Levitt 32
Getting What You Want: Interest Group Success in Redistricting
As the newly-minted seven commissioners on San Diego’s Citizens’ Redistricting Commission first sat down to take the oath of office on October 21, 2010, the Asian- and Pacific-American Coalition (APAC) came prepared. Not even knowing the official numbers from the 2010 Census, Mitz Lee spoke on behalf of the group: “Asians are the fastest-growing group in the city, and deserve a district…and this district should be the new 9th districts, to show the importance of the community.” A prepared map, using city and county population estimates, proposed to link five neighborhoods currently split between four districts. Though Ms. Lee herself was unable to participate in the entire process[i], APAC nevertheless attended every meeting, working with the Commission to develop a final district that—while not exactly what the group had first advocated—nevertheless united three of the five communities that were formerly in three separate districts. A much calmer Dr. Allan Chan spoke to the Commission at its final hearing on August 25th, thanking the Commission for their hard work, and noting that “while APAC may not have gotten everything it wanted,” they “looked forward to coming back in 10 years” and pleading their case again.
While APAC could not have been said to have lost, as the Commission spent hours deliberating over the testimony from hundreds of APAC supporters and opponents, it nevertheless did not clearly win either, and their main goal of numbering this district so that it would have an election in 2012 rather than 2014 was unmet. This suggests an intriguing question: why do some interest groups succeed in redistricting while others fail? In particular, what sort of decision-making processes do Redistricting Commissions and interest groups go through when partisan cues are subordinate or absent?
In this paper, I use models from cooperative game theory, specifically Fair Division and bargaining analogies to analyze interest group success given Commission decision-making processes, and ultimately, answer the question of why some interest groups may be more successful than others.
Defining Success
Operationalizing success is not a simple task. The emphasis in the literature has focused on explaining redistricting success by emphasizing descriptive outcomes such as partisan control or ethnic population as a key variable.
The problem with simply using descriptive measures is that they tend to focus strongly on the results produced by the new districts rather than what I am more precisely interested in—the processes and methods that groups use in achieving their goals, which may not be strictly partisan or ethnic. APAC, for example, never claimed to speak on behalf of Asians in south San Diego, in Skyline-Paradise Hills. San Diego’s regional planning boards that spoke often asked the Commission to ignore ethnicity when maximizing an ethnic population meant dividing planning groups, as the Coasts and Canyons coalition did when it asked the Commission to keep the heavily Asian neighborhoods in University City around the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) in the same district as Whiter areas of University City. In all of the testimony, references to partisanship and competitiveness in district creation was brought up by only group, the San Diego Republican Party, whose map was completely ignored by the Commission because it divided too many neighborhoods[ii].
Yet though focusing on outcomes produced in the districts does not capture what we want in a measure, which is the how successful interest groups are at different stages of the process. What we need is something more akin to a measure of willingness to compromise, of how likely, in each stage, is either party to give in to the other side. The structure of the game is the easy part to model: when an Interest Group makes a request to the Commission, the Commission has three options: accept the request, reject the request, or defer the request. This is true until the Final Plan, when the Commission only has two options: accept or reject. Yet while this illustrates the Commission’s process, the question of how the Commission chooses its option remains. Clearly this requires some sort of evaluative standard, some system of costing that the Commission can apply to each interest.
We can conceive the costs of both the Commission and each Interest Group as twofold:
1. A cost of litigation (CL), which is the estimate of the costs of going to court to fight for the district boundaries you want. A higher cost of litigation would mean that your plan would be difficult to argue for or defend legally.
2. A cost of compromising (CC), which is the opportunity cost of not getting the precise boundary or meeting the self-selected criteria either the Commission or the Interest Group wants. A low cost of compromise means that the two proposals are close in concept, while a higher cost of compromise means that the Commission’s proposal and the Interest Group’s are farther apart.
