Andrew C. Thomas on "Symmetry and Competition in State Legislative Election Systems". 

 This week, the Applied Statistics Workshop is happy to have Andrew C. Thomas, G-4 Department of Statistics, presenting his work on, "Symmetry and Competition in State Legislative Election Systems".  Andrew has provided the following abstract for his presentation: 

 Drawing of legislative districts has historically been conducted by the legislators themselves; recently, some states have appointed redistricting commissions, the members of which cannot run for seats in the legislature for a period afterwards. I demonstrate that current methods, in particular the Gelman-King model and the JudgeIt R package, can easily diagnose the state of an electoral map given previous electoral conditions. In particular, competition increases in states with commissions, but the impact on symmetry is as yet unclear. I conclude with a discussion on techniques to improve the resolution and measurement of electoral symmetry within states. 

 Please join us this Wednesday at 12 noon for the presentation and a light lunch.  We hold the workshop in Room N-354 of CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St).