No data-based post today. Instead I'm going to have a long generic discussion of the theoretical gerrymandering, followed by a plea asking whether anybody can steer me to a good database or set of online tables of electoral results, especially for US House elections and/or state legislatures.
Why am I asking for such a thing you ask? So far we've looked at a few sets of economic data. But at some point this year I'd like to take a look at another phenomenon whose effect I think worsened during the Naughts: gerrymandering.
As databases and data analysis has grown more sophisticated over the years, it has become easier for redistricting committees to design districts that tilt towards one party or another. In cases when a single party controls the redistricting party, this allows incumbents to draw districts that maximize the number of representatives that there party will have.
The way this is done is to design as many "reasonably safe" districts for the incumbent party, and to crowd as many voters from the other party into a very few "overwhelmingly safe" districts. "Reasonably safe" districts tend to have something like a 55%-45% to 60%-40% advantage for the incumbent party, while "overwhelmingly safe" districts can have an advantage for the out party of anywhere from 75%-25% to 90%-10%.
Let me give you an example. Let's say we have a state with ten million voters and 100 state house seats. For sake of our example, we'll split our voters into five million voters that favor Party A and five million voters that favor Party B.
In an absolutely even mathematical construct, we would have 100 districts, each of which has 50,000 voters from Party A and 50,000 representatives from Party B. In a completely neutral election these districts would split randomly, 50 for Party A and 50 for Party B.
Geography and demography is not a random mathematical construct of course. Because different areas favor different parties, what we might reasonably expect would be a bell-shaped curve in which we have something like five "overwhelmingly safe" seats for each party, ten or fifteen "reasonably safe" seats for each party, and perhaps as many as 50 or 60 seats that could potentially be up for grabs in each election, depending on which way the political winds are blowing.
However, a clever gerrymander will shift the apportionment. Let's say that Party A is in power. They can then draw up districts that look something like this:
Reasonably Safe for Party A - 83 seats
55,000 from Party A
45,000 from Party B
Overwhelmingly Safe for Party B - 17 seats
25,000 from Party A
75,000 from Party B
(One of those "overwhelmingly safe" seats for Party B needs to be a 35,000-65,000 split to make the math work perfectly, but that's still an overwhelmingly safe margin.)
What effect does that sort of districting have on our 100-seat legislative body?
The most obvious, of course, is that the body will vote overwhelmingly for the positions of Party A on each and every issue. And because their advantage is so large, they will have no incentive in considering or including even part of the platform of Party B as they craft legislation.
But what about cases in which redistricting is shared between the parties? Even in these cases the redistricting is being drawn by incumbents. So it shouldn't surprise anybody if the redistricting tends to favor creating safe districts for incumbents. We may end up with a legislature that is split 50 seats to 50 seats; however, what we are likely to have in district makeup is something like this:
Safe for Party A - 50 Seats
60,000 Party A
40,000 Party B
Safe for Party B - 50 Seats
40,000 Party A
60,000 Party B
The popular description of this phenomenon goes something like this:
Instead of a system in which the electorate chooses their representatives, we have a system in which the representatives choose their electorate.
Whether there is a single-party or shared gerrymander, there is very little chance that we will see seats change parties during the decade that follows the redistricting. This means that the real election to choose the person who holds that seat is the party primary, in which that parties nominee for the general election is selected. Independent voters either shun party primaries or are shut out of them altogether, depending on that state's rules. Primaries also see low voter turnout and tend to be dominated by the most active segments of each party's electorate, the "wings" of their party. In the case of Democrats and Republicans, these tend to be the liberal and conservative bases.
This means that in our gerrymandered legislatures, if you want to represent a district, you should have policies that favor the wings of the party for whom that district is safe. In our single-party gerrymander this means that not only do we have a legislature with representatives who favor Party A, we have a legislature that overwhelmingly favors the most extreme factions of Party A with a noisy minority from Party B. In our two-party gerrymander we have a legislature with 50 representives from the wing of Party A and 50 representatives from the wing of Party B. In either case there's no electoral incentive for the representatives to govern from the center of the poltical spectrum.
Thus, does gerrymandering push centrists out of power altogether.
In our theoretical gerrymandered legislature we would expect to see extreme partisan rancor, very few representatives crossing party lines for votes, legislation that favors the most extreme positions of the controlling party, and a growing sense of disenfranchisement among centrists. The more sophisticated the gerrymandering, the more likely we are to see those behaviors.
