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Three Essays on the Accounting of Partisan Gerrymandering and Consequences of Redistricting
Partisan gerrymandering is the construction of political districts to benefit one party at the expense of another. It has been a fixture of American politics for over two centuries, and, in part, determines who is elected to office. In spite of its historical prevalence and broad implications for America's political landscape, there is no consensus on how gerrymandering should be measured. Among the various metrics that exist for this task, one of the most popular is a fairly recent addition the field: the efficiency gap. Still, the efficiency gap has been garnered considerable criticism for its inability to consistently measure gerrymandering and potential to provide unintuitive results. Chapter One of this dissertation documents the efficiency gap's mathematical properties and its shortcomings. It then presents a straightforward modification to the efficiency gap that ensures its consistency. Chapter Two presents individual metrics for the strategies underlying gerrymandering, packing and cracking, and then combines them to create a novel metric of gerrymandering, the cracking differential. Encouragingly, the cracking differential provides results that are qualitatively similar to the efficiency gap, but robust to its most common critiques. Chapter Three utilizes the cracking differential to quantify the causal effects of redistricting reform in Arizona's congressional elections. This is among the first papers to provide a rigorously study the causal link between redistricting reform and gerrymandering, and provides suggestive evidence that Arizona's independent redistricting commission reduced partisan gerrymandering within the state's congressional elections