Chapter 15 Apportionment

Publisher Summary This chapter describes apportionment. Apportionment determines the number of seats each state will receive. Redistricting refers to the drawing of congressional district boundaries within a state, one for each representative. The districts should have approximately ‘equal populations'. These considerations place severe restrictions on the districting plans, and make districting a quite difficult computational problem. All of the major historical methods except Hamilton's fall into the specific computational framework implied by a common divisor. The approach to measure bias suggests a mathematical model for theoretical analysis. Mathematics, through the axiomatic method, gives a precise statement about the consistency or inconsistency and thus provides a sensible basis for choosing the method that seems right for a given application. Population monotonicity implies house monotonicity. Not only do the Hamilton and Quota methods violate population monotonicity, so does any method that satisfies quota.