The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation
| Autor: | Kosuke Imai, Christopher T. Kenny, Benjamin Fifield, Jun Kawahara |
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| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
FOS: Computer and information sciences
Statistics and Probability zero-suppressed binary decision diagram Public Administration Operations research Computer science graph partition Gerrymandering Statistics - Applications enumeration Computer Science - Computers and Society symbols.namesake Computers and Society (cs.CY) Applications (stat.AP) markov chain monte carlo redistricting Applied Mathematics Graph partition Markov chain Monte Carlo Legislature gerrymandering lcsh:Political institutions and public administration (General) Redistricting symbols lcsh:JF20-2112 lcsh:Probabilities. Mathematical statistics Statistics Probability and Uncertainty lcsh:QA273-280 Simulation methods |
| Zdroj: | Statistics and Public Policy, Vol 7, Iss 1, Pp 52-68 (2020) |
| ISSN: | 2330-443X |
| DOI: | 10.1080/2330443x.2020.1791773 |
| Popis: | As granular data about elections and voters become available, redistricting simulation methods are playing an increasingly important role when legislatures adopt redistricting plans and courts determine their legality. These simulation methods are designed to yield a representative sample of all redistricting plans that satisfy statutory guidelines and requirements such as contiguity, population parity, and compactness. A proposed redistricting plan can be considered gerrymandered if it constitutes an outlier relative to this sample according to partisan fairness metrics. Despite their growing use, an insufficient effort has been made to empirically validate the accuracy of the simulation methods. We apply a recently developed computational method that can efficiently enumerate all possible redistricting plans and yield an independent uniform sample from this population. We show that this algorithm scales to a state with a couple of hundred geographical units. Finally, we empirically examine how existing simulation methods perform on realistic validation data sets. 32 pages, 14 figures |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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