Widespread Partisan Gerrymandering Mostly Cancels Nationally, but Reduces Electoral Competition

Congressional district lines in many U.S. states are drawn by partisan actors, raising concerns about gerrymandering. To separate the partisan effects of redistricting from the effects of other factors including geography and redistricting rules, we compare possible party compositions of the U.S. House under the enacted plan to those under a set of alternative simulated plans that serve as a non-partisan baseline. We find that partisan gerrymandering is widespread in the 2020 redistricting cycle, but most of the electoral bias it creates cancels at the national level, giving Republicans two additional seats on average. Geography and redistricting rules separately contribute a moderate pro-Republican bias. Finally, we find that partisan gerrymandering reduces electoral competition and makes the partisan composition of the U.S. House less responsive to shifts in the national vote.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, plus references and appendi

Evaluating Bias and Noise Induced by the U.S. Census Bureau's Privacy Protection Methods

The United States Census Bureau faces a difficult trade-off between the accuracy of Census statistics and the protection of individual information. We conduct the first independent evaluation of bias and noise induced by the Bureau's two main disclosure avoidance systems: the TopDown algorithm employed for the 2020 Census and the swapping algorithm implemented for the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Censuses. Our evaluation leverages the recent release of the Noisy Measure File (NMF) as well as the availability of two independent runs of the TopDown algorithm applied to the 2010 decennial Census. We find that the NMF contains too much noise to be directly useful alone, especially for Hispanic and multiracial populations. TopDown's post-processing dramatically reduces the NMF noise and produces similarly accurate data to swapping in terms of bias and noise. These patterns hold across census geographies with varying population sizes and racial diversity. While the estimated errors for both TopDown and swapping are generally no larger than other sources of Census error, they can be relatively substantial for geographies with small total populations.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Comment: The Essential Role of Policy Evaluation for the 2020 Census Disclosure Avoidance System

In "Differential Perspectives: Epistemic Disconnects Surrounding the US Census Bureau's Use of Differential Privacy," boyd and Sarathy argue that empirical evaluations of the Census Disclosure Avoidance System (DAS), including our published analysis, failed to recognize how the benchmark data against which the 2020 DAS was evaluated is never a ground truth of population counts. In this commentary, we explain why policy evaluation, which was the main goal of our analysis, is still meaningful without access to a perfect ground truth. We also point out that our evaluation leveraged features specific to the decennial Census and redistricting data, such as block-level population invariance under swapping and voter file racial identification, better approximating a comparison with the ground truth. Lastly, we show that accurate statistical predictions of individual race based on the Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding, while not a violation of differential privacy, substantially increases the disclosure risk of private information the Census Bureau sought to protect. We conclude by arguing that policy makers must confront a key trade-off between data utility and privacy protection, and an epistemic disconnect alone is insufficient to explain disagreements between policy choices.Comment: Version accepted to Harvard Data Science Revie

Campaign Messaging and Optimization in Local Elections: Evidence from a Field Experiment

The vast majority of American elections take place at the local level in low-turnout, low-salience environments yet we know little about how voters select which local candidates to support. The literature is split on whether or not local voters choose candidates for ideological reasons. Previous work has suggested that both ideological and non-ideological messages can influence local voting behavior, but it is not yet established whether voters prioritize certain types of information or if, instead, hearing non-negative information of any kind about a local candidate is enough to generate support in a low-salience election. This study presents the results from a field experiment (N = 5484 voters in 2957 households) which, in partnership with a campaign for local office, enlisted canvassers to present voters with either a message containing non-ideological personal information about the candidate or a policy-rich message outlining the candidate's ideological proposals. I find compelling evidence that voters are persuaded by personal contact with a local campaign but care little about campaign messaging in low-salience environments - that is, in the absence of information about other candidates or the election, voters are equally persuaded by ideological and non-ideological information. This suggests that uncertainty plays a significant role in low-salience elections and that voters may select candidates in these environments on the basis of familiarity and not necessarily ideology

Replication Data for: Representation in Municipal Governments: A Replication and Extension to School Districts

In "Representation and Municipal Government," Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2014) examine the extent to which cities in the U.S. are responsive to the views of their citizens. Using a multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) model, the authors pool survey data to predict citizen preferences for U.S. cities with more than 20,000 citizens. They then compare citizen policy preferences with policy outputs at the municipal-level. The authors find that policy outputs correspond with the liberal-conservative policy preferences of citizens, but that institutions (e.g. having an elected mayor, partisan elections, etc.) have little to no impact on policy responsiveness. We provide two extensions. First, we replicate their core findings and use their estimated ideology scores to show that school district policies are strongly associated with citizen-level policy views. Second, we follow their entire methodological process with new survey data and create true school district-level estimates of ideology. These initial results suggest that school district policies largely correspond with the views of the citizens represented by them

Acute Invasive Rhino-Orbital Mucormycosis in a Patient With COVID-19-Associated Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Acute invasive fungal rhinosinusitis is a rare, although highly morbid, infection primarily affecting immunosuppressed individuals. The same population is at particularly high risk of complications and mortality in the setting of SARS-CoV-2 infection and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related acute respiratory distress syndrome. The authors present a case of acute invasive fungal rhino-orbital mucormycosis in a patient with COVID-19 and discuss the prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment of fungal coinfections in COVID-19. Prompt recognition, initiation of therapy, and consideration of the challenges of rapidly evolving COVID-19 therapy guidelines are important for improving patient survival

Acute Invasive Rhino-Orbital Mucormycosis in a Patient With COVID-19-Associated Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Acute invasive fungal rhinosinusitis is a rare, although highly morbid, infection primarily affecting immunosuppressed individuals. The same population is at particularly high risk of complications and mortality in the setting of SARS-CoV-2 infection and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-related acute respiratory distress syndrome. The authors present a case of acute invasive fungal rhino-orbital mucormycosis in a patient with COVID-19 and discuss the prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment of fungal coinfections in COVID-19. Prompt recognition, initiation of therapy, and consideration of the challenges of rapidly evolving COVID-19 therapy guidelines are important for improving patient survival