Analyzing the Effects of Partisan Correlation on Election Outcomes Using Order Statistics
Abstract
The legislative representation of political parties in the United States is dependent
not only on way that legislative district boundaries are drawn, but also on the way
in which people are distributed across a state. That is, there exists a level of partisan
correlation within the spacial distribution of an electorate that affects legislative
outcomes. This work aims to study the effect of this partisan clustering on election
outcomes and related metrics using analytic models and order statistics. Two models
of North Carolina, one with a uniformly distributed electorate and one with a symmetrically
clustered electorate, are considered both independently and in comparison. These models
are used to study expected election outcomes, the proportionality of legislative representation
for given state-wide vote fraction, and the sensitivity of vote share to seat share
across different correlation length scales. The findings provide interesting insight
into the relationship between district proportionality and legislative proportionality,
the extent to which the minority party is expected to be underrepresented in seat
share for given state-wide vote share and correlation length, and the extent to which
the responsiveness of seat share is dependent on state wide vote share and correlation
length.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
MathematicsPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18526Citation
Wiebe, Claire (2019). Analyzing the Effects of Partisan Correlation on Election Outcomes Using Order Statistics.
Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18526.Collections
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