If it ain't broke


Yesterday, we addressed one of the central assumptions of the Governor's redistricting proposals: that there is something wrong with the districts that can be successfully determined by inspecting their shapes.

Today, we turn to another: The idea that the rate of incumbent defeats is indicative of the success of the system.

In addition to making fun of the "drunks with an etch-a-sketch" quality of district borders (argument that boils down to "the shapes aren't squares so they must be wrong"), the Governor also frequently mentions the fact that no district-based state offices changed hands in the last election.

My question is: On its face, is this evidence that the system is in any way broken?

How much turnover are we required to observe in order to call an election successful? Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty?

The answer, of course, is that it will vary — and like any random thing, sometimes the answer will end up being zero.

Besides: does more turnover guarantee that the result of an election was more "democratic"? I'm just not sure that the turnover per se is a value here. I could design a system with a random component (what engineers call "noise") that would ensure an average amount of turnover in any election (though again, if it were truly random, sometimes the observed amount of turnover would be zero), but that wouldn't make the system more democratic, just less robustly reflective of the people's will.

Indeed, too much turnover would be a bad thing: If every district were balanced on a knife-edge to encourage "turnover," election results would have far less to do with the will of the people, and far more to do with chance, the slings and arrows of fortune, quirks of media coverage, second-order effects (like ballot measures on the same ticket), and of course money. The situation would be counter-democratic and disruptive, since no incumbent could have any confidence of their re-election and no one would be encouraged to think beyond the next election.

You can't tell anything from turnover: In a mature democracy (sorry, pedants, republic) without huge demographic shifts within established district borders, sometimes there will be more and sometimes less. It's far from clear that there's evidence we need a change at all.

(Post scriptum: No Democrat lost their seat last time around, but neither did any Republican. I'm not sure if that bolsters any claim I might have to be making a non-partisan argument, but there you go.)



Posted: Tue - March 22, 2005 at 08:40 AM   | Category:     |   |   | |


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