PPE Research Fellow Focus: Nicholas Goedert

Nicholas Goedert, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and PPE Affiliated Faculty, served as a PPE Research Fellow during the academic year 2023-2024 .

Dr. Goedert used this time to develop a book project on using algorithmic models to explore competing normative goals of congressional districting. The use of legislative districting to achieve political goals, or “gerrymandering” has been a prominent subject of contemporary political and legal debate, and Dr. Goedert’s work in this area, with the help of the Kellogg Center, can be used to aid practitioners and public advocates to craft more effective solutions and reforms.

This book, tentatively titled, The Roads the Representation, and co-authored by Dr. Robert Hildebrand in the Grado Department of Engineering, is the culmination of work by Redistricting Analytics at Virginia Tech (RAVT), a group of multidisciplinary scholars using cutting-edge methodological tools to address problems of districting and gerrymandering. PPE Research Fellowship funds were used to defray the travel costs to present work from the book at professional conferences and to support an undergraduate research assistant.

Dr. Goedert’s work with RAVT uses computer simulations to demonstrate how multiple “good government” goals can be satisfied in legislative maps, engaging with several of the major ongoing debates within redistricting law, scholarship, and practice. The group’s work exemplifies how technology can be used in the service of a better electoral process and a more representative government.

During his PPE Research Fellowship, Dr. Goedert published versions of two future chapters from, The Roads to Representation, as peer-reviewed articles: “Asymmetries on Potential for Partisan Gerrymandering” in Legislative Studies Quarterly, and “Black Representation and District Compact in Southern Congressional Districts” in Politics, Groups, and Identities.

As an example of the signficance of the work, federal courts have wrangled with the presumed trade-off between ethnic minority representation and compactness and districts for the past forty years, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision overturning an Alabama congressional map drawing only one Black opportunity district in Allen vs. Milligan.

In their “Black Representation” article in PGI, Goedert and co-authors demonstrate how both Black representation and compactness could be simultaneously improved in almost all Southern states, including Alabama. The figure below shows simulated maps of Alabama under several different mixes of objectives, including a map (Objective 4) that is both more compact than the map overturned in Milligan while also including a second Black opportunity district.

Other chapters of the book address questions of the tactics of partisan gerrymandering, asymmetric geographic dispersion of partisans, and the preservation of country lines and communities of interest.

In 2024, Dr. Goedert presented a draft of the final substantive chapter of, Roads to Representation, at the Southern Political Science Association and Midwest Political Science association annual conferences, demonstrating maps of thirty-six states simultaneously maximizing four or five normative goals, including partisan balance, competitiveness, compactness, population equality, and minority representation.  Examples of simulated maps mixing several “good government goals” in Virginia are shown below.

As part of the PPE Research Fellowship, Dr. Goedert employed recent political science graduate Charles Nuttycombe for help on both the RAVT project and a new project on legislative ideology.  Nuttycombe is the director of the state legislative election projection website CNanalysis.com, and President of StateNavigate.org, a new resource for state legislative politics.

Nuttycombe’s work with Dr. Goedert on intraparty divisions in Republican-dominated state legislatures was recently awarded the Political Science Department’s Harris Award for distinguished undergraduate scholarly achievement.  Dr. Goedert also served as chair of the Political and Data Science Committee of State Navigate, and he will continue his public outreach work with Nuttycombe to develop tools for understanding state politics while completing his manuscript with Dr. Hildebrand during the 2024-2025 academic year.