As someone who got WAY into issues of districting, variation in election laws, voting procedures and the like when I was in grad school I'm familiar with a lot of the arguments for and against different types of gerrymandering. But the Lexington column in the July 8th issue of The Economist brings up a matter I haven't given much thought to: Do we have fewer black statewide elected officials because of racial gerrymandering? I think that's a pretty interesting question. US representatives are (I think) the set of officials most likely to get elected to the Senate and to gubenatorial mansions (and of course governors are most likely to win the presidency). Does the fact that successful black politicians are often segregated into districts that don't look much like their state as a whole, well, does that hurt them when they try to run statewide? I don't know precisely how one would study this, but I think it's an intriguing thought.
Posted by armand at July 10, 2006 03:18 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics