The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: The Essential Role of Empirical Validation in Legislative Redistricting Simulation
المؤلفون: Fifield, Benjamin, Imai, Kosuke, Kawahara, Jun, Kenny, Christopher T.
سنة النشر: 2020
المجموعة: Computer Science
Statistics
مصطلحات موضوعية: Statistics - Applications, Computer Science - Computers and Society
الوصف: 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.
Comment: 32 pages, 14 figures
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10148
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.2006.10148
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv