Legibility, expertise & political power
On Statecraft and Redistricting California
A politician encounters a contractor, a survey, public testimony, and a specialized procedure—and mistakes complexity itself for failure.
James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, describes the long effort of governments to make populations and territory legible: to translate complicated, local social arrangements into forms that can be recorded, compared and administered. These abridgements are necessary to statecraft. The danger comes when the simplification is mistaken for the reality it was designed to represent.
That is useful background for reading Steve Hilton’s Califailure. Hilton argues that redistricting “ought to be straightforward.” Equalize population, respect city and county borders, establish geographic centers, and “geographically logical” districts should follow. Then, in Hilton’s telling, California complicated matters when it formed the redistricting commission and moved the process into subjective territory.
This sounds damning until one looks first at what the commission was trying to collect from Californians themselves.
What the state needed to know
The data is California’s communities-of-interest survey packet. It asks residents to describe their communities, explain what interests held them together, identify neighboring areas they believed should or should not be placed in the same district, and draw their communities on a map.
The commission then contracted Q2 Data & Research, LLC for technical GIS services to make that public input usable. The scope included data management, analysis, software expertise, summarizing testimony from groups of citizens self-identifying as communities of interest, presenting criteria for evaluating maps, and producing and maintaining the maps requested by the commission.
The contractor was not inventing communities or deciding political representation on its own. It was performing the technical work necessary to convert public input, geography and population information into usable district maps.
Scott’s work suggests a more serious question: what information would disappear if the process were made as simple as Hilton wants it to be?
Nor is hiring technical mapping expertise evidence of dysfunction. Commissioners are not GIS technicians. Public agencies routinely contract for specialized capabilities they do not maintain in-house. The scope of work exists precisely to define what those specialists are being paid to do.
Hilton does not need to be a redistricting subject-matter expert. A governor cannot be an expert in every technical field. But before presenting an unfamiliar government process as evidence that California is broken, he should make some effort to understand what that process is for.
Complexity is not a diagnosis
The redistricting example matters because it shows a recurring interpretive error rather than an isolated factual mistake. Hilton repeatedly encounters complexity and treats the complexity itself as evidence of failure. He sees a contractor, a study, public testimony, a specialized procedure, and asks why government is making things so complicated.
In redistricting, the answer is not abstract. An electoral map does not merely describe political communities. Once backed by state power, it helps determine whether those communities can exercise political power together at all.
Before diagnosing California’s government as a failure, Hilton might profit from reading Seeing Like a State.