Accountable Democracy: Mathematical Reasoning & Representative Politics in America

In her Academy project, Steingart examines how mathematical thought and computing technologies have impacted twentieth-century electoral politics in the United States. “In recent years, the overwhelming infusion of computational techniques into American electoral politics has received increased scrutiny by political and legal scholars as well as the broader public,” she writes. 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. Steingart’s project 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. Applying theoretical insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Steingart uses archival methods to investigate how ideas about what constitutes “bias,” “fairness,” and “discrimination” are determined as much by mathematical and computational metrics as by legal, political, and social ones. Focusing on congressional apportionment, the census, proportional voting, congressional redistricting, political polling, and election forecasts, she argues that the electoral process is the perfect place from which to investigate the incursion of mathematical and computational ways of knowing into the everyday fabric of American life. “My goal is to approach the history of American democracy in the twentieth century not only as a series of political struggles,” Steingart explains, “but also as technical and mathematical ones.”