Chapter 35 — Further Reading

An annotated guide to the literature on gerrymandering, redistricting, and electoral design. Sources are grouped by orientation and approach, with notes on what each contributes.

Quantitative-empirical analysis

Sam Wang, Brian Remlinger, and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Princeton's Election Innovation and Redistricting Report Card projects (gerrymander.princeton.edu) provide ongoing quantitative analysis of every state's congressional and state-legislative maps, scored on partisan fairness, competitiveness, geographic features, and compactness. The site is the single best public-facing resource for current map data. Wang's academic papers on partisan symmetry and the application of statistical methods to gerrymandering are foundational.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos and Eric McGhee. Stephanopoulos (Harvard Law) and McGhee (Public Policy Institute of California) co-authored "Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap" (University of Chicago Law Review, 2014), the paper that introduced the efficiency-gap metric and was central to Whitford v. Gill. Stephanopoulos's subsequent work on "partisan asymmetry as a measure of gerrymandering" is essential. McGhee's quantitative analyses, available through PPIC, document the empirical effects of redistricting reforms in California.

Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide (Basic Books, 2019). The most-cited account of the geographic-sorting hypothesis. Rodden, a Stanford political scientist, argues that the United States' urban-rural sorting produces a structural Republican advantage in single-member-district plurality systems even under neutral maps. The book is essential for understanding how much of the lopsidedness in U.S. House districts is gerrymandering versus geography.

Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, "Unintentional Gerrymandering: Political Geography and Electoral Bias in Legislatures" (Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2013). The technical paper underlying Why Cities Lose. The paper's neutral-redistricting simulations of Pennsylvania are the basis for many subsequent comparison-method analyses.

Jonathan Mattingly, Wendy Tam Cho, Kosuke Imai, and Devin Caughey. Each has developed simulation-based methods for evaluating redistricting plans. Mattingly's work at Duke was central to the Pennsylvania litigation; Tam Cho's at Illinois pioneered ensemble methods; Imai's at Harvard developed the redist package for R; Caughey's at MIT extended methods to state-legislative analysis. Their combined output represents the state of the art in quantitative redistricting analysis.

Michael Li and the Brennan Center for Justice. Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, has been the most-cited legal commentator on redistricting throughout the 2010s and 2020s. The Brennan Center's "Redistricting and Representation" reports are essential primary sources, with state-by-state analyses, litigation tracking, and reform-proposal evaluations.

Justin Levitt, A Citizen's Guide to Redistricting (Brennan Center, 2010, updated editions). A clear introduction to the legal framework before Rucho; the 2020-update editions cover the post-Rucho state-court doctrine. Levitt, now at Loyola Law School (and DOJ's senior counsel for democracy and voting rights in the Biden administration), is the most accessible legal expositor in the field.

Bernard Grofman, Redistricting: A Long View (CQ Press, 2014). Grofman, a UC Irvine political scientist who has spent forty years studying redistricting, provides the definitive long-view treatment. The book is comprehensive on legal history, doctrine, and the political-science literature.

Heather Gerken, "Lost in the Political Thicket: The Court, Election Law, and the Doctrinal Interregnum" (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2004). Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, has been a leading election-law theorist for two decades. This early article frames the doctrinal puzzle that Rucho eventually resolved.

Journalistic and narrative accounts

David Daley, *Ratfked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (W.W. Norton, 2016).* The most-cited journalistic account of REDMAP. Daley, a journalist with sympathetic access to RSLC strategists and to redistricting reformers, traces the program from its origin to its 2014 mid-decade legal challenges. The book is written from a reform perspective; readers should pair it with conservative critiques.

David Daley, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy (Liveright, 2020). Daley's follow-up covers the rise of state-court and ballot-initiative reform between 2016 and 2020. Sympathetic to the reform movement; useful as a guide to the institutions and individuals involved.

Sam Wang and Brian Remlinger, "How Gerrymandering Works in 2026" (essays at electionlawblog.org and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project blog). Real-time analysis of current redistricting controversies. The blog format produces rapid, well-sourced commentary on emerging cases.

Conservative and contrarian perspectives

The Cato Institute, "Election Reform" research portfolio (cato.org/research/election-reform). Cato's election-reform research generally argues for transparency and federalism while raising skepticism of "good government" reforms perceived as advantaging Democrats. The portfolio includes critiques of independent-commission practice, defenses of legislature-drawn redistricting on democratic-accountability grounds, and skepticism of federal anti-gerrymandering legislation. Essential for steel-manning the conservative position.

The R Street Institute, "Governance" research portfolio. R Street, a center-right policy organization, has produced more reform-friendly conservative analysis of redistricting, including support for some commission structures. Useful counterweight to the Cato position.

Adrian Vermeule, "Common-Good Constitutionalism and Election Law" (essays in American Affairs and elsewhere). Vermeule, a Harvard Law professor, argues that aggressive partisan competition is itself a feature of democratic politics, and that elite "good-government" reformers should not be entrusted to override it. The position is contested but should be steel-manned.

Hans von Spakovsky and the Heritage Foundation's "Election Law Reform Initiative." Heritage's elections research takes positions skeptical of independent commissions, supportive of voter-ID requirements, and resistant to federal anti-gerrymandering legislation. Pair with Brennan Center analyses for the contrasting view.

State-by-state analysis

Allen Lemus and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). NCSL's redistricting database provides current-cycle state-by-state status, links to maps, and litigation tracking. Less analytically driven than Princeton or Brennan Center but essential as a primary-source repository.

Dave Wasserman and the Cook Political Report. Wasserman's House race ratings and PVI calculations are the standard reference for individual-district competitiveness. The Cook Political Report is read by both parties' campaign committees and is non-partisan in framing.

The Election Innovation Center at Stanford, "Redistricting Workshop" (electioninnovation.stanford.edu). Workshop-format analyses of state-by-state redistricting, with emphasis on technical-academic methods. Useful for instructors.

Primary sources for the running cases

  • Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964).
  • Wesberry v. Sanders, 376 U.S. 1 (1964).
  • Thornburg v. Gingles, 478 U.S. 30 (1986).
  • Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993).
  • Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267 (2004).
  • Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013).
  • Cooper v. Harris, 581 U.S. 285 (2017).
  • Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. ___ (2018).
  • Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. ___ (2019).
  • Allen v. Milligan, 599 U.S. ___ (2023).
  • Moore v. Harper, 600 U.S. 1 (2023).
  • League of Women Voters v. Commonwealth, 178 A.3d 737 (Pa. 2018).
  • Harper v. Hall, 380 N.C. 317 (2022); 384 N.C. 292 (2023, on rehearing).
  • Harkenrider v. Hochul, 38 N.Y.3d 494 (2022).
  • Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, 2023 WI 100.

All Supreme Court cases are available at supremecourt.gov; state cases at state-court repositories.

For instructors

The companion instructor guide for this chapter (in instructor-guide/chapter-notes/35-gerrymandering.md) includes additional resources for class discussion, including suggested film clips (the Slate documentary Slay the Dragon, 2020, on the Michigan reform movement), additional steel-man discussion prompts, and a list of common-struggle student responses with suggested instructor handling.