What does it mean for everyone to have a say in a democracy? This summer, philosopher Daniel Wodak and undergraduate Jasmine Ni, explored the contradictions and questions raised by political equity.
2 min. read
The “one person one vote” idea is popular across countries like the United States, meant to capture an individual right to political equality, according to associate professor of philosophy Daniel Wodak at the School of Arts & Sciences. But peel back the layers and the concept becomes more complicated, something Wodak and undergraduate Jasmine Ni spent their summer exploring.
“The idea is that in a political system like we have in the United States, each person has a single vote and that’s how they influence democratic processes,” says Ni, who is double-majoring in English and political science. “In reality, if you take those four words—‘one person, one vote’—and break down what they mean, you run into a lot of questions and contradictions.”
Wodak, who is working on a book about the “one person, one vote” principle, brought Ni on through the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program run through the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. With a limited timeframe of 10 weeks, her focus was on two specific practices, both relating to “apportionment,” or the way voters are divided into electoral districts.
One centered around partisan gerrymandering, or how lawmakers redraw electoral district borders to improve their own party’s odds of victory. The other concerned the idea that an area’s total population—not just the citizen population of voting age—should be used to draw legislative districts, something the Supreme Court upheld in the 2016 case Evenwel v. Abbott.
Wodak says the idea of prioritizing total population doesn’t get as much airtime as partisan gerrymandering, but that both apportionment approaches raise questions about whether every individual does indeed get an equal say in an election. “In the U.S., states draw legislative maps to equalize the number of residents per district,” he says. “But is this the population group that they should use?”
To investigate how different scholars, judges, and policymakers have answered those questions, Ni poured through academic texts and court decisions. Often, she found the “one person, one vote” idea invoked but not actively explored. Wodak says he’s not surprised to see the phrase pop up without real consideration for its deeper meaning. Though it has “a very special place in political thought,” he says, it can be “surprisingly opaque.”
Exploring its applications has meant bridging the worlds of political science and philosophy, as well as “the line between theory and practice,” Ni says. “This research takes a concept that really impacts our lives and breaks it down so that it makes sense.”
Rashi Sabherwal, a doctoral student in political science, explores how women engage politically in society in informal roles through her research in India.
Applying design to agriculture for a new approach to agroforestry
Penn researchers are leading a multidisciplinary land-use project that blends trees, livestock, and streamside buffers to turn New Bolton Center into a living lab for stewardship agriculture.
Helping robots work together to explore the Moon and Mars
Penn Engineers, NASA, and five other universities tested robotic systems designed to help unmanned explorers cooperate in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, paving the way for Moon and Mars exploration.
