Designing Redistricting Institutions

Designing International Institutions Hierarchy

Designing Labor Market Institutions

\Western Europe su®ers from too many labor market rigidities, from excessively generous unemployment insurance to high employment protection, and to high minimum wages. It is essential that countries putting in place new institutions do not commit the same mistakes." The quote is made up. But it is, I believe, a fair representation of the opinions of many experts and many organizations, from Th...

Strategic Redistricting†

We develop and analyze a model of strategic redistricting. Two parties choose redistricting plans to maximize their probability of winning a majority in the House of Representatives. We show that in the unique equilibrium parties maximally segregate their opponent’s supporters but pool their own supporters into uniform districts. Ceteris paribus, the stronger party segregates more than the weak...

Axiomatic Redistricting*

In a framework with two parties, deterministic voter preferences and geographical constraints, we propose a set of simple axioms and show that they jointly characterize the districting rule that maximizes the number of districts a party can win, given an electoral outcome (the " optimal gerrymandering rule "). As a corollary, we obtain that no districting rule can satisfy our axioms and treat p...

Gerrymandering and Computational Redistricting

Partisan gerrymandering poses a threat to democracy. Moreover, the complexity of the districting task may exceed human capacities. One potential solution is using computational models to automate the districting process by optimising objective and open criteria, such as how spatially compact districts are. We formulated one such model that minimised pairwise distance between voters within a dis...