The interpretation of these costs is different for the Commission and the Interest Group. This stems from the fact that Interest Groups cannot impose their preferences on the Commission, while the Commission has no preference for a particular alignment. The Commission’s objectives are straightforward and can be ranked in this order:
(1) Produce a plan that is legally defensible on its face, by following the mandates of the Supreme Court and Federal Law, including the Voting Rights Act, as well as the San Diego City Charter
(2) Incorporate “good-government” redistricting principles, particularly in keeping neighborhoods and communities of interest together (as Commissioner Potter termed it, “shared problems”), and avoiding partisan considerations
(3) Negotiate between the various proposals for alignments sponsored by Interest Groups.
While this seems to suggest that the Commission would minimize the extent to which they listen to Interest Groups, this overstates the limitations the first two criteria impose. Those criteria serve to give the Commission a framework from which they can determine costs. The first question the Commission asks is, “Are we legally mandated to do this?” Note that this does not mean the Commission knows whether it is indeed legally required to do something. Because the courts have given redistricting authorities broad power over what criteria are prioritized, and even the more specific language in the San Diego city charter is still broad, a Commission faces great uncertainty over what potential litigation costs might be. For example, the Charter’s requirement for “reasonably compact” districts is open to many potential challenges. This uncertainty means the cost incurred by the Commission is higher than it would be if they knew the outcome. If they know they only have to draw one majority Latino district, for example, they will treat requests for a second as “nice in theory, but not necessary”. One effect of the uncertainty of litigation is that it gives the Commission even more flexibility in responding to Interest Group proposals. Indeed, listening to Interest Groups is often a strategy the Commission uses to minimize the threat of litigation—if a group that is likely able to launch a successful lawsuit is made happy, then the Commission can lower their total cost of litigation. For the Commission, then, the willingness to compromise is related to cost of litigation because the Commission should be more willing to compromise when its perceived legal threat is high.
In areas where the threat of successful litigation is low, such as areas without Voting Rights Act issues, the Commission can essentially tick the box next to the first objective and move to the next two. For example, the Tierrasanta Planning Board initially proposed a district that linked their neighborhood with communities to the west in Clairemont. In this case, the litigation costs are extremely low—the courts are unlikely to overturn an otherwise legal plan just because a neighborhood is divided—but the Commission decided the cost of compromising with the group was too high—this alignment entailed too many community splits in the neighborhoods to the north and south of the proposed district, and simply wasn’t feasible.
On the other side, Interest Groups face the prospect of not getting anything, so their costs are a little different. Interest Groups prioritize their goals as:
(1) Get the exact alignment it wants
(2) Barring this, make sure core areas are linked together or separated, depending on the objective
(3) If this is not possible under any Commission’s proposal, lay a foundation for a potential lawsuit
In particular, for Interest Groups, the first question is whether they have a legal case for the alignment they want. To this extent, most Interest Groups face more uncertainty than the Commission—even Interest Groups representing ethnic groups may not be sure the extent to which their group is protected under the Voting Rights Act. So many Groups face a high cost of litigation, even though some of this cost may be paid up-front in paying for a legal analysis of probable outcomes. So for many Interest Groups, the cost of litigation is simply too high, and it is cheaper to compromise rather than stand one’s ground.
Yet just as for the Commission, a Group’s cost of compromise is not simply a function of costs of litigation. In the first round of drafts, the Coast and Canyons coalition received most of what they wanted. They were generally happy with the district, and the Commission was favorably inclined toward their position. Yet because the Commission had followed the city’s neighborhood boundary instead of the Planning Area boundary, the eastern half of the Del Mar Mesa Nature Preserve was excluded from the district. To be clear, there was no chance of litigation from Coasts and Canyons if the Commission had not agreed, but when the issue was raised on July 9th, the Commission had no reservations about ordering the change implemented. Conversely, even though Community in Unity, a coalition of ethnic groups, probably had the lowest cost of litigation, they frequently opted to compromise with the commission, even on significant issues.
