New first-year seminar course examines geography of redistricting

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — American elections are rooted in location, but politicians and political scientists largely determine the shape of legislative districts. A new course offered by Penn State’s Department of Geography brings the focus of the redistricting process back to the geographic basics.

“I think political scientists mostly think about redistricting at the point where boundaries matter for a particular election,” said Chris Fowler, associate professor of geography and instructor of GEOG 298: The Geography of Redistricting. “As a geographer, I want to start much earlier than that. The questions I want to start with are: What is this institution we have that draws boundaries around a region, then says this is going to be associated with representation? What does it fundamentally mean to have elections and to have those elections based on location? That’s an important question when we think about representative democracy in the United States where we have a winner-take-all system based on geographic location.”

Fowler, who served on Gov. Tom Wolf’s redistricting commission last fall, has lined up several speakers from diverse fields to share their perspectives on the process. An expert on The Federalist Papers spoke to students about what Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were thinking when they proposed organizing elections around geographic interests such as slaveholding versus non-slaveholding areas and urban versus rural geographies. Gov. Wolf visited the class remotely on Sept. 8 to discuss the most recent redistricting process and took questions about what it means to represent constituents from diverse areas of the state. Future guest lectures and question-and-answer sessions will feature journalists and grassroots organizers.

The course will also delve into questions of identity and offer students opportunities to work with publicly available data from the 2020 census. Hands-on activities involving mapping software will complement discussions on gerrymandering and why decision-makers may choose to divide a city like Pittsburgh or State College, Pennsylvania, into several legislative districts.

“Historically, there have been multiple congressional districts in the Borough of State College,” said Fowler. “Currently, the relatively good state legislative proposal has State College in two different districts. A lot of times people see this and think you can’t split the borough, but it turns out that if you’re doing good mapping at the congressional level, it’s difficult to keep Centre County together.”

State College often appears as a Democratic blip on the edge of a huge Republican expanse, according to Fowler. The borough often ends up grouped with Erie or the Northern Tier counties, which are largely rural and Republican. However, connecting State College to other parts of the state that share similar political leanings can create issues counter to good representation in other parts of Pennsylvania. State College serves as a great case study for many of the questions that the class will attempt to address.

The course’s main goal, according to Fowler, is to show students the benefits of examining an issue from a geographic standpoint.

"The first thing I want to do is teach the students: this is a problem you thought was interesting before, now look at it as a geographic problem and look at all the doors that thinking opens up for critical analysis," he said. "Geography has a tremendous amount to offer any kind of social, environmental, political or economic problem. What I want to teach is fundamentally a way of understanding the world as a series of geographic problems."