title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism (also known as Tengriism, Tengerism, or Tengrianism) is an ethnic and old state Turko-Mongolic religion originating in the Eurasian steppes, based on folk shamanism, animism and generally centered around the titular sky god Tengri. Tengri was not considered a deity in the usual sense, but a personification of the universe. The purpose of life is, according to the Tengris view, to live in harmony with the universe.


title: Tengrism

text: It was the prevailing religion of the Turks, Mongols, Bulgars, Xiongnu, Huns and possibly the Hungarians, and the state religion of several medieval states: First Turkic Khaganate, Western Turkic Khaganate, Eastern Turkic Khaganate, Old Great Bulgaria, First Bulgarian Empire, Volga Bulgaria, and Eastern Tourkia (Khazaria), Mongol Empire. In "Irk Bitig", a ninth century manuscript on divination, Tengri is mentioned as (God of Turks). According to many academics, Tengrism was a predominantly polytheistic religion based on shamanistic concept of animism, and during the imperial period, especially by the 12th–13th centuries, Tengrism was mostly monotheistic. Abdulkadir Inan argues that Yakut and Altai shamanism are not entirely equal to the ancient Turkic religion.


title: Tengrism

text: The term also describes several contemporary Turko-Mongolic native religious movements and teachings. All modern adherents of "political" Tengrism are monotheists.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism has been advocated in intellectual circles of the Turkic nations of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan with Kazakhstan) and Russia (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan) since the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the 1990s. Still practiced, it is undergoing an organized revival in Buryatia, Sakha (Yakutia), Khakassia, Tuva and other Turkic nations in Siberia. Altaian Burkhanism and Chuvash Vattisen Yaly are movements similar to Tengrism.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengri can either refer to the sky deity or refer also to other deities (compare this with the concept of Kami).


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism is centered on the worship of the "tngri" (gods), with "Tengri" (Heaven, God of Heaven) being one of them. In the Mongolian folk religion, Genghis Khan is considered one of the embodiments, if not the main embodiment, of Tengri's will.


title: Tengrism

text: The forms of the name "Tengri" () among the ancient and modern Turks and Mongols are "Tengeri", "Tangara", "Tangri", "Tanri", "Tangre", "Tegri", "Tingir", "Tenkri", "Tangra", "Teri", "Ter", and "Ture". The name Tengri ("the Sky") is derived from ("daybreak") or Tan ("dawn"). Meanwhile, Stefan Georg proposed that the Turkic "Tengri" ultimately originates as a loanword from Proto-Yeniseian "*tɨŋgɨr-" "high". Mongolia is sometimes poetically called the "Land of Eternal Blue Sky" () by its inhabitants. According to some scholars, the name of the important deity Dangun (also Tangol) (God of the Mountains) of the Korean folk religion is related to the Siberian "Tengri" ("Heaven"), while the bear is a symbol of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major).


title: Tengrism

text: The word "Tengrism" is a fairly new term. The spelling "Tengrism" for the religion of the ancient Turks is found in the works of the 19th century Kazakh Russophone ethnographer Shoqan Walikhanov. The term was introduced into a wide scientific circulation in 1956 by Jean-Paul Roux and later in the 1960s as a general term of English-language papers.


title: Tengrism

text: "Tengrianism" is a reflection of the Russian term, "" ("Tengriánstvo"). It is introduced by Kazakh poet and turkologist Olzhas Suleymenov in his 1975 book "AZ-and-IA". Since the 1990s, Russian-language literature uses it in the general sense, as for instance, reported in 1996 ("so-called Tengrianism") in the context of the nationalist rivalry over Bulgar legacy.


title: Tengrism

text: The spellings "Tengriism", "Tangrism", "Tengrianity" are also found from the 1990s. In modern Turkey and, partly, Kyrgyzstan, Tengrism is known as the ' or ("Sky God religion"); the Turkish (sky) and (God) correspond to the Mongolian (blue) and (sky), respectively. Mongolian ' is used in a 1999 biography of Genghis Khan.


