Apportionment

Apportionment

Description

The Supreme Court's apportionment cases are among the most important and revolutionary decisions in the Court's history. These decisions culminated in the famous one-person, one-vote principle, which has come to be viewed as part of the bedrock of American democracy. The reapportionment decisions had immediate and dramatic effects, which included the restructuring of the institutions of representative government throughout the United States: Congress, state legislatures, city councils, and many other institutions of local and state government. These decisions continue to require that election districts be redrawn every decade, in the wake of a new census, to ensure those districts remain consistent with the one-person, one-vote requirement. As consequential as these immediate practical effects were, the significance of the decisions extends even more broadly, for they also initiated a transformation of the role of courts in overseeing the basic structures of American democracy more generally. Apportionment is used somewhat differently in different contexts, but for purposes of this entry, apportionment will refer to the process by which various political institutions, such as state legislatures, decide how to design the individual election districts that are used to elect members of the U.S. House and state legislatures. When local governments use individual election districts to elect members of local government, to a city council for example, those local governments must similarly decide how to design these election districts. These actions are often called the process of apportioning representatives, though they are frequently called redistricting as well. The process of redistricting or apportionment can have enormous political consequence. Even if citizens face no barriers to casting a vote, the way election districts are designed can determine who wins elections and which forces control government. For example, consider a town of 100 people, divided between sixty people who support Blue policies and forty who support Red policies, that elects five representatives to govern it. If the town designs its election districts so that one district includes all sixty Blues and the other four districts all contain ten Reds each, the town council will vote four-to-one for Red policies, even though a clear majority of the town's citizens prefer Blue policies. Thus, democracy requires not just that all citizens be able to vote, but that election districts be designed to aggregate those votes in such a way as to ensure fair and responsive representation.

Source Publication

Encyclopedia of the Supreme Court of the United States

Source Editors/Authors

David S. Tanenhaus

Publication Date

2008

Volume Number

1: A—C

Apportionment

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