Does this sound like a legislature near you? You may have gerrymandered districts.
Was gerrymandering any worse during the Naughts than in previous years? That's why I'd like the data in a nice, convenient bundle. So we can see whether reality matched my nice theoretical construct above.
If gerrymandering is afoot, I would expect to see a pattern in which the average margin of victory is greatest in the year following a redistricting (2002, for this decade) and slowly decreases as voters shift and move. And if it's worse in this decade than previous decade, I would expect to see a pattern in which the average margin of victory for US House and state house elections is larger in this decade than in previous decades.
The data's out there, and looking up individual elections is easy enough. But if somebody's already compiled it all in a single place, I'd just as soon not replicate the effort, and would appreciate you steering me in that direction. Muchas gracias!
Showing posts with label What I Don't Yet Understand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label What I Don't Yet Understand. Show all posts
Friday, January 15, 2010
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The Naughtful Naughties: State Tax Revenues
Just quickly passing along another chart today, this one courtesy of the The Business Insider's Chart of the Day (click on the chart to pop up a full-size version):
What I find especially noteworthy in this chart is the extent to which the two recessions of the Naughts led to far greater decreases in state revenue that we saw in any of the recessions of the previous forty years. We might have expected the biggest drop in state revenue to come from the Great Recession at the end of the decade, but what happened in the recession that started the decade? Why was it so much worse for state governments than previous recessions?
I suspect the answer lies in some combination of changes in the source of tax revenues and an unwillingness to raise taxes at the state level to make up for revenue shortfalls. But I don't know. It certainly seems an interesting area for further research.
Opinions differ on tax rates (to put it mildly!) and a lot of folks see less tax money going to state government as an inherently good thing. One thing we can all agree on is that decreased revenues lead directly to state cutting services (education, infrastructure, policing, etc.) for the citizens of that state, pushing the burden of providing those services down on local municipalities that are dealing with their own revenue shortfalls, or engaging in accounting chicanery to balance the books for that year. In Michigan -- where we never really got that mid-decade bump upwards in revenues -- we've seen all three.
What worries me about the increasing volatility of state revenues shown in that chart above is that it leads state governments to seek short-term solutions that have bad long-term results. A few years ago in Michigan we sold off the long-term revenue stream from our tobacco settlement to use the money to plug immediate budget holes. Now we have the same structural budget holes, with even less revenue than ever to weather the current crisis.
Arizona plans to sell off and re-lease their state government buildings to plug the cash-flow hole in this year's budget. Is this a good long-term deal for the citizens of the state? No. But given the sort of precipitous decline in state revenues shown above, I can see how it might be an appealing quick fix to a state government. The same goes for privatizing lotteries, selling off park land, and a host of other options that all of you have probably heard floated from your own state governments.
As you can see from the chart above, fiscal crisis management is the order of the day for our state governments. But it isn't necessarily leading to better government.
What I find especially noteworthy in this chart is the extent to which the two recessions of the Naughts led to far greater decreases in state revenue that we saw in any of the recessions of the previous forty years. We might have expected the biggest drop in state revenue to come from the Great Recession at the end of the decade, but what happened in the recession that started the decade? Why was it so much worse for state governments than previous recessions?
I suspect the answer lies in some combination of changes in the source of tax revenues and an unwillingness to raise taxes at the state level to make up for revenue shortfalls. But I don't know. It certainly seems an interesting area for further research.
Opinions differ on tax rates (to put it mildly!) and a lot of folks see less tax money going to state government as an inherently good thing. One thing we can all agree on is that decreased revenues lead directly to state cutting services (education, infrastructure, policing, etc.) for the citizens of that state, pushing the burden of providing those services down on local municipalities that are dealing with their own revenue shortfalls, or engaging in accounting chicanery to balance the books for that year. In Michigan -- where we never really got that mid-decade bump upwards in revenues -- we've seen all three.
What worries me about the increasing volatility of state revenues shown in that chart above is that it leads state governments to seek short-term solutions that have bad long-term results. A few years ago in Michigan we sold off the long-term revenue stream from our tobacco settlement to use the money to plug immediate budget holes. Now we have the same structural budget holes, with even less revenue than ever to weather the current crisis.
Arizona plans to sell off and re-lease their state government buildings to plug the cash-flow hole in this year's budget. Is this a good long-term deal for the citizens of the state? No. But given the sort of precipitous decline in state revenues shown above, I can see how it might be an appealing quick fix to a state government. The same goes for privatizing lotteries, selling off park land, and a host of other options that all of you have probably heard floated from your own state governments.
As you can see from the chart above, fiscal crisis management is the order of the day for our state governments. But it isn't necessarily leading to better government.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
The Naughtful Naughties: The Money Supply
As seen in the comments on my previous post, my brother Mike has some pretty strong opinions about the ol' Federal Reserve System and the money supply. So, I reckoned I'd gather up a bit of historical macroeconomic data to see what I could find. That took a wee bit of time, so I'm not going to format and explain my source data in detail today, but I did want to pass along a couple of graphs that I put together.
I assembled a goodly batch of data from the past 50+ years. It was a worthwhile exercise, since one of the things I'd like to do in this Naughtful Naughties series is to put what happened over the last ten years into some historical perspective.
For today, I've chosen to look at five specific measures of change:
The Prime Rate -- The rate at which banks lend to favored customers. This is tied closely to the federal funds rate established by the Federal Reserve. (In retrospect, I probably should've gone directly to the federal funds rate.)
The Change in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Deflator -- This is a measure of inflation that is broader than the consumer Price Index because in addition to consumer products and services, it also includes government services and investment goods.
The Change in the Real GDP per capita -- The Real GDP measures the the total national output of goods and services in constant dollars. When divided by the total population it makes for a handy measure of our change in national wealth per person.
Federal Deficit as a Percentage of GDP -- Another possible source of change in the money supply. Is the federal government spending more than it takes in? (It usually is!) If so, it'll need to issue treasury bonds to make up the difference.
Change in M2 per capita -- M2 is the money supply measured in terms of currency, traveler's checks, demand deposits, other checkable deposits, retail money market mutual funds, savings, and small time deposits. It's a pretty good measure of the dollars that are available for use. I divided it by the total population to see how much faster the money supply grew than might be expected if it just kept pace with our population.
What did I come up with? Here's what it looks like (You can click on the image to see the full-size graph):
I assembled a goodly batch of data from the past 50+ years. It was a worthwhile exercise, since one of the things I'd like to do in this Naughtful Naughties series is to put what happened over the last ten years into some historical perspective.
For today, I've chosen to look at five specific measures of change:
The Prime Rate -- The rate at which banks lend to favored customers. This is tied closely to the federal funds rate established by the Federal Reserve. (In retrospect, I probably should've gone directly to the federal funds rate.)
The Change in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Deflator -- This is a measure of inflation that is broader than the consumer Price Index because in addition to consumer products and services, it also includes government services and investment goods.
The Change in the Real GDP per capita -- The Real GDP measures the the total national output of goods and services in constant dollars. When divided by the total population it makes for a handy measure of our change in national wealth per person.
Federal Deficit as a Percentage of GDP -- Another possible source of change in the money supply. Is the federal government spending more than it takes in? (It usually is!) If so, it'll need to issue treasury bonds to make up the difference.
Change in M2 per capita -- M2 is the money supply measured in terms of currency, traveler's checks, demand deposits, other checkable deposits, retail money market mutual funds, savings, and small time deposits. It's a pretty good measure of the dollars that are available for use. I divided it by the total population to see how much faster the money supply grew than might be expected if it just kept pace with our population.
What did I come up with? Here's what it looks like (You can click on the image to see the full-size graph):
If the zigs and zags of that graph hurt your eyes, I also "smoothed" the data by taking some five-year averages. (So, the 1975 point has the average percentages for 1971-1975.) I often find that a useful way to see broader trends:
For today, I'm not drawing any conclusions. But I do think it's interesting to look at some of the relationships that seem to emerge among these sorts of measures that step back from the daily ebbs and flows of the financial news and look at the year-to-year changes, especially when you keep in mind what was happening in the economy during the various periods covered here.
Here are the sources for the data I compiled today:
Prime Rate (The US Federal Reserve)
Money Supply (M1 & M2 , M3 )(The US Federal Reserve)
Consumers Price Index (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Gross Domestic Product (Measuringworth.org, which had a more convenient format than the federal tables I found.)
US Federal Deficit as a Percent of GDP (usgovernmentspending.com)
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