title: Tengrism

text: In the 20th century, a number of scientists proposed the existence of a religious imperial khagan cult in the ancient Turkic and Mongolian states. The Turkish historian of religion Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) wrote in his "The History of Turkish Holy Tradition and Turkish Civilization" that the religion of the ancient Turkic states could not be primitive shamanism, which was only a magical part of the religion of the ancient Türks (see a historiography of the problem: ).


title: Tengrism

text: The nature of this religion remains debatable. According to many scholars, it was originally polytheistic, but a monotheistic branch with the sky god Kök-Tengri as the supreme being evolved as a dynastical legitimation. It is at least agreed that Tengrism formed from the diverse folk religions of the local people and may have had diverse branches.


title: Tengrism

text: It is suggested that Tengrism was a monotheistic religion only at the imperial level in aristocratic circles, and, perhaps, only by the 12th-13th centuries (a late form of development of ancient animistic shamanism in the era of the Mongol empire).


title: Tengrism

text: According to Jean-Paul Roux, the monotheistic concept evolved later out of a polytheistic system and was not the original form of Tengrism. The monotheistic concept helped to legitimate the rule of the dynasty: "As there is only one God in Heaven, there can only be one ruler on the earth ...".


title: Tengrism

text: Others point out that Tengri itself was never an Absolute, but only one of many gods of the upper world, the sky deity, of polytheistic shamanism, later known as Tengrism.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism differs from contemporary Siberian shamanism in that it was a more organized religion. Additionally the polities practicing it were not small bands of hunter-gatherers like the Paleosiberians, but a continuous succession of pastoral, semi-sedentarized khanates and empires from the Xiongnu Empire (founded 209 BC) to the Mongol Empire (13th century). In Mongolia it survives as a synthesis with Tibetan Buddhism while surviving in purer forms around Lake Khovsgol and Lake Baikal. Unlike Siberian shamanism, which has no written tradition, Tengrism can be identified from Turkic and Mongolic historical texts like the Orkhon inscriptions, "Secret History of the Mongols", and "Altan Tobchi". However, these texts are more historically oriented and are not strictly religious texts like the scriptures and sutras of sedentary civilizations, which have elaborate doctrines and religious stories.


title: Tengrism

text: On a scale of complexity Tengrism lies somewhere between the Proto-Indo-European religion (a pre-state form of pastoral shamanism on the western steppe) and its later form the Vedic religion. The chief god Tengri ("Heaven") is considered strikingly similar to the Indo-European sky god *Dyḗus and the East Asian Tian (Chinese: "Sky; Heaven"). The structure of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European religion is actually closer to that of the early Turks than to the religion of any people of neolithic European, Near Eastern or Mediterranean antiquity.


title: Tengrism

text: The term "shamanism" was first applied by Western anthropologists as outside observers of the ancient religion of the Turks and Mongols, as well as those of the neighbouring Tungusic and Samoyedic-speaking peoples. Upon observing more religious traditions across the world, some Western anthropologists began to also use the term in a very broad sense. The term was used to describe unrelated magico-religious practices found within the ethnic religions of other parts of Asia, Africa, Australasia and even completely unrelated parts of the Americas, as they believed these practices to be similar to one another.


title: Tengrism

text: Buryat scholar Irina S. Urbanaeva developed a theory of Tengrist esoteric traditions in Central Asia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the revival of national sentiment in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.


title: Tengrism

text: The first time the name Tengri was recorded in Chinese chronicles was from the 4th century BC as the sky god of the Xiongnu, using the Chinese form 撑犁 ("Cheng-li").


