Nicholas R. Seabrook

The Limits of Partisan Gerrymandering: Looking Ahead to the 2010 Congressional Redistricting Cycle

This article looks ahead to the 2010 congressional redistricting cycle, and makes the case that the concern over the pernicious effects of partisan redistricting has been significantly over-exaggerated. Those attempting to use partisan control of the apparatus of state government to influence future elections operate under a number of significant constraints, from legal and political factors that inhibit the redistricting process and frequently result in compromise or litigation, to geographical and structural factors that dictate the extent to which electoral boundaries can be effectively manipulated to produce deviations from partisan symmetry. Evidence from the 1990 and 2000 redistricting cycles indicates that the benefits of partisan gerrymandering, where present, are extremely susceptible to subsequent electoral swings. This casts considerable doubt on the utility of partisan gerrymandering as a mechanism for instituting long-term electoral bias in congressional elections.

Money and State Legislative Elections: The Conditional Impact of Political Context

This study builds on existing literature demonstrating the conditional effects of contextual and conversion factors on the relationship between money and votes in state legislative elections. A conditional theory of the impact of spending in state legislative campaigns is developed, emphasizing that the effectiveness of expenditures should vary according to the number of “up for grabs” voters in a district, candidate quality, and strategic decisions about when to enter a race. Using an original data set of elections to state legislatures in nine states, the analysis provides evidence that the political and institutional context of a race has a significant impact on the effectiveness of campaign spending. Specifically, the percentage of registered independents in a district, the presence or absence of term limits on legislators, and the level of professionalism of a legislature each significantly condition the impact of money.

Secret Law: The Politics of Appointments to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

ABSTRACT This study investigates the politics of appointments to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the court established under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to review secret federal government requests for warrants related to national security investigations. Since the FISA Courts creation, its members have been appointed entirely at the discretion of the Chief Justice of the United States, who selects FISA Court judges from among the pool of existing U.S. District Court judges. Using data on the common space scores of the federal district judges appointed to the court, and the limited information available on the courts decisions, we explore the implications of this, both for the ideological makeup of the FISA Courts judges and for the oversight function they perform. The results suggest that the court has become decidedly more conservative in recent years, far more so than the district courts overall, with potentially serious implications for its ability to function as an effective check on the power of the executive branch.