|
Article Excerpt
The 1930 Census reduced Minnesota's apportionment in the U.S. House of Representatives from ten to nine, requiring the state to draw new congressional districts. The Republican-led state legislature passed a gerrymandered redistricting bill in an attempt to insulate its nine incumbents in the state's delegation from the party's expected loss of the statewide popular vote to the insurgent Farmer-Labor Party. When the Farmer-Labor Governor, Floyd B. Olson, vetoed the redistricting bill, the legislature claimed the bill could take effect without the governor's signature. In Smiley v. Holm, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the veto was effective and that because Minnesota therefore had no validly enacted congressional districts, it must elect all nine of its congressmen at-large. In the ensuing election, voters swept from power all but two of the sitting congressmen and reduced the Republicans from nine seats to three. This Note presents a historical case study of the events surrounding Smiley and the 1932 congressional elections in Minnesota and uses it to discuss the benefits and costs" of at-large elections. It determines that in this case, the at-large elections effectively blocked countermajoritarian tactics in the 1932 and subsequent elections without some of the negative consequences usually ascribed to at-large elections.
TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK A. Evaluating Redistricting Outcomes B. Evaluating the Redistricting Process II. THE POLITICS AND HISTORY OF SMILEY V. HOLM A. Setting the Stage for a Realignment: The Politics of Minnesota Before 1931 B. The Republican Gerrymander: Fighting to Hold Back the Realignment C. The Litigation and Its Outcome III. EVALUATING THE REMEDY: THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE AT-LARGE ELECTIONS A. Consequences for Substantive Representation 1. Redistricting Outcomes: The 1932 Congressional Elections 2. Redistricting Processes: Bargaining over Future Redistricting B. Other Concerns with At-Large Elections 1. Voter Confusion 2. Underrepresentation of Minority Interests CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
Partisan gerrymandering is a serious contemporary concern, but it is not a new problem. Since at least 1811, when a newspaper editor invented the term to refer to a redistricting scheme by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, (1) political parties have used clever line-drawing to protect their incumbents and ensure that they are overrepresented in legislative bodies relative to their support in the electorate. In this way, parties attempt to maximize their power and retain it, even when a majority (2) of the electorate turns against them.
Minnesota experienced this kind of gerrymandering in the early 1930s. After the onset of the Great Depression, the Republican Party--which had dominated state politics for decades--lost statewide public support to the Farmer-Labor Party. (3) The Republicans responded by attempting to retain their lock on the state's congressional delegation through the redistricting process. (4) The new Farmer-Labor governor vetoed the state legislature's redistricting plan. (5) The legislature, however, argued that the federal Constitution excluded the governor from the redistricting process and that its plan was law. (6)
In Smiley v. Holm (7) the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the Minnesota Legislature's incumbent-insulating strategy and instead allowed the new party preferences of the state's voters to find immediate and dramatic expression. The Court upheld the governor's veto and ordered at-large elections for all nine of Minnesota's congressional seats should the state fail to validly adopt a plan. (8) In the at-large elections that followed, voters swept from power all but two sitting congressmen and reduced the Republican delegation from nine seats out of ten to three out of nine. (9) Rather than face at-large elections again in 1934, the Minnesota Republicans, still a majority in the state senate, agreed to a compromise redistricting bill that became law in 1933. (10)
This Note presents a historical case study of the circumstances surrounding Smiley and the 1932 congressional elections in Minnesota and uses it to discuss the benefits and costs of at-large representation. In recent decades, courts have come to frequently criticize all forms of multimember representation, including representation at-large. In Connor v. Finch, the U.S. Supreme Court warned that "the practice of multimember districting can contribute to voter confusion, make legislative representatives more remote from their constituents, and tend to submerge electoral minorities and overrepresent electoral majorities." (11) Other state and federal courts have expressed similar concerns. (12) This Note evaluates the benefits of the Court's decision in Smiley--blocking a countermajoritarian gerrymander--and contrasts them with these concerns.
