Characteristics and Causes of America's Polarized Politics - Essay Example

Gerrymandering causes political, racial and class tension in a country. Actions that can be taken to reduce the effects of this practice include redistricting based on neutral or cross-party agencies. Rectifying the voting systems, resizing large districts, regulating transparency in elections and having to use fixed districts in elections. Redistricting, however, faces major challenges in implementation. The challenges are related to the negative influence of the top leadership most of whom are the direct or indirect beneficiaries of the practice (Esman & Herring, 2003).

In the process, taking a partisan level of approach is relatively easier and is faced with fewer challenges as compared to a bipartisan level approach. This is because with a partisan level, the decisions and explanations made are retained throughout the process. This game specifically relates to challenges the lawmakers often face as they try to change the wrong strategies that brought most of them to the office.There are three predominant types of gerrymandering. Cracking is a gerrymandering approach that spreads out a particular group of voters among a large number of districts thus denying them a majority vote in one area.

For instance, most urban areas are even today divided into several districts voting independently to ensure that they do not have a majority advantage. Stacking is another strategy that packs the particular type of voters in a single district and thus significantly reduces their influence in other districts. This is still used today for instance in selecting districts based on racial divides. Mutually positive gerrymandering redraws districts such that two persons of the same group run against one another and hence they both are eliminated in the election that someone else wins (Nivola & Brady, 2006).