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism formed from the various Turkic and Mongolic folk religions, which had a diverse number of deities, spirits and gods. Turkic folk religion was based on Animism and similar to various other religious traditions of Siberia, Central Asia and Northeast Asia. Ancestor worship played an important part in Tengrism.


title: Tengrism

text: The cult of Heaven-Tengri is fixed by the Orkhon, or Old Turkic script used by the Göktürks ("celestial Turks") and other early khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism was the religion of several medieval states, such as the Göktürk Khaganate, Western Turkic Khaganate, Old Great Bulgaria, Danube Bulgaria, Volga Bulgaria, and Eastern Tourkia (Khazaria) Turkic beliefs contains the sacral book "Irk Bitig" from Uyghur Khaganate.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism also played a large role in the religion of Mongol Empires as the primary state spirituality. Genghis Khan and several generations of his followers were Tengrian believers and "Shaman-Kings" until his fifth-generation descendant, Uzbeg Khan, turned to Islam in the 14th century. Old Tengrist prayers have come to us from "the Secret History of the Mongols" (13th century). The priests-prophets ("temujin") received them, according to their faith, from the great deity/spirit "Munkh Tenger".


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism was probably similar with the folk traditions of the Tungusic peoples, such as the Manchu folk religion. Similarities with Korean shamanism and Wuism as well as Japanese Shinto are also evident.


title: Tengrism

text: According to Hungarian archaeological research, the religion of the Magyars (Hungarians) until the end of the 10th century (before Christianity) was a form of Tengrism and Shamanism.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrists view their existence as sustained by the eternal blue sky (Tengri), the fertile mother-earth spirit (Eje) and a ruler regarded as the chosen one by the holy spirit of the sky. Heaven, earth, spirits of nature and ancestors provide for every need and protect all humans. By living an upright, respectful life, a human will keep his world in balance and perfect his personal Wind Horse, or spirit. The Huns of the northern Caucasus reportedly believed in two gods: Tangri Han (or Tengri Khan), considered identical to the Persian Esfandiyār and for whom horses were sacrificed, and Kuar (whose victims are struck by lightning).


title: Tengrism

text: Traditional Tengrism was more embraced by the nomadic Turks than by those residing in the lower mountains or forests. This belief influenced Turkic and Mongol religious history since ancient times until the 14th Century, when the Golden Horde converted to Islam. Since then, Tengrism was mostly submerged by other religious ideas. Traditional Tengrism persists among the Mongols and in some Turko-Mongolian regions of Russia (Sakha, Buryatia, and Tuva) in parallel with other religions.


title: Tengrism

text: According to the Orkhon inscriptions, Tengri played a big role in choices of the kaghan, and in guiding his actions. Many of these were performed because "Heaven so ordained" ().


title: Tengrism

text: Arghun expressed the association of Tengri with imperial legitimacy and military success. The majesty ("suu") of the khan is a divine stamp granted by Tengri to a chosen individual through which Tengri controls the world order (the presence of Tengri in the khan). In this letter, "Tengri" or "Mongke Tengri" ("Eternal Heaven") is at the top of the sentence. In the middle of the magnified section, the phrase "Tengri-yin Kuchin" ("Power of Tengri") forms a pause before it is followed by the phrase "Khagan-u Suu" ("Majesty of the Khan"):


title: Tengrism

text: Arghun expressed Tengrism's non-dogmatic side. The name "Mongke Tengri" ("Eternal Tengri") is at the top of the sentence in this letter to Pope Nicholas IV, in accordance with Mongolian Tengriist writing rules. The words "Tngri" (Tengri) and "zrlg" (zarlig, decree/order) are still written with vowel-less archaism:


title: Tengrism

text: Tengri is mentioned many times in "the Secret History of the Mongols", written in 1240. The book starts by listing the ancestors of Genghis Khan starting from Borte Chino (Blue Wolf) born with "destiny from Tengri". Borte Chino was either a heavenly wolf, a real man with the totemic name of a wolf or Modu Chanyu. Bodonchar Munkhag the 9th generation ancestor of Genghis Khan is called a "son of Tengri". When Temujin was brought to the Qongirat tribe at 9 years old to choose a wife, Dei Setsen of the Qongirat tells Yesugei the father of Temujin (Genghis Khan) that he dreamt of a white falcon, grasping the sun and the moon, come and sit on his hands. He identifies the sun and the moon with Yesugei and Temujin. Temujin then encounters Tengri in the mountains at the age of 12. The Taichiud had come for him when he was living with his siblings and mother in the wilderness, subsisting on roots, wild fruits, sparrows and fish. He was hiding in the thick forest of Terguun Heights. After three days hiding he decided to leave and was leading his horse on foot when he looked back and noticed his saddle had fallen. Temujin says "I can understand the belly strap can come loose, but how can the breast strap also come loose? Is Tengri persuading me?" He waited three more nights and decided to go out again but a tent-sized rock had blocked the way out. Again he said "Is Tengri persuading me?", returned and waited three more nights. Finally he lost patience after 9 days of hunger and went around the rock, cutting down the wood on the other side with his arrow-whittling knife, but as he came out the Taichiud were waiting for him there and promptly captured him. Toghrul later credits the defeat of the Merkits with Jamukha and Temujin to the "mercy of mighty Tengri" (paragraph 113).


