Comments on: Egypt’s potential district boundaries

By: Superluli

Superluli — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:23:40 +0000

- So setting districts around Police stations is not how it’s done in the rest of the world?
- You know a lot of the Cairo residents don’t actually vote in Cairo…in my family we’re three who live in Cairo, but only 1 of us votes in Cairo, the rest are still registered on their Alexandria address. Since most of Cairo/Giza are people migrating from other cities and villages, they would probably go back to their original homes to vote right?
- I am worried that they are not discussing the upper house at all! There’s very little info about it, no timeline for that. A lot of people are calling for cancelling the upper house all together – are there countries that work with one house only?

By: Bancki

Bancki — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:59:51 +0000

Strange principles lead to strange results: all seat totals are even because one seat out of every two is reserved for ‘workers and peasants’ In the nominal tier, every district has 2 seats. According to the links in your post, in the PR tier every district has 4 seats, except in 10 governorates with a number of seats not divisible by 4, where there is one district of 6 seats. At least there seems to be a rule behind it, even if the magintude is low for PR and high for majoritarian.

Fair districting is always a tradeoff between population equalization and preservation of existing administrative units. To judge to what extent the districter was free to gerrymander, you have (1) to compare population (or electorate) figures at the district level and (2) to judge to what extent districts are created out of existing administrative units.
This raises several questions: what are your population sources, an dare they also available for the district level? The subunits (police stations) used to define the districts, are they the usual subdivision of a governorate, or does this definition by police stations cut across another tier of administratieve units? Are the districts of both tiers are always nested, meaning: is every nominal district within a single PR district?

In any case, choosing a small-M-system means is choosing extra workload and debatable decisions (districting) before the elections… and isn’t that something to avert in a situation like Egypt now?

And what’s the system and the districting for the upper house?

By: David

David — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:24:18 +0000

Thank you. You’re correct about the districts; the information knowledgeable people have told me recently indicate that the districts are pretty off due to the fact that they are based on police stations, and nothing else.

I will review the other suggestions/comments, and potentially update when I get a rare, spare minute!

By: Egypt’s potential district boundaries, Ctd. Workers and farmers « Ahwa Talk

Egypt’s potential district boundaries, Ctd. Workers and farmers « Ahwa Talk — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 01:01:07 +0000

[...] Ahwa Talk Elections, Party Systems, and the Middle East HomeAbout the author ← Egypt’s potential district boundaries [...]

By: Matthew Shugart

Matthew Shugart — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 18:27:19 +0000

The indices of (dis)proportionality can be applied to any case where we are interested in how closely one quantity corresponds with another. So use each district’s voters as a percentage of all voters and each district’s allocated seats as a percentage of all seats. Same quantitative problem as party votes and seats.

I assume you do not have actual district voter (or population) totals? Obviously, using aggregated districts at the governorate level, where a governoarate is divided into two or more districts, is less than ideal. But what you have done here is still a useful analysis.

But you seem to imply that more populated areas are over-represented. That would be really unusual, and I am not sure that it would hold up in an actual district-by-district analysis.

Is the horizontal axis in Figure 2 meaningful? I could not tell if observations are arrayed by population (as the text implies) or not, because the axis is not labelled.

It would make more sense to me to plot (and regress) the logarithm of population vs. logarithm of seats (or disproportionality).