Stephen Ansolabehere is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is an expert in public opinion and elections, and has published extensively on elections, mass media, and representation, political economy, and public opinion, especially concerning energy and the environment. He is author of four books: The Media Game, Going Negative, American Government, and The End of Inequality. He is a Carnegie Scholar (2000), a Hoover National Fellow (1994), and Truman Scholar (1982) and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. He directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project from its founding in 2000 through 2004; is a member of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Study and the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University; and consults for CBS News Election Decision Desk. He is the principal investigator of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a collaborative effort of over 60 universities and colleges in the United States.
This post is the first in a series about the redistricting cases moving through the courts. In the Spring of 2013, two prominent election lawyers, a Republican and a Democrat, visited my Election Law class. I asked them what were the great unsettled questions in the field, especially governing redistricting. They were united in their…
The United States Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Gill v. Whitford did not settle the question of partisan gerrymandering, as many had anticipated that it would. The Court denied the plaintiffs’ standing in this case because the plaintiffs failed to show specific harms arising from the configuration of individual districts. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for…
