Research

            Jaeckle Center personnel are currently working on several active research projects.

1.         State constitutional structures of legislative representation

            The Center is in the process of creating a comprehensive database of state constitutional provisions structuring legislative representation from 1776 to the present.  Variables within the scope of the study include the constitutional unit of representation (county, district, etc.); rules for allocating representatives among represented units; rules establishing or governing the size of the legislature; the method of election (single-member or multimember districts); and direct constitutional restrictions on gerrymandering (requirements of contiguity, compactness, etc.).

             The first of these databases, identifying the basic unit of legislative representation, is now complete and available here:  unit of representation.  The other databases will be linked on this page as they become complete over the next few months.  Users of the data are cordially requested to report any errors or omissions, or to provide any other feedback on the databases, to law-jaecklecenter@buffalo.edu.

2.         Historical state legislative districting and gerrymandering practices

             A substantial amount of historical data on congressional districts is widely available.  In contrast, virtually no systematic historical data on state legislative districting has been collected.  We are presently working on a pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of creating a database of state legislative districts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  The project involves archival research to determine district boundaries, plus cross-referencing to census and voting data.  In addition to creating a useful database for future research, an important goal of the project is to facilitate the identification of past state legislative gerrymanders, and if possible to connect suspicious districting practices to state constitutional reforms, the efficacy of which can then be evaluated.

3.         State political autonomy

            American federalism contemplates that states will retain a significant degree of autonomy so that state power can serve as a meaningful counterweight to national power.  It is often said that states exercise this function through extraconstitutional processes centered on the political party system.  That is, states influence the content of national law and protect themselves from undesirable exercises of national power by using the mechanisms of internal party processes.  If this process is to work properly, however, states clearly must retain considerable political autonomy, for the possibility of state objection to exercises of national power is merely theoretical if state political processes are not sufficiently independent of their national counterparts to enable the state to adopt and assert different ends or different interests from the national government.  Yet there is reason to believe that the growth of political parties in the nineteenth century was a two-way street.  Parties not only furnished states with a mechanism by which to control national politics, but also created a reverse pathway by which national politics could influence, and perhaps overawe, any independent state-level politics.  In 2007-08, the Center will begin a new project to test this hypothesis by collecting data about state political autonomy by examining the output of state legislatures during the period of the nineteenth century when organized, national political parties emerged.