Courtroom Cartography

Abstract

Every decade, following the U.S. Census, lawmakers redraw state and federal legislative districts. This process of redistricting is a necessary aspect of representative democracy for capturing population changes in a dynamic society. While this responsibility of redrawing legislative districts has historically been left to state legislatures to complete - and more recently to commissions and panels - the reality is that every redistricting cycle, some of these maps are actually drawn by the U.S. federal courts. These maps determine the district boundaries for millions of Americans - who votes where, for whom and with whom. Since the Supreme Court ruled that legislative reapportionment was a justiciable issue for federal judiciary in 1962’s landmark decision, Baker v Carr, the lower federal courts have regularly taken the extraordinary step of drawing legislative districts themselves when the initial redistricting institution fails to implement a lawful plan. This places the famously nonpartisan institutions at the center of the most political activity. There is no clear constitutional or statutory guidance for how federal courts should make these remedial maps, and there are dozens of competing criteria for where to draw each line: compactness, partisan advantage, racial representation, competitiveness, protection of political subdivisions, etc. This raises fundamental questions about the role of the federal courts in American government, the nature of representative democracy, judicial independence and the separation of powers, the criteria for judging fairness, institutional capacity and federalism. Despite these tensions, there has been no comprehensive research on the impact that federal courts have on redistricting. This dissertation aims to address these tensions and fill this scholarly gap, answering the question of What has been the impact of federal court involvement in legislative redistricting between 1962’s Baker v Carr and 2019’s Rucho v Common Cause. In this dissertation, I use five approaches to undertake a comprehensive examination of the role of the federal courts in redistricting during this 57-year period. In Chapter 2, I adapt Supreme Court decision making theories for the lower federal courts to develop a theory of institutional constraints. I argue these constraints determine the courts’ choices on when, how and why to make a redistricting map and which criteria to use. In Chapter 3, I use an American Political Development approach to examine the changes in judicially manageable standards created by the Supreme Court over time for understanding the legally constraining precedents for the lower courts. In Chapter 4, I conduct an original descriptive content analysis of more than 1,200 lower federal court decisions between 1960 and 2019 related to redistricting to understand the preconditions for federal court action, the trends in lower federal court caseload and outcomes, and the obedience of the lower courts to Supreme Court precedents. In Chapter 5, I present the analytical heart of this dissertation, testing my theory and defining what makes a federal court-made map distinct from those made by other institutions. To accomplish this goal, I use an original dataset of five decades of redistricting plans at the state and federal levels together with 13 varied quantitative methods developed by myself and other political scientists for measuring gerrymanders. Analyses of these data allow me to quantify the criteria used by the federal courts in distinction to other institutions, leading to predictive results about the federal courts as map makers. I find that federal courts create redistricting plans with lower population variance, more compact districts, and a higher proportion of majority-minority districts for descriptive racial representation than legislatures or commissions. Federal courts also create some partisan bias in their plans but at a lower level than is seen in legislatures. In Chapter 6, I take a qualitative, case study approach and compare these empirical results to the actual court opinions in four representative instances where the courts drew the maps. I examine how well judges understood the nonpolitical criteria they were actually using in practice and apply my theory of institutional constraints on lower federal courts. In sum, this dissertation offers: • new datasets and methods for studying redistricting institutions; • descriptive accounts of the trends, processes and development of federal courts redistricting; • an institutional theory and approach for studying the lower federal courts; • A detailed examination of the development of Supreme Court precedents on redistricting that constrain lower court decision making; • and quantitative and qualitative analyses of which criteria the federal judiciary favors when they draw plans and why. Most importantly, this dissertation finds that the criteria courts favor in practice differ from those used by state legislatures and commissions. Federal courts apply criteria shaped by judicial constraints and that reflect a distinct understanding of legislative representation. The dissertation’s conclusion examines the implications of these findings for American democracy, the lower federal courts, voters and constituents.