RACE AND REDISTRICTING IN THE 1990s by Bernard Grofman (Editor). New York: Agathon Press, 1998. 405pp.
Reviewed by Keith J. Bybee, Department of Government, Harvard University.
Bernard Grofman is one of the most prolific scholars of minority representation in the United States. As an author and editor, he has canvassed the American debate over race-conscious redistricting (Grofman and Davidson, 1992); assessed the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 across the South (Davidson and Grofman, 1994); and examined the judicial interpretation of minority voting rights over the past three decades (Grofman, Handley, and Niemi, 1992). His most recent volume, RACE AND REDISTRICTING IN THE 1990s, focuses on the practical politics of redistricting and minority representation. It is a valuable addition to Grofman’s substantial body of work.
The book is divided into four sections. The first section broadly considers how the redistricting of the early 1990s has affected the election of minority-preferred candidates. Two of the essays in this section take up questions that have become centers of debate: Does the election of minority candidates require the creation of districts with a majority of minority constituents? Does the creation of such "majority-minority" districts account for the Republican congressional victories in 1994? The third essay in this section also addresses the empirical consequences of race-conscious redistricting, but does so from a fresh perspective. Written by Matthew M. Schousen, David T. Canon, and Patrick J. Sellers, the essay considers the opportunities majority-minority districts give voters in conjunction with the incentives that these districts give candidates. This "supply-side" analysis demonstrates that the impact of majority-minority districts is critically dependent on the choices of local politicians and the presence of institutions like runoff elections. Although the authors have previously published a version of their essay in THE JOURNAL OF POLITICS, their argument warrants further development and I am happy to see it included here.
The second section of the volume considers the legal and bureaucratic components of 1990s redistricting. The first essay in this section provides a very brief overview of leading judicial decisions, focusing attention on emergent doctrines hostile to the creation of majority-minority districts. The second, more comprehensive essay, written by Mark A. Posner, provides an insider’s view of minority voting rights enforcement at the Department of Justice (DOJ). The Supreme Court has recently taken the DOJ to task for attempting to maximize the number of majority-minority districts in Georgia and North Carolina. Posner obliquely responds to the Court’s criticism by detailing DOJ procedures and workload, providing a more complete picture of the Department’s official policies. Yet Posner does not directly assess the Court’s criticism in the specific contexts it was made. This is unfortunate, since essays elsewhere in the volume appear to side with Court (see, e.g., pp.195-96).
The third and largest section of the volume presents case studies of the redistricting process in nine different states. Virtually all of the case studies are written by individuals with practical redistricting experience. The result is a series of "on the ground" essays that provide a sharp sense of conflicts that redistricting engenders. Thus, even though the case studies vary in scope and quality, they collectively convey an important set of political lessons. First, the case studies demonstrate that political parties care a great deal about redistricting. Given the chance to control legislative line drawing, a party will usually attempt gear the entire process toward its own advantage. Second, the case studies indicate that partisan interest is frequently in conflict with the interests of individual politicians. Parties wish to distribute loyal constituents across districts in order to elect a legislative majority, while the individual incumbents wish to pack loyal constituents together in order to retain their seats. The tension between party and incumbent interests means that redistricting struggles between parties will often develop into redistricting battles within parties. Third, the case studies show that the issue of minority representation is enmeshed in the party/incumbent conflict. Minority legislators who wish to increase the number of majority-minority districts often find themselves at loggerheads with a Democratic leadership committed to maximizing party advantage. Fourth, the case studies demonstrate that participants in the redistricting process will use political resources strategically, appealing for judicial intervention, welcoming DOJ review, or brokering cross-party coalitions on the basis of beliefs about which mechanism will serve their interests best. Finally, the case studies suggest that redistricting provides a highly imperfect means of ensuring political control. Individual political fortunes can be made (and unmade) as a consequence of redistricting, but the conflicts and complexity of the process make it far more difficult for parties to establish a political dynasty through line drawing alone. Many of these lessons are not entirely new (see, e.g., Cain, 1984), but they are often neglected in contemporary discussions. This collection of case studies should help remedy the problem.
The fourth and final section of the volume features two more case studies by redistricting practitioners. Grofman places these studies in their own section because the procedures reviewed in each are somewhat unique. The first essay, written by Alan Gartner, examines the redistricting of the expanded New York City Council; the second essay, written by the late Donald Stokes, reviews the redistricting of the New Jersey state legislature. Politically balanced commissions performed redistricting in both cases, with some differences in process. In New Jersey, commission work was critically influenced by a special tie-breaking procedure: in the case of deadlock, the Chief Justice of the state supreme court was permitted to appoint an additional commission member in order to reach a settlement. In New York, special emphasis was placed on soliciting community input: the redistricting commission conducted 27 public hearings, gathered information from more than 400 community meetings, and created a public access computer terminal loaded with demographic data and redistricting software. In view of the nine "conventional" case studies that precede them, the New York and New Jersey essays make for fascinating reading. The political conflicts endemic to redistricting are present in the two states, but institutional innovations allow the states to harness these conflicts, placing them in service of specific representational goals. As the 2000 round of redistricting approaches, such efforts to alter legislative line drawing through political means should be kept in mind.
On the whole, this volume makes a strong contribution to the rapidly growing literature on race and redistricting. It does not provide either a general introduction to issues of minority representation or a collection of tightly coordinated essays. But for those seeking a more complete picture of race-conscious redistricting, with an emphasis on the nuts and bolts of the process, this volume will prove to be an important resource.
REFERENCES
Cain, Bruce. THE REAPPORTIONMENT PUZZLE. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Davidson, Chandler and Bernard Grofman, editors. QUIET REVOLUTION IN THE SOUTH: THE IMPACT OF THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT, 1965-1990. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Grofman, Bernard and Chandler Davidson, editors. CONTROVERSIES IN MINORITY VOTING: THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT IN PERSPECTIVE. Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1992.
Grofman, Bernard, Lisa Handley, and Richard Niemi. MINORITY REPRESENTATION AND THE QUEST FOR VOTING EQUALITY.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.