Ohio Rep. Matt Huffman, right, at a news conference announcing the bipartisan process that will draw voting districts for Ohio’s General Assembly (Ann Sanner/AP)
Ohio has recently announced a plan to draw its state legislative districts using a bipartisan process. Trip Gabriel summarizes the plan for the New York Times. His article begins:
Of 435 House races in November, only a few dozen were considered competitive — a result of decades of drawing district lines for partisan advantage, generally by state legislatures.
But in an era of hyperpartisan gerrymandering, which many blame for the polarization of state and national politics, Ohio took a step in the opposite direction last week. With the support of both parties, the Ohio House gave final approval Wednesday to a plan to draw voting districts for the General Assembly using a bipartisan process, intended to make elections more competitive.
This isn’t quite the right framing. First, regardless of what “many blame,” gerrymandering has, at most, a small effect on polarization. But this zombie idea is hard to kill.
Moreover, there is not even any consensus on whether redistricting has contributed to any decline in the competitiveness of legislative elections, at least in Congress. See, for example, this piece by political scientist Alan Abramowitz and colleagues, compared to this piece by political scientist Michael McDonald.
But the question here is more specific: Do redistricting institutions designed to be less partisan actually create more competitive elections? There is some research that bears directly on this, although it isn’t mentioned in Gabriel’s article. The research is this 2014 article by political scientists Jamie Carson, Michael Crespin and Ryan Williamson, who examined the impact of redistricting plans drawn be legislatures, courts and commissions. They conclude:
If states wish to increase competition in their congressional districts, utilizing commissions (or courts) when redistricting is an option that should be considered according to the analysis provided here … on average, elections in court-drawn and commission-drawn districts are more likely to be competitive compared with their legislative-drawn counterparts. While these results may not be entirely counterintuitive, they are encouraging in that they suggest that commission- and court-drawn plans can lead to more competitive elections, as they were designed to do.
As is often the case with any bipartisan plan, the devil is in the details. So Gabriel is appropriately cautious about what Ohio’s proposed reform could accomplish. But if it mimics the behavior of courts and commissions when they draw district boundaries, there is good reason to suspect Ohio’s legislative elections will become more competitive.