What's in a Line? {Glad You Asked, Episode 29} by DukeUniversity

State legislatures draw the boundaries for most Congressional districts, and the result is partisan gridlock, says Connel Fullenkamp. Fullenkamp says it's time to take the politics out of redistricting by turning the job over to nonpartisan groups.

Fullenkamp is a professor of the practice in the Duke University department of economics.

Transcript:

From Duke University, this is Glad You Asked, where we consider the question, “What should we be talking about this election season?”

"My name is Connel Fullenkamp. I’m a professor of the practice in the economics department at Duke University.

When the dust settles, the one thing that we really ought to talk about in the election is districting, is how we choose our election districts in America. The districts are largely chosen by political parties. And both are equally responsible for the mess that we’re in.

A few states have actually gone to some nonpartisan districting, but in most states what happens is, the state legislature gets together and picks the districts. And so basically, you get both parties trying to maximize the number of seats that they’re going to get in the next local, or congressional, or even presidential election.

So they cut a lot of really nasty deals, they draw a lot of gerrymandered districts like the ones we’ve seen in North Carolina, and they create basically safe districts for their parties. The result is that you get districts in which the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate is virtually guaranteed to be the winner in the general election.

So, it means that we get candidates who basically have no incentive to play for the middle, and we get people who are really not representative of the average person in the district. We get somebody who’s actually more partisan than we really want. Most economists who study voting behavior think that we get people who represent what we call the median voter, who is somebody in the middle. But if you split the parties and give somebody a safe district, then you get the median maybe of the party rather than the median of the general population.

If I’ve been elected to Congress on a fairly extreme, say, conservative ticket, and I know my seat’s guaranteed, why do I have to work with anybody? I don’t have any incentive to reach across the aisle to get anything done. My job’s pretty much secure.

This polarization, I think, is largely caused by our failure to select districts in a nonpartisan way, and really more fair way."

This is Glad You Asked. For more on redistricting, check out the next episode of the Ways and Means podcast. Find it at waysandmeansshow.org.