Even though the qualitative meaning of both costs is different, the types of request a group will make as well as the predicted Commission response are shown in Table 1:
Table 1: Predicted Interest Group Request and Commission Action
CommissionCC<CL / CC>CL
Interest Group / CC<CL / · Interest Group takes hard line;
· Commission agrees to mutually beneficial outcome (see Figure 1) / · Interest Group offers compromise;
· Commission defers until it gets the bargain it wants, at which point it accepts
CC>CL / · Interest Group stays neutral;
· Commission offers counter-proposals until it develops one that the Interest Group accepts / · Interest Group takes hard line;
· Commission rejects
· Litigation possible
Figure 1: Willingness to Compromise-Cost Functions
Table 1 and Figure 1 work together to show the prospective outcomes given the calculations each party makes about their costs, an outcome that represents the predisposition to modify their position, or willingness to compromise, as I termed it above . Willingness to compromise is itself a simple summation of the two costs. When an Interest Group or the Commission perceives its costs are high, willingness to compromise is low and vice versa. The shape of the curve for the Commission is exponential, which reflects the principle that minor changes are very cheap, while larger changes are costly. Moving an adjacent census block into a district to unify a community has little cost, but wholesale redrawing to satisfy a particular interest is costly. On the other hand, for interest groups, the cost of changing is high at two points—first, when the Commission’s plan is very close to the desired district, and second, when the Commission’s plan is very different. Willingness to compromise will be highest in between the two extremes.
Figure 2: Willingness to Bargain-Surplus and Lost
The grey areas in Figure 2 also help us understand why Interest Groups have the advantage when both parties have lower costs of compromise than litigation, like Coasts and Canyons, as well as when Interest Groups may choose to no longer participate in the process, such as when the College Area Residents’ Association quit seeking to work with the commission. The light grey area left of point a illustrates the size of the Commission’s surplus. This is highest when there is total overlap between the Commission’s map and the Interest Group proposal. At any point to the left of a, the Commission gains a surplus by agreeing with the Interest Group—essentially, it is fulfilling its goals 2 and 3 by working with the Interest Group. Thus, since the Commission has the most to gain when overlap is very high to start, when for both parties the cost of compromise is lower than the cost of litigation, the Interest Group can successfully force the Commission’s hand.
The dark greys right of a represent values where the outcome is a loss. These are places of dissonance, where the differences between the Commission’s proposal and the Interest Group’s have substantial differences, but nevertheless, are not different enough that negotiation is impossible, as is the case at point c. If a group is between points a and b, it can move toward a, reducing its loss. Conversely, at any point to the right of b, the Commission and the Interest Group may actually reduce losses not by moving in the same direction, but by moving in the opposite direction. If a Group is at point d, for example, moving toward b will be a net worse outcome unless they can pass b. This is often the case in the lower right quadrant in Table 1, when the Commission and the Interest Group are both aware that the cost of compromise is higher than the cost of litigation. An example of a group that began (and stayed) at point c is the San Diego Taxpayer’s Federation, who presented to Commission in several hearings before June 25, but when they realized the Commission was hostile to their plan, they chose not to continue participating in the process.
There is one other important intuition from Figure 2. While the area left of a corresponds to the upper left quadrant of Table 1 (CC<CL for both parties) and the area right of b is the lower right quadrant (CC>CL for both parties), the area between a and b represents either the upper right or lower left quadrants, where compromise should happen. As we see on Figure 2, at these points, generally the Interest Group is more willing to compromise. But this does not entail that the Interest Group should be the party who offers the compromise. In the lower left quadrant, what we see is the Interest Group in a receptive role. This is illustrated by the Navajo Planning Board. This Interest Group did not offer their own plan, but spoke against Draft Plans 1-3, but when the Council offered Draft Plan 4, voiced their support for it. Navajo was more willing to compromise than the Commission, but let the Commission determine the direction of the changes.