IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/coopap/v69y2018i1d10.1007_s10589-017-9936-3.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The geo-graph in practice: creating United States Congressional Districts from census blocks

Author

Listed:
  • D. M. King

    (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

  • S. H. Jacobson

    (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

  • E. C. Sewell

    (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)

Abstract

Every 10 years, United States Congressional Districts must be redesigned in response to a national census. While the size of practical political districting problems is typically too large for exact optimization approaches, heuristics such as local search can help stakeholders quickly identify good (but suboptimal) plans that suit their objectives. However, enforcing a district contiguity constraint during local search can require significant computation; tools that can reduce contiguity-based computations in large practical districting problems are needed. This paper applies the geo-graph framework to the creation of United States Congressional Districts from census blocks in four states—Arizona, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and New York—and finds that (a) geo-graph contiguity assessment algorithms reduce the average number of edges visited during contiguity assessments by at least three orders of magnitude in every problem instance when compared with simple graph search, and (b) the assumptions of the geo-graph model are easily adapted to the sometimes-irregular census block geography with only superficial impact on the solution space. These results show that the geo-graph model and its associated contiguity algorithms provide a powerful constraint assessment tool to political districting stakeholders.

Suggested Citation

  • D. M. King & S. H. Jacobson & E. C. Sewell, 2018. "The geo-graph in practice: creating United States Congressional Districts from census blocks," Computational Optimization and Applications, Springer, vol. 69(1), pages 25-49, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:coopap:v:69:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10589-017-9936-3
    DOI: 10.1007/s10589-017-9936-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10589-017-9936-3
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10589-017-9936-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ricca, Federica & Simeone, Bruno, 2008. "Local search algorithms for political districting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 189(3), pages 1409-1426, September.
    2. Douglas M. King & Sheldon H. Jacobson & Edward C. Sewell & Wendy K. Tam Cho, 2012. "Geo-Graphs: An Efficient Model for Enforcing Contiguity and Hole Constraints in Planar Graph Partitioning," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 60(5), pages 1213-1228, October.
    3. Anuj Mehrotra & Ellis L. Johnson & George L. Nemhauser, 1998. "An Optimization Based Heuristic for Political Districting," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 44(8), pages 1100-1114, August.
    4. Takeshi Shirabe, 2009. "Districting Modeling with Exact Contiguity Constraints," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 36(6), pages 1053-1066, December.
    5. Bozkaya, Burcin & Erkut, Erhan & Laporte, Gilbert, 2003. "A tabu search heuristic and adaptive memory procedure for political districting," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 144(1), pages 12-26, January.
    6. Andreas Drexl & Knut Haase, 1999. "Fast Approximation Methods for Sales Force Deployment," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 45(10), pages 1307-1323, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Swamy, Rahul & King, Douglas M. & Ludden, Ian G. & Dobbs, Kiera W. & Jacobson, Sheldon H., 2024. "A practical optimization framework for political redistricting: A case study in Arizona," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Swamy, Rahul & King, Douglas M. & Ludden, Ian G. & Dobbs, Kiera W. & Jacobson, Sheldon H., 2024. "A practical optimization framework for political redistricting: A case study in Arizona," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    2. María Salazar-Aguilar & Roger Ríos-Mercado & Mauricio Cabrera-Ríos, 2011. "New Models for Commercial Territory Design," Networks and Spatial Economics, Springer, vol. 11(3), pages 487-507, September.
    3. Camacho-Collados, M. & Liberatore, F. & Angulo, J.M., 2015. "A multi-criteria Police Districting Problem for the efficient and effective design of patrol sector," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 246(2), pages 674-684.
    4. Eduardo Álvarez-Miranda & Camilo Campos-Valdés & Maurcio Morales Quiroga & Matías Moreno-Faguett & Jordi Pereira, 2020. "A Multi-Criteria Pen for Drawing Fair Districts: When Democratic and Demographic Fairness Matter," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(9), pages 1-26, August.
    5. Haase, Knut & Müller, Sven, 2014. "Upper and lower bounds for the sales force deployment problem with explicit contiguity constraints," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 237(2), pages 677-689.
    6. Alexander Butsch & Jörg Kalcsics & Gilbert Laporte, 2014. "Districting for Arc Routing," INFORMS Journal on Computing, INFORMS, vol. 26(4), pages 809-824, November.
    7. Douglas M. King & Sheldon H. Jacobson & Edward C. Sewell & Wendy K. Tam Cho, 2012. "Geo-Graphs: An Efficient Model for Enforcing Contiguity and Hole Constraints in Planar Graph Partitioning," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 60(5), pages 1213-1228, October.
    8. Anna Franceschetti & Ola Jabali & Gilbert Laporte, 2017. "Continuous approximation models in freight distribution management," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 25(3), pages 413-433, October.
    9. Balázs Fleiner & Balázs Nagy & Attila Tasnádi, 2017. "Optimal partisan districting on planar geographies," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 25(4), pages 879-888, December.
    10. Federica Ricca & Andrea Scozzari & Bruno Simeone, 2013. "Political Districting: from classical models to recent approaches," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 204(1), pages 271-299, April.
    11. Christian Haas & Lee Hachadoorian & Steven O Kimbrough & Peter Miller & Frederic Murphy, 2020. "Seed-Fill-Shift-Repair: A redistricting heuristic for civic deliberation," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(9), pages 1-34, September.
    12. Ram Gopalan & Steven O. Kimbrough & Frederic H. Murphy & Nicholas Quintus, 2013. "The Philadelphia Districting Contest: Designing Territories for City Council Based Upon the 2010 Census," Interfaces, INFORMS, vol. 43(5), pages 477-489, October.
    13. M Blais & S D Lapierre & G Laporte, 2003. "Solving a home-care districting problem in an urban setting," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 54(11), pages 1141-1147, November.
    14. Bruno, Giuseppe & Genovese, Andrea & Piccolo, Carmela, 2017. "Territorial amalgamation decisions in local government: Models and a case study from Italy," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 61-72.
    15. Sebastián Moreno & Jordi Pereira & Wilfredo Yushimito, 2020. "A hybrid K-means and integer programming method for commercial territory design: a case study in meat distribution," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 286(1), pages 87-117, March.
    16. Rui Fragoso & Conceição Rego & Vladimir Bushenkov, 2016. "Clustering of Territorial Areas: A Multi-Criteria Districting Problem," Journal of Quantitative Economics, Springer;The Indian Econometric Society (TIES), vol. 14(2), pages 179-198, December.
    17. Xin Tang & Ameur Soukhal & Vincent T’kindt, 2014. "Preprocessing for a map sectorization problem by means of mathematical programming," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 222(1), pages 551-569, November.
    18. Steiner, Maria Teresinha Arns & Datta, Dilip & Steiner Neto, Pedro José & Scarpin, Cassius Tadeu & Rui Figueira, José, 2015. "Multi-objective optimization in partitioning the healthcare system of Parana State in Brazil," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 53-64.
    19. Baghersad, Milad & Emadikhiav, Mohsen & Huang, C. Derrick & Behara, Ravi S., 2023. "Modularity maximization to design contiguous policy zones for pandemic response," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 304(1), pages 99-112.
    20. Haugland, Dag & Ho, Sin C. & Laporte, Gilbert, 2007. "Designing delivery districts for the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 180(3), pages 997-1010, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:coopap:v:69:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10589-017-9936-3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.