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There are two stages to the process of determining the boundaries of electoral districts. In the first, the number of districts in a legislative assembly is established. In the United States, this phase is referred to as apportionment or reapportionment; in countries with a Westminster–style parliamentary system, it is generally known as redistribution. For federal countries such as Germany, India, and Canada—but not for unitary states such as New Zealand and the United Kingdom—an essential part of the first stage is the allocation of districts to their lower house of parliament according to the share of the nation’s population of their respective Länder, states, or provinces. Once the number of districts has been established (as a result of either a governing statute or, in rare instances, a constitutional provision), the second part of the process gets under way. This is known as the districting, boundary readjustment, or boundary delimitation stage.

Statutory law is commonly used to establish the total number of seats in a legislative assembly. That is the case in the United States, where 435 districts in the House of Representatives has been a fixed number since 1929. In other countries, the size of the assembly is variable. It may change from one reapportionment to another because of population growth or movement (Canada and the United Kingdom) or expansion to include additional population or territory (Germany following reunification in 1990).

Apportionment of legislative or parliamentary seats does not take place in political systems that have no need for territorially defined electoral districts. In Israel, for example, proportional representation is used to elect the 120 members of the Knesset, with the entire country serving as a single electoral district. By contrast, in countries that elect their assemblies by way of a first-past-the-post system (the U.S. House of Representatives), single transferable vote (the Republic of Ireland’s Dáil), or additional member (Germany’s Bundestag) system, geographically bounded districts must be constructed.

The frequency of boundary delimitations varies from country to country. In Australia, redistributions are triggered after a period of seven years, but they occur more often if the distribution of population requires a change in the number of members of the House of Representatives allocated to a state or territory or if more than one-third of a state’s federal districts (called “divisions” in Australia) deviate from the average divisional population of that state by more than 10 percent. India, on the other hand, undertakes the massive job of redistricting its congressional seats less frequently. Thirty years passed between the redistribution of electoral districts for the lower house of parliament (Lok Sabha) that followed the 1971 census and the next redistribution early in the twenty-first century. It is anticipated that the next redistribution will not occur until after the 2021 census. The constitution of many countries, including Canada and the United States, requires redistricting every ten years based on the most recent national census.

The allocation of legislative districts and the actual drawing of their boundaries have long played an integral and highly partisan role in politics. Politicians of all stripes have traditionally seen the districting process as a way to try to advance their own party’s chances of electoral success. The time-honored practice of government parties manipulating district boundaries for their own benefit has come to be known as gerrymandering.

In many countries, partisan gerrymandering has given way—largely over the past few decades—to commissions that work independently of legislatures and political parties. Canada, for instance, in 1964 followed the pioneering lead of New Zealand and Australia in turning over to nonpartisan commissions the task of designing the districts for its House of Commons. Once a decade, three-member nonpartisan commissions chaired by a judge are named for each of the ten provinces. The governing statute calls upon the commissions to design federal constituencies with population equality of electoral districts as the principle objective, subject to such practical considerations as community of social and economic interests and geographic integrity. In varying degrees, such principles are common to all countries that assign boundary delimitation to nonpartisan commissions.

With the exception of a few states in the United States where no legislative commissions are named to carry out the redistricting of the state legislature, the process at the federal and state levels remains highly politicized. Once the 435 seats have been apportioned among the 50 states, the responsibility for drawing district boundaries for the House of Representatives falls on the state legislatures. Partisan control of the legislative and (for veto purposes) executive branches is highly desirable to try to ensure that the districts have been designed in such a way as to favor the majority party’s interests.

Bibliography:

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