Accountable Democracy

Representative Politics in America

The overwhelming adoption of computational techniques in American electoral politics in recent years has attracted increased scrutiny by political and legal scholars as well as the broader public. Contemporary accounts, however, tend to forget that mathematics has always played a role in the constitution of American representative democracy, even prior to digital computing. In this lecture, Alma Steingart investigates how changing computational practices, from statistical modeling to computational geometry, insinuated themselves into the most basic definitions of “fairness” in the American electorate in the twentieth century.