This Note demonstrates that the decision in Smiley foiled the countermajoritarian strategy of the gerrymandering party and altered the redistricting process so as to hinder such strategies in the future, without some of the negative consequences frequently ascribed to at-large elections. Part I provides a theoretical framework for discussing the countermajoritarian threat of partisan gerrymandering. It identifies desirable traits of a responsive electoral system that partisan gerrymandering impedes and discusses factors in the redistricting process that influence the nature of the redistricting plan produced. Part II explains the political situation in Minnesota that created the controversy addressed in Smiley, describing its development from the ruling party's attempt to insulate its incumbents from predicted electoral defeat. Part III examines the consequences of the Supreme Court's decision, both for the 1932 elections and for the subsequent final negotiations over redistricting. It concludes that the at-large elections blocked the tactics of the gerrymandering party, protecting the state from capture by a ruling minority party. The elections did so without creating severe bias against the minority party and without provoking voter confusion, although they did fail to distribute the congressional delegation evenly throughout the state.
1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Redistricting outcomes are distinguishable from redistricting processes. Each seat in the House of Representatives represents a particular geographically defined group of citizens. That group of citizens determines who sits in that seat. Each seat might represent a distinct group of citizens ("single-member districts"), more than one seat might represent a larger group of citizens ("multi-member districts"), or each of the seats apportioned to a state might represent the entire state ("at-large representation"). (13) The political mechanism by which a state determines which group of citizens each seat represents is its "redistricting process." The redistricting process then results in a districting plan that assigns particular seats to particular groups of citizens. This plan is the "redistricting outcome."
Smiley v. Holm dealt with both redistricting outcomes and redistricting processes. This Part discusses the two issues separately, providing a theoretical framework for analyzing each. The later Parts of this Note will use this framework to compare the gerrymandered plan defeated in Smiley, the at-large elections ordered by the Court, and the plan finally adopted in 1933. Section I.A elaborates a framework for evaluating redistricting outcomes based on their ability to represent the changing preferences of voters effectively and accurately. Section I.B discusses the process of redistricting and how procedural changes affect redistricting outcomes.
A. Evaluating Redistricting Outcomes
Scholars can plausibly judge a redistricting outcome by how well it produces representation that reflects the preferences of the people of that state. The framers established the U.S. House of Representatives to be the organ of the federal government most responsive to changes in public opinion. At the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that the House of Representatives must be directly elected because "[t]he legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society. Representation is made necessary only because it is impossible for the people to act collectively." (14) In The Federalist No. 52, James Madison agreed, explaining that the House of Representatives "should have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people." (15)
The House of Representatives "represents" the electorate of the United States in varied ways. An officeholder provides "descriptive" representation to the extent that she shares the demographic characteristics of her electorate. (16) A preference for single-member districts enshrines one form of descriptive representation: a member of Congress "represents" her constituents when she is a member of the same narrowly-defined geographic community. Descriptive representation also often involves membership in the constituents' racial or ethnic group. (17) Scholars distinguish such "descriptive" representation from "substantive" representation, in which elected policymakers represent their constituents by pursuing the voters' policy preferences. (18) This Note primarily addresses substantive representation, examining districting systems based on their ability to represent the policy preferences of voters, with partisan affiliation serving as a proxy for policy preferences. This Note focuses on substantive representation because it is the interest that the problem of partisan gerrymandering most directly implicates: when parties use gerrymandering to gain disproportionate seat share, they are attempting to damage the substantive representational interest of their opponents' supporters. (19)
Assuming that party preferences can serve as a proxy for policy preferences, a state congressional delegation best vindicates the public's substantive representational interest when the share of seats in the delegation held by each party is the same as the share of votes each party received statewide. This Note employs the two factors Gary Cox and Jonathan Katz identified to measure how well a redistricting outcome provides this type of representation. (20) First, a set of districts will create a certain level of partisan bias, defined as "how much larger or smaller a party's seat share is than its vote share." (21) An electoral system more accurately reflects popular sentiment when its partisan bias is close to zero. (22) Second, a set of districts will have more or less responsiveness, defined as "how much party seat shares respond to changes in vote shares." (23) An electoral system can more accurately reflect changes in popular opinion when its responsiveness is high.
