Computer scientists and social scientists consider the political districting problem from different viewpoints. This paper gives an overview of both strands of the literature on districting in which the connections and the differences between the two approaches are highlighted.

Multiple hierarchical models of representative democracies in which, for instance, voters elect county representatives, county representatives elect district representatives, district representatives elect state representatives and state representatives a president, reduces the number of...

The Hungarian mixed-member electoral system, adopted in 1989, is one of the world’s most complicated electoral systems, and, as this paper demonstrates, it suffers from the "population paradox". In particular, the governing coalition may lose as many as 8 seats either by getting more votes or...

We show that optimal partisan districting in the plane with geographical constraints is an NP-complete problem.

We collect data about 172 countries: their parliaments, level of corruption, perceptions of corruption of parliament and political parties. We find weak empirical evidence supporting the conclusion that corruption increases as the number of parties increases. To provide a theoretical explanation...