Models and Methods Commons^™

Gerrymandering And The Impossibility Of Fair Districting Systems, Danielle Degutz

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Voting district boundaries are often manipulated, or gerrymandered, by politicians in order to give one group of voters an unfair advantage over another during elections. To make sure a system of voting districts is not gerrymandered, the population size, the shape, and the voting efficiency of each party in each district should be taken into consideration. Following recent work of Boris Alexeev and Dustin G. Mixon, we discuss mathematical criteria for each of these three aspects, and we prove how problems arise when attempting to apply all three at once to a districting system--first to a simplified districting system and …

Public Discourse And The Securitization Of Conflict, Gilda Raizel Edelman

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Assessing The Theory Of Demographics As Destiny & Patterns Of Bloc Voting In The United States, Nathan Benjamin Susman

Senior Projects Spring 2016

By 2044, it is predicted that America will be a majority-minority country-- that is, a plurality of minorities will begin to outnumber white people. Some suggest that this demographic trend suggests the demise of the Republican party, thanks to their historical paucity of support amongst minority communities. This has been deemed the "Demographics as Destiny" theory. This paper argues that the theory of "Demographics as Destiny is based on four assumptions:

1) that the population of minority communities will continue to grow by leaps and bounds;

2) that minorities will soon register to vote and cast ballots in proportion to …