Relative to its overall statewide support, the Republican Party has been over-represented in Congressional delegations and state legislatures over the last decade in a number of U.S. states. A challenge for courts is to determine the extent to which this can be explained by intentional gerrymandering vis-a-vis an underlying inefficient distribution of Democrats in cities. We explain the problem of spatial inefficiency in partisan support, and measure it by borrowing from the field of plant ecology, assessing the partisanship of the nearest neighbors of each voter in each U.S. state at the spatial scales relevant for Congressional delegations and both chambers of state legislatures. We demonstrate that as a result of urban-rural partisan polarization, much of the cross-state and cross-chamber variation in Republican advantage can be explained by the relative spatial inefficiency of Democrats. Moreover, our pure political geography approach to votes and seats provides a useful baseline against which to evaluate claims of partisan gerrymandering. We demonstrate that Republicans are often able to improve significantly on their underlying geographic advantage when they control the redistricting process, while Democrats are sometimes able to ameliorate it when they draw the lines.

中文翻译：

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谁是我的邻居？党派关系的空间效率

相对于其在全州范围内的总体支持，在过去的十年中，共和党在美国多个州的国会代表团和州议会中的代表人数过多。法院面临的一个挑战是，通过对城市中潜在的民主低效率的分配进行有意的讨价还价，来确定可以在多大程度上解释这一点。我们解释了党派支持的空间效率低下的问题，并通过借鉴植物生态学领域进行了测量，并在与国会代表团和两个州参议院有关的空间尺度上评估了美国各州每个选民的最近邻居的党派关系。立法机关。我们证明，由于城乡两党分化，共和党优势的大部分跨州和跨室变化都可以通过民主党的相对空间效率低下来解释。此外，我们对票数和席位的纯粹政治地理学方法提供了有用的基准，可以用来评估游击队游击队员的主张。我们证明，共和党人在控制重新划分流程时通常能够显着提高其潜在的地理优势，而民主党人在划定界限时有时能够加以改善。