About Understanding across Time and Space

Book reviewed in this article: Anna Lindberg, Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930–2000     

Modeling the effect of mandatory district compactness on partisan gerrymanders

Geographic compactness standards have been offered as neutral and effective standards constraining redistricting. In this paper, we test this allegation. Redistricting is treated as a combinatoric optimization problem that is constrained by compactness rules. Computer models are used to analyze the results of applying compactness standards when political groups are geographically concentrated. Several population models are used to generate populations of voters, and arbitrary plans are created with combinatoric optimization algorithms. We find that compactness standards can be used to limit gerrymandering, but only if such standards require severe compactness. Compactness standards are not politically neutral—a geographically concentrated minority party will be affected by compactness standards much differently than a party supported by a geographically diffuse population. The particular effects of compactness standards depend on the institutional mechanism that creates districts.     

FROM COERCIVE POLICIES TO VOLUNTARY INITIATIVES

During the twentieth century Danish policies to prevent venereal diseases (VD) were characterized by coercive measures targeting all citizens and formulated in a gender neutral language. Voluntary individual initiatives were only during the 1970s and 1980s accepted as the best means to curb these diseases. This paper analyses debates in the Danish parliament on legislation between 1906 and 1988 to prevent VD, exploring when and why provisions shifted from coercive policies to voluntary initiatives. It considers the possible impact of accepted norms for sexual behaviour as well as of the increasingly influential medical profession. It discusses to what extent VD legislation complied with core elements of emerging and later changing welfare state policies and charts the position of political parties with regard to legislation on VD.