Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district.
When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander a portmanteau of the name Gerry and the animal salamander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like "monster", and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander. Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party.
The term has negative connotations and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The term gerrymandering is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States at the time of his death, who, as Governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. Wayne Dawkins describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians. Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. The manipulation may consist of "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). In representative democracies, gerrymandering ( / ˈ dʒ ɛ r i m æ n d ər ɪ ŋ/, originally / ˈ ɡ ɛr i m æ n d ər ɪ ŋ/) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent of creating undue advantage for a party, group, or socio-economic class within the constituency.
0 kommentar(er)
