Federalism and the Constitution exist today because of the division of
powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government,
especially during the redistricting process of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering
is the drawing of boundaries during legislative redistricting, approved by
legislation every decade, and is designed
not to interfere with discrimination protected under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The purpose of this literature review is to
examine and evaluate the research question, does gerrymandering
cause partisan polarization? This research study is divided into five sections: 1) An introduction to the
topic of gerrymandering’s history and process; 2) Who draws the redistricting
lines which become another independent variable (IV) in this study; 3)
Methodologies that become the dependent variables (DVs); 4) Studies that support
the IVs and DVs; and 5) A summary of research results that provide empirical
evidence that gerrymandering causes political partisan polarization with a
suggested resolution or hypothesis being: voting boundaries redrawn from the
gerrymandering process by independent agencies or commissions reduce partisanpolarization by political officials in the legislature to reduce bias.
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