Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of City Redistricting: Minority-Opportunity Districts and the Election of Hispanics and Blacks to City Councils

3. Players in the Politics of “Selling” Minority-Opportunity Districts: Self-Serving Incumbents, the Feds, and Organized Interests

C H A P T E R T H R E E Players in the Politics of “Selling” MinorityOpportunity Districts: Self-Serving Incumbents, the Feds, and Organized Interests During the 1970s and 1980s many interest groups were effectively excluded from the details of redistricting due to limited access to technology. The 1990 round of redistricting saw digital data sets and powerful computer programs, able to aggregate block-level census data into district maps, made available widely to interested parties. Digital census data, when combined with any of several Geographic Information System (GIS) software packages, provided the ability to construct and submit alternative redistricting plans (Martin 1996, 69–70, 159–61; Foresman 1998, 286). Monmonier (2001, 6–7) documents the increased number of pages required to record congressional districts in the Congressional District Atlas as an indicator of the increasingly complex geometry of congressional districts. The early 1990 round of redistricting was a juncture in “the rapid developments in computer hardware and GIS software [that] came together to revolutionize the technical aspects of electoral cartography” (Eagles, Katz, and Mark 1999, 6; Chrisman 1997). Hagens (1996, 320–21) documents the importance of access to districting technology during the 1990 round of redistricting in Virginia: At long last the legislature’s monopoly on the technical capability to create districting plans ended. No longer could the legislature claim, as it had in past decades, that alternatives to its redistricting plans were technically impractical. [Private interests] were able to publish plans for the 1 5 minority that demonstrated the feasibility of alternative redistricting proposals that increased minority representation. Weber (1995, 212) argues that technological advances in districting software “fed litigation and judicial activism” by providing “multiple actors the ammunition to sue” if they were not satisfied with the legislature’s redistricting plans. By permission of Don Wright for the Palm Beach Post This chapter presents a discussion of the concepts that condition the two general relationships already specified in the previous chapter. Recall that the concept of ‘system aptitude’ is the potential to construct minorityopportunity districts independent of political climate or geographic constraints .1 The technical task of drawing districting plans that include minority-opportunity districts is a relatively simple matter of mechanics given a large enough citywide minority population. The development of the variable political tenability, the first of several proposed conditioning variables , will illustrate the bridge between the technical ability to construct potential districting plans that contain minority-opportunity districts and the political defense that may contribute to either the adoption or rejection of those plans. P O L I T I C A L T E N A B I L I T Y The supposition thus far has been that, given a large enough minority population , a minority-opportunity district is likely to be adopted and a minority elected to office. This, however, ignores the untenable political position of 1 6 Race, Ethnicity, and the Politics of City Redistricting districting plans that propose minority-opportunity districts with unusual or grotesque shapes. The drawing of districting plans with relatively compact minority-opportunity districts may be more easily defended or sustained politically than odd-shaped districts. Therefore, the tenability of minorityopportunity districts is dependent, in part, on the residential concentration of the minority population. While dispersion of minority population within a city may not necessarily preclude the construction of minority-opportunity districts, it often compels the drawing of Rorschach-shaped districts with fingers reaching into several scattered minority concentrations. And a relatively small number of councilmanic districts may further require the capturing of dispersed pockets of minority concentrations. Such odd-shaped districts may not be explicable on grounds other than race or ethnicity and thereby frequently raise eyebrows and lead to charges of racial gerrymandering (see, e.g., Shaw v. Reno 1993).2 People are fairly intimate with their local surroundings and generally are able to identify geographic areas within a city. These “communities” or “neighborhoods” are commonly recognized along cultural, economic, racial, or ethnic lines. This is consistent with our understanding that proximity of spatial relations is an indication of other commonalties. Simply, those living in relative proximity may share some social, cultural, political, or economic interests. According to Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1925, 7): “Proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for the simplest and most elementary form of association . . . in the organization of city life. Local interests and associations breed local sentiment, and, under a system which makes...