Gerrymandering in Alabama

Contributors

• Samuel Barnard *, sbbarnard@middlebury.edu, @padutchfan123, Middlebury College

* Corresponding author and creator

Abstract

This is an original study of gerrymandering in Alabama. We well test three methods of shape-based compactness scores, assess the representativeness of districts based on prior presidential elections and race. We will then extend prior studies by calculating representativeness of the convex hull of district polygons.

This study is based on literature on gerrymandering metrics:

• Practical application of district compactness (1993)
• Gerrymandering and Compactness: Implementation Flexibility and Abuse (2020)
• Discrete geometry for electoral geography (2024)

This study is exploratory in design, with the goal of evaluating usefulness of a new gerrymandering metric based on the convex hull of a congressional district and representative capability inside the convex hull compared to the congressional district.

Study Metadata

• Key words: gerrymandering, compactness, convex hull, alabama, political representation Comma-separated list of keywords (tags) for searchability. Geographers often use one or two keywords each for: theory, geographic context, and methods.
• Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences: Geography: Geographic Information Sciences
• Date created: 2025-02-17
• Date modified: 2025-02-17
• Spatial Coverage: Alabama OSM:161950
• Spatial Resolution: Census Block Groups
• Spatial Reference System: EPSG: 4269, NAD 1983 geographic coordinate system
• Temporal Coverage: 2020-2024 population and voting data
• Temporal Resolution: Decennial census

Metadata for access

• Rights: LICENSE: BSD 3-Clause “New” or “Revised”
• Resource type: Collection
• Resource language: English
• Conforms to: Template for Reproducible and Replicable Research in Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences version 1.0, DOI:[10.17605/OSF.IO/W29MQ](DOI:%5B10.17605/OSF.IO/W29MQ){.uri}

Compendium structure and contents

This research compendium is structured with four main directories:

• data: contains subdirectories for raw data and derived data.
• docs: contains subdirectories for manuscript, presentation, and report
• procedure: contains subdirectories for code or software scripts, information about the computational environment in which the research was conducted, and non-code research protocols
• results: contains subdirectories for figures, formatted data tables, or other formats of research results.

The data, procedures, and results of this repository are outlined in three tables:

• Data: data/data_index.csv
• Procedures: procedure/procedure_index.csv
• Results: results/results_index.csv

Important local documents include:

• Pre-analysis plan: docs/gerrymandering_analysis_plan0.1.html
• Study report: docs/gerrymandering_report.html
• Manuscript: docs/manuscript/manuscript.pdf
• Presentation: docs/presentation/presentation.pdf

Compendium reference

The template_readme.md file contains more information on the design of this template and references used in the design. The Template_LICENSE file provides the BSD 3-Clause license for using this template. To cite the template, please use template_reference.bib or: > Kedron, P., & Holler, J. (2023). Template for Reproducible and Replicable Research in Human-Environment and Geographical Sciences. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/W29MQ