How I Teach Gerrymandering

I'd heard the term before but never looked into it – it was useful to have something to prompt me (partially because this article doesn't even mention what it is). It's when the government manipulates electorates to increase their chances of being re-elected. As someone in the UK this is something I've wondered about a lot over the last year.

If you don't follow UK politics, we have a government that was elected with 51% of the seats on 36.9% of the votes.

I found this article which explains some of the mechanisms used to manipulate the outcome of these elections.

https://medium.com/@georgetaitedwards/is-britain-now-too-ger...

UK election outcomes have nothing to do with gerrymandering and everything to do with being a multi-party democracy using a FPTP electoral system, which tends to boost the representation of leading parties at the expense of smaller parties. Indeed, you'd actually need gerrymandering for such a system to have any hope of returning seats broadly in proportion to vote share.

(the conspiracy theory about disenfranchisement advanced by the blog article is orthogonal to the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to distort shares of actual votes. It's also a little difficult to take seriously an argument which suggests that a short-lived poll tax abolished in 1991 would be a significant factor in the 2015 election. Especially when the party that enacted it spent 13 of the intervening years out of power, with the electoral system and distribution of voters heavily favouring their rivals at the time. The article is equally ludicrous in suggesting Labour would be disadvantaged by a fraction of voters in strongly Labour-supporting boroughs being under financial pressure to relocate)

I've seem a number of comments about that 36.9% - I had a quick look and it is actually higher than the Labour win in 2005 (35.2%) which had a lower turnout as well.

http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/uktable.htm

[I'm not a Labour, Conservative or LibDem supporter so I have no particular axe to grind here].

This is a great way to teach gerrymandering. It also illustrates the problem with 'Party X is evil, Party Y is not.'

Political parties (stripping away all else) are groups of people who identify with one another. Take that one step further, and they're groups of people that identify with one another and believe their group is the best one to represent the whole.

Or, if you are less idealistic, they want to win (I subscribe to the idea that they want to win because they think their way is the best way and they like the power).

Once you believe those few things, it's easy to understand why politicians aren't evil, they're just vested in their group; in the same way you'd be vested in your group of friends vs. some random sampling of people you met on the street.

Does this make our current set of political problems insurmountable? No; we just have to mold the system so that no one party can have absolute control even if they control the central government. Maybe by delegating a small set of powers to the central government and keeping most governing done at the local level. Maybe we could call it a constitutional republic?