Redistricting, in its current institutional form, is one of the uniquely dysfunctional practices of American democracy. Under compulsion of constitutional doctrine developed by the Supreme Court in the 1960s, virtually all districts that hold elections for representative political bodies—from city councils to state legislatures to the US House of Representatives—must be redesigned every decade in the wake of the decennial US Census, to bring these districts back into line with the constitutionally strict requirement that each election district for a particular representative body contain close to the same population of all other districts for that body. In the United States, the authority to draw these new districts each decade is overwhelmingly located in political institutions (state legislatures and, in most places, state governors) at the state level; 39 of the states with more than one member of Congress use state legislatures to draw congressional districts. Not surprisingly, these political actors use this power for a variety of political purposes, such as protecting favored incumbents, pursuing partisan advantage, punishing political opponents, and similar aims.

As I have documented in other work, no other major Western democracy that uses individual election districts similarly puts the power to design election districts in the hands of politically self-interested actors; all other democratic systems use various forms of independent commissions for this necessary task (Richard H. Pildes, “The Constitutionalization of Democratic Politics, Harvard Law Review 118 [November 2004]: 78–83). The absence of such intermediate institutions to handle redistricting in the country is part of a more general absence in the United States of intermediate institutions to oversee various aspects of democracy, such as election administration, that are commonly used in most other Western or mature democracies.

Charles S. Bullock has long been one of the significant academic authorities, as well as an expert witness in court cases, on the redistricting process, including the controversial role of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in that process. In Redistricting, he seeks to pull together nearly four decades of teaching and scholarly thought about the subject. The book is an excellent, well-organized, lucidly presented primer (with many valuable maps) on the process. Effectively integrating the legal constraints on redistricting with empirical social science data and political insights, the book provides an easily accessible, well-informed, accurate, and comprehensive introduction that will be a useful teaching vehicle for undergraduate and graduate courses, as well as a solid single source to turn to for all those interested in understanding the essentials of the redistricting process. No other book provides as concise a general, introductory survey of the relevant law and data.

After an opening chapter that provides appropriate contextual perspective on the history of districting, the Census process, the congressional apportionment of seats to states, and the significant stakes in redistricting, the book is organized around a series of chapters that track the sequence of considerations to which redistricters typically respond. These chapters focus first on population equality issues, then on minority voting rights issues under the VRA, and then on the secondary factors that come into play, such as contiguity, compactness, and maintenance of communities of interest. An entire chapter is devoted to partisan gerrymandering and is followed by an excellent case study of the 2000 redistricting process in Georgia, which brings together nearly all of the issues the book has addressed in a particularly illuminating and powerful context. Several chapters conclude with a brief pro and con presentation of the most controversial issues that remain within that particular dimension of the redistricting puzzle (such as how strict the requirements for population equality ought to be, or whether minority voters are better- or worse-off as a result of the creation of “safe” minority election districts). The book concludes with a framework for understanding the issues likely to be generated in the round of redistricting now taking place.

Bullock is fortunate to have had a bird's-eye view of redistricting in Georgia over several decades. Not only did the 2000 redistricting in Georgia produce two of the major court decisions on redistricting in the last decade, but the mix of politics and race in Georgia in 2000 also provides a microcosm for these developments throughout much of the South over the last 30 years. Bullock's case study on Georgia is an efficient tour de force. As in much of the South, in the 1990s, partly under Department of Justice compulsion, Georgia had created as many African American majority election districts for Congress and the state legislature as it could. The Supreme Court then invalidated some of these districts as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. As the author notes, when the districts therefore had to be redrawn in the middle of the 1990s, a strange-bedfellows coalition of black Democratic and newly elected Republican legislators, who shared the goal of maintaining as many majority-black districts as possible (Republicans, because doing so enhanced Republican political power overall) was formed. Legislative stalemate led the courts to draw the congressional districts, while the state legislative plan largely preserved the majority-black seats for the statehouse and senate that had been created at the start of the decade.

In the wake of the 2000 Census, however, the partisan and racial dynamics had changed dramatically in Georgia, as they had in much of the South. Georgia's population had grown substantially (so much so that it was entitled to two new members in Congress), with most of that growth coming in areas dominated by white, Republican voters. In every election starting in 1996, Republicans received a majority of the total votes cast for all state senate and house seats, but they never came close to winning a majority of the seats in either chamber, given the design of the election districts. In 2001, Democrats still controlled the governorship and both houses, but it was clear their ship was sinking. In a desperate effort to maintain partisan control, they developed an aggressive gerrymander of the Georgia house and senate seats that consisted of two main strategies. First, black and white Democratic legislators, facing the threat of Republican takeover, joined forces. They agreed to a more efficient use of the party's core constituency, African American voters, by reducing modestly the black populations in some districts that had been packed with black voters during the 1990s; they then spread those voters out over surrounding districts to help elect more Democrats. Secondly, the Democrats in charge of the process sought to force as many Republican votes as possible to be wasted by overpopulating Republican districts and underpopulating Democratic districts.

Civil rights groups challenged the first strategy as a violation of the VRA. The Supreme Court upheld Georgia's plan in a 5–4 decision, but in 2006 Congress amended the VRA to overturn the Court's decision. And a lower federal court (affirmed by the Supreme Court) held that the second element in this strategy constituted an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The federal court then took over the districting process, with the result that Republicans gained control of both the Georgia house and senate in the newly drawn districts. By the mid-2000s, black Democrats outnumbered white Democrats by four to two in Georgia's congressional delegation, 12 to 10 in the state senate, and 41 to 34 in the state house. Bullock attributes these results to the combined, and interactive, effects of the VRA (starting in the 1990s) and a secular rise in white Republican support (p. 173).

One wishes that Bullock had more space to pursue further nuances and complexities of the issues he rightly identifies as the major sources of continuing controversy about the redistricting process and the law that governs it. But that would be in tension with the virtue of this book, which is that it brings together in one place a concise, comprehensive presentation of the central legal, political, and empirical issues concerning America's continuing pathology of assigning the power to design its electoral districts to the most politically self-interested actors.