are crucial in the debates over
alternative constituency configurations, therefore,
as exemplified by the City of Sheffield (see Box
27.1).
In the USA, there are no legal conditions
defining how constituencies should be