Low partisan bias and high responsiveness guarantee availability of two primary electoral mechanisms by which the voters in a polity exert control over government policy: determining partisan composition and unseating incumbents. First, the lower the partisan bias and the greater the responsiveness in the electoral system, the more readily a shift in preferences among voters can recast the composition of the legislature. This power allows voters to exert control over the government's overall policy direction. They exercise this control most clearly during a realignment: a moment in which a majority-determining block of voters removes its support from a party that has consistently enjoyed that support for a significant period of time and shifts it to a new party. (24) Second, high responsiveness allows voters to control government policy by holding individual representatives to account. This accountability has two faces: representatives "vote in accord with their constituents" because they want to be returned to office, and "voters punish a representative who votes against his or her district's preferences." (25) Electoral accountability only works, however, in constituencies with competitive elections. Where one party is reliably dominant in a constituency, the representative must commit a proportionately larger transgression to lose an election because a larger number of partisans must defect. A high level of responsiveness therefore ensures popular control of government by maintaining incumbent vulnerability.
Partisan actors gerrymander to reduce responsiveness or to increase partisan bias. (26) Frequently, a state will create districts so full of each incumbent's partisans that all are secure from challenges arising outside his or her party. Such a "proincumbent" (27) gerrymander may not have a large partisan bias, but it may be almost totally lacking in responsiveness. Even if a large group of voters changes its party preference, it may not be large enough in any one district to create a new partisan majority. The other major form of nonracial gerrymander is the "partisan" gerrymander, (28) in which one party spreads its partisans so as to maximize the number of districts in which they can command a majority. (29) The 1931 redistricting plan passed by the Minnesota Legislature--the subject of Smiley--was this type of plan. Such a plan, taken to the extreme, can create a situation where both partisan bias and responsiveness are high. Where a party has spread its supporters so thinly that its electoral majorities are small, it may control a much higher seat share than its vote share would indicate, but it may also be highly vulnerable to even small shifts in partisan preferences in the electorate. Part of the challenge of a successful partisan gerrymander is striking this balance: preserving as much partisan bias as possible while reducing responsiveness as much as possible. (30)
At the time of Smiley, courts had not yet intervened to force parties to create congressional districts of equal population, (31) allowing parties much greater ability to skew the electoral results than they possess today. Under the plan at issue in Smiley, the Farmer-Labor-dominated Fifth District, centered around Minneapolis, was fifty-one percent larger in population than the Republican-controlled First District in southern Minnesota. (32) Taken to the extreme, a plan with districts of varying populations could theoretically have partisan bias so high and responsiveness so low that one party could receive nearly all of the seat share regardless of its vote share. In practice, public opinion exerts some limiting force on such excesses; in the Minnesota case, the large size differentials between districts created public pressure against the gerrymanderers even among their own partisans. (33)
B. Evaluating the Redistricting Process
This Section discusses how changes in redistricting processes affect redistricting outcomes. Just as Section I.A argued that low partisan bias and high responsiveness make a redistricting outcome desirable, a redistricting process will be more desirable if it tends to produce such outcomes. This evaluation is important in examining the context and effects of Smiley, because its primary holding dealt with the mechanism of redistricting and not redistricting outcomes. (34) The Court did not judge the Minnesota districting plan by whether the substance of the plan was unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful, but rather by whether the state legislature created it in a legally permissible way. In doing so, the Court's decision had consequences for both of the important variables in a state redistricting process: (1) the formal decision-making structure and (2) the resulting plan should that structure fail to produce a plan.
The first important variable in a redistricting process is the role of various state actors, particularly the governor and the legislature, in the decision making. As an official elected statewide, the governor's partisan alignment will reflect that of the statewide electorate at the time of his last election. Thus, if the...
|
