Some of you here on DK know me as “that gerrymandering gadfly”, always associating the rise of American political extremism with the implementation of REDMAP in 2010. I end most of my rants on that topic with some version of “our sister democracies, coming after 1789, learned what NOT to omit” in their apportionment clauses.
After all the years of me saying “other democracies don’t do redistricting this way”, a major American news outlet finally allows me to say, “Don’t take my word for it...”
Here is the (no paywall) link, to a rather rare explanation to American readers what makes the American election system an outlier compared to all other democracies: www.nytimes.com/...
I won’t bother with excerpts except to highlight that one exception to Western democracies (besides the US), Hungary, run by an authoritarian dictator, Viktor Orban, and beloved by many in the MAGA-Republican party as the example of how they would like America to be run:
Hungary is an outlier.
Since 2010 in Hungary, Viktor Orban, the country’s right-wing prime minister, and his allies have won more votes than any rival in every election. And redistricting has played a key role in Mr. Orban’s party winning many more seats, increasing his margins of victory.
Balint Madlovics, a political scientist at Central European University, said that changing boundaries helped Mr. Orban “engineer the supermajority for himself.” This is what authoritarian leaders do, he said. They “want to change the constitutional system to their liking.”
A simple majority in Parliament is all that is needed for Hungarian politicians to change constitutional law and redistricting. And under Mr. Orban, voting districts that had historically leaned to the left were reshaped to include around 5,000 more voters than districts that traditionally leaned right, according to an analysis bya Hungarian think tank. This meant that leftist parties needed more votes to win a seat [emphasis mine] than the right-wing ruling party did. [Ed. sound familiar, Democrats?]
Supporters of Mr. Orban, including President Trump, assert that Hungary is a model of successful conservative politics. But the European Parliament, the legislative body of the European Union, said in 2022 that Hungary, one of its member nations, could no longer be considered a full democracy, describing it instead as an “electoral autocracy” in which elections are held but respect for democratic norms is absent.
Think about that. Today’s (illegitimate) Republican Party wants to be able to be ‘in charge’ — as one of the two major parties of the United States(!) — of how all Americans, in any state, at any time, are allowed to determine their district representative boundaries, in order to control the nation’s politics in perpetuity. That’s the definition of authoritarianism, put into structural terms. That should be an insult to every American citizen who thought their vote mattered.
[Edited for REDMAP link inclusion]
