A substantial majority of the countries that delimit electoral districts employ a specially designated boundary commission or an election management body to draw these boundaries. The legislature serves as the boundary authority in several countries. And in a few countries, government agencies are charged with the task of redistricting.
Britain was an early pioneer of establishing an independent boundary commission to define electoral districts[1]. Many established democracies once governed by the United Kingdom followed this example and adopted boundary (or delimitation) commissions, including Australia and Canada, Caribbean countries such as the Bahamas, Barbados, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines and several Anglophone African countries (i.e., Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe) also adopted boundary commissions for delimiting constituencies.
Composition of Boundary Commissions
Boundary commissions tend to be relatively small in size, ranging from three to seven or nine members. Canada, for example, has three-member commissions, the United Kingdom has four-member commissions, and a number of Caribbean countries have five-member commissions (e.g., Bahamas, Barbados). Germany and New Zealand each have seven-member commissions (New Zealand actually has 8 members but one, the Chair of the Local Government Commission, does not have a vote); Albania has a nine-member commission.
The commissions often include non-partisan (non-political) public officials with backgrounds in election administration, geography, and statistics. In Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, for example, the commissions incorporate electoral officers or registrar-generals, as well as the Director of Ordnance Survey (United Kingdom) and the Surveyor-General (Australia and New Zealand). Statisticians have an important role on Australian commissions because population projections are used to draw electoral district boundaries. In Canada, academics knowledgeable about elections and/or geography may be asked to serve on boundary commissions.
Members of the judiciary are also well represented on districting commissions in many countries. They often chair the commissions, as in Canada and New Zealand. In the United Kingdom, senior judges serve as Deputy Chairs of the four Boundary Commissions in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In India, two of the three members of the Delimitation Commission are required to be judges.
Many countries with boundary commissions exclude anyone with political connections from serving on the commission. On the other hand, some countries specifically include representatives of the major political parties on the commission. For example, in New Zealand, two “political” appointees, one representing the governing party and one the opposition parties, serve on the seven-member Representation Commission. The theory behind their presence on the commission is that it helps ensure that any political bias in a proposed delimitation plan is recognized and rectified. However, because the two political appointees constitute a minority of the commission, they cannot outvote the non-political commissioners. Other countries that incorporate political party representatives on the boundary commission include Albania, Bahamas, Barbados, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and St. Vincent.
Botswana is one of the countries that specifically excludes any person with political connections from serving on the boundary commission. Other examples include Australia, Canada, India, and Mauritius.
Election Management Bodies
Another, equally common, approach to delimiting constituencies is the use of the election commission. In some countries, the election commission is quite independent of the executive and the legislature (Lithuania, Mexico, and Poland, for example), but in other countries this is less true (e.g., Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania).
Legislature
Although many countries have delegated the task of delimitation to an authority other than the obviously self-interested legislature, in some countries the legislature has retained this responsibility.
However, a number of countries in which the legislature is responsible for delimitation are countries with List Proportional Representation (List PR) electoral systems. The legislatures in these countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden) originally defined a set of electoral district boundaries (often multimember districts) in the constitution or electoral law, and these constituencies have remained in place for subsequent elections – although the number of seats assigned to the multimember constituencies vary over time depending on the population size.
A second set of countries in which the legislature plays a role in the delimitation process are countries with mixed electoral systems like Italy, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, and Panama. The boundaries of the constituencies in these countries are of less political consequence than in those with a First Past the Post electoral system because a separate set of legislative seats are filled via proportional representation. Elections in mixed systems usually produce outcomes that are far more proportional than FPTP systems.
The United States is one of the very few democracies that allows the legislature a dominant role in the delimitation process given that the election of legislators is based solely on single-member constituencies. The consequence of this approach, at least in the United States, is that partisan politics plays a very large role – and often quite explicit role – in the redistricting process. For example, on several occasions when a redistricting plan was challenged in court on the grounds that the plan constituted a racial gerrymandering, defendants claimed that politics, and not race, was the motivating factor behind the plan hence the plan was neither illegal nor unconstitutional.
Notes:
[1] New Zealand established an independent boundary commission in 1887 that included government-appointed members; however, the government-appointed members never exceeded the number of politically neutral
public servants included on the commission.
