Transcript
TOM MANN: In some ways it seems rather odd that our subject is gerrymandering, safe seats, and the lack of competition. You can understand given the last five congressional elections why that might be our focus. This has been a period of extraordinary stability and stasis, the fewest number of incumbents defeated, fewest number of seats changing party hands than any comparable five election period in American political history.
And yet we are today, 8 days away from the 2006 midterm elections, with powerful signs of major electoral change, certainly in the House of Representatives likely to be sufficient to change the majority party and with in my view a slightly better even the chance of that majority shifting in the Senate as well.
In fact, these elections pose a test for our electoral system. Given the overall uncompetitive structure, is there enough flexibility in this rigid system to allow some form of democratic accountability? The electorate claims to be mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore. Does our electoral system permit that sentiment to be registered by changing the team that is in control? We will learn in 8 days, but our focus here is less on electoral turnover, changing party majorities, and more on partisan polarization, the ideological polarization of the political parties and the role that gerrymandering might play in its presence and the role it might play in its amelioration.
I will for the moment simply assert that partisan polarization is for real, it exists certainly at the elite level in legislatures and the Congress, it is present among activists, and there are signs of that polarization among voters. I am saying partisan polarization. I did not say all voters are to be found at the ideological poles, and there is lots of interesting debate about just what has not gone at the level of the individual voter, but the reality is, most of us as citizens and voters view the world through our partisan lenses and it has a profound effect on what we see, and it also has serious consequences for the way in which our political system operates.
There is a natural tendency for all of us to look for the villain with partisan polarization. I have been traveling around the country lately and I have not had a session in which a question wasn't asked about gerrymandering and how can we possibly get out of this current system without dealing with the problem of gerrymandering. The assumption is gerrymandering is the villain.
If you just sit back and think for a moment or even read Tom Edsall's book which will take you a lot longer, but even more profitable, any recounting of recent American history reveals multiple roots for this pattern of uncompetitiveness and partisan polarization certainly extending back to the 1960s including the counterculture, the reaction of the war in Vietnam, the Voting Rights Act, the economic development of the South, Roe v. Wade, all setting I motion a dynamic that played out over the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Therefore, as historians and political sociologists, we would be inclined to look for those broad set of forces, but as economists or rational choice political scientists, we are driven for the single cause, it is the Voting Rights Act, or in this case, it is gerrymandering. Gerrymandering provides almost an irresistible account of how this came to be.
Read the full transcript (PDF—158kb)