Communities of Interest in Redistricting: Who are we splitting up?

Keywords: communities of interest, redistricting, clustering, census
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Congressional redistricting is the process of delineating boundaries for districts in which voters elect members to the United States House of Representatives. Currently, states are actively redrawing these boundaries based on the results of the 2020 Census. Eight traditional redistricting criteria should be considered when determining the boundaries of congressional districts and this paper focuses on one of those criteria, maintaining communities of interest. The criterion requires states to preserve community of interest boundaries when delineating congressional districts but fails to define the term. This paper evaluates one way to define a community of interest using cluster analysis to group together people with similar demographic characteristics and then identifies how well states complied with this definition after the redistricting that occurred after the 2010 Census. The results show that the definition is suitable for defining a community of interest in most states. States largely maintain the community of interest boundaries within their congressional districts by only splitting, at most, 13% of the communities and, on average, 7% of the time. The paper then examines the demographic characteristics of the people who found themselves living near each other but on different sides of a congressional district line after the 2010 Census.