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Political Districting: from classical models to recent approaches

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Abstract

The Political Districting problem has been studied since the 60’s and many different models and techniques have been proposed with the aim of preventing districts’ manipulation which may favor some specific political party (gerrymandering). A variety of Political Districting models and procedures was provided in the Operations Research literature, based on single- or multiple-objective optimization. Starting from the forerunning papers published in the 60’s, this article reviews some selected optimization models and algorithms for Political Districting which gave rise to the main lines of research on this topic in the Operations Research literature of the last five decades.

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Notes

  1. This work is based on the same electoral data already analyzed in Arcese et al. (1992).

  2. We want to thank our Ph.D. colleague and friend Andrea De Vitis for his precious help in the translation of this paper which was published only in Japanese. Besides knowing Japanese, Andrea is an expert in Operations Research and a former student of Bruno Simeone. We are sure that he patiently supported us not only out of friendship, but also in high regard for Bruno.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. Scienze Statistiche, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome, Italy

    Federica Ricca & Bruno Simeone

  2. Facoltà di Economia, Università degli Studi “Niccolò Cusano”, Rome, Italy

    Andrea Scozzari

Authors
  1. Federica Ricca
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  2. Andrea Scozzari
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  3. Bruno Simeone
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Correspondence to Federica Ricca.

Additional information

Federica Ricca and Andrea Scozzari dedicate this work to their dear friend Bruno Simeone, who passed away unexpectedly on October 10, 2010. He was the prime mover of their common research in this field. He started productive research on electoral systems with political districting which remained throughout the years one of his main interests. This paper is meant to be both a tribute to the deep scientific oeuvre of Bruno and a wish for further developments in this area.

This is an updated version of the paper that appeared in 4OR, 9, 223–254 (2011).

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Ricca, F., Scozzari, A. & Simeone, B. Political Districting: from classical models to recent approaches. Ann Oper Res 204, 271–299 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-012-1267-2

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