by Jacob T. Levy

Apropos of today's TNR editorial on gerrymandering, I'd like to recommend (to readers, OU colleagues, and TNR editors alike) the book The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design by Andrew Rehfeld, a political theorist at Washington University of St. Louis (and, if I recall correctly, a former student and advisee of our own Cass Sunstein). Rehfeld presents a surprisingly powerful argument for breaking the power of gerrymandering, not by returning constitutency-districting to traditional communities of interest, and not by the preferred goo-goo expedient of having nonpartisan commissions craft balanced districts, but by doing away with territorial constituencies altogether. He proposes instead random assignment to non-territorial single-member constituencies-- in the U.S., those would be by state, so that all Californians or New Yorkers would be thrown into a common pool and allocated to constitutencies randomly. I'm Burkean enough to dislike and distrust big, audacious institutional fixes that seem to be derived from slender philosophical premises. And I have no trouble describing some of the problems to which the system would give rise. But after reading the book I'm not sure those problems are worse than the status quo; and the argument is strong enough, and sensitive enough to questions of institutions and incentives, to overcome a lot of my Burkean resistance. It leaves a strong impression that this might be one of those rare cases in which the bigger, more radical change (abolishing territorial districting) might be a more-attainable and more-realistic solution than the various incremental changes that have been proposed instead--as well as being, on his account, much more justified. In any event the book is an intellectual pleasure to read--nicely combining historial, normative, and institutional analyses--and it really got me thinking about districting and constitutencies in new ways. (Hobbyhorse alert: it's a great example of what political theory, as a subdiscipline separate from political philosophy, can hope to intellectually contribute.) I'm far from sure that Rehfeld is right; but I am sure that people ought to be thinking about both his proposal and his arguments about constituency more generally in trying to understand what to do about the American gerrymandering mess.