Gerrymandering: A Bug in American Democracy

Feb 18 2019
By B. Rose Kelly and Egan B. Jimenez
Topics Politics
Source Woodrow Wilson School

A fall graduate policy workshop led by professor Sam Wang explored the complex issue of gerrymandering, a process that manipulates geographic regions to provide an advantage to a particular political party. The course, “Repairing Bugs in American Democracy: Gerrymandering,” examined how law, statistics and quantitative analysis could be used to help terminate gerrymandering.

The policy workshop is a unique feature of the graduate curriculum at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, allowing students the opportunity to analyze complex and challenging policy issues, typically for real clients. Wang’s class culminated in a policy report for Voters Not Politicians, the citizen sponsors of the Michigan ballot initiative on redistricting.

Required for second-year Master in Public Affairs students, policy workshops explore a range of real-world challenges, as students work in small groups to come up with creative, realistic policy recommendations. Students often perform field research during fall break. Each workshop produces a final report and gives a final presentation to the client once the course has concluded.

This video follows Wang’s class in their journey from research to field work to a final policy report.