Golden Betrayal: The Erosion of Representation and the Loss of Legitimacy in California

Publication Date: January 1993

Publisher: Rose Institute of State and Local Government

Author(s): Leroy Clyde Hardy

Research Area: Politics

Type: Report

Coverage: California

Abstract:

California entered the union in 1850 and began a development that has typically been onward and upward. This study looks at one facet of its development --representation and its institutional manifestations in terms of reapportionment and redistricting. This work offers a new look at reapportionment and redistricting: over a long period of time, in one state, and with new perspectives, new terminology and a breadth of experience. The whole cannot be understood in its parts alone; but the parts sometimes reveal the internal workings and ills of the whole. Often flaws are assumed to be minor and dismissed as irrelevant. And so it has been with reapportionment and redistricting, a decennial manifestation of the internal conflict and illness in the body politic. In the mid-1920s, it was noted: Failure to adopt a just apportionment of representation is a standing disgrace....The failure will in the near future constitute an increasingly important cause of irritation, friction, and distrust.