title: Tengrism

text: Khorchi of the Baarin tells Temujin of a vision given by "Zaarin Tengri" where a bull raises dust and asks for one of his horns back after charging the ger cart of Jamukha (Temujin's rival) while another ox harnessed itself to a big ger cart on the main road and followed Temujin, bellowing "Heaven and Earth have agreed to make Temujin the Lord of the nation and I am now carrying the nation to you". Temujin afterward tells his earliest companions Boorchi and Zelme that they will be appointed to the highest posts because they first followed him when he was "mercifully looked upon by Tengri" (paragraph 125). In the Battle of Khuiten, Buyuruk Khan and Quduga try using zad stones to cause a thunderstorm against Temujin but it backfires and they get stuck in slippery mud. They say "the wrath of Tengri is upon us" and flee in disorder (paragraph 143). Temujin prays to "father Tengri" on a high hill with his belt around his neck after defeating the Taichiud at Tsait Tsagaan Tal and taking 100 horses and 50 breastplates. He says "I haven't become Lord thanks to my own bravery, but I have defeated my enemies thanks to the love of my father mighty Tengri". When Nilqa Sengum the son of Toghrul Khan tries to convince him to attack Temujin, Toghrul says "How can I think evil of my son Temujin? If we think evil of him when he is such a critical support to us, Tengri will not be pleased with us". After Nilqa Sengum throws a number of tantrums Toghrul finally relents and says "I was afraid of Tengri and said how can I harm my son. If you are really capable, then you decide what you need to do".


title: Tengrism

text: When Boorchi and Ogedei return wounded from the battle against Toghrul, Genghis Khan strikes his chest in anguish and says "May Eternal Tengri decide" (paragraph 172). Genghis Khan tells Altan and Khuchar "All of you refused to become Khan, that is why I led you as Khan. If you would have become Khan I would have charged first in battle and brought you the best women and horses if high Khukh Tengri showed us favor and defeated our enemies". After defeating the Keraits Genghis Khan says "By the blessing of Eternal Tengri I have brought low the Kerait nation and ascended the high throne" (paragraph 187). Genghis sends Subutai with an iron cart to pursue the sons of Togtoa and tells him "If you act exposed though hidden, near though far and maintain loyalty then Supreme Tengri will bless you and support you" (paragraph 199). Jamukha tells Temujin "I had no trustworthy friends, no talented brothers and my wife was a talker with great words. That is why I have lost to you Temujin, blessed and destined by Father Tengri." Genghis Khan appoints Shikhikhutug chief judge of the Empire in 1206 and tells him "Be my eyes to see and ears to hear when I am ordering the empire through the blessing of Eternal Tengri" (paragraph 203). Genghis Khan appoints Muqali "Gui Wang" because he "transmitted the word of Tengri when I was sitting under the spreading tree in the valley of Khorkhunag Jubur where Hotula Khan used to dance" (paragraph 206). He gives Khorchi of the Baarin 30 wives because he promised Khorchi he would fulfill his request for 30 wives "if what you say comes true through the mercy and power of Tengri" (paragraph 207).


title: Tengrism

text: Genghis mentions both Eternal Tengri and "heaven and earth" when he says "By the mercy of Eternal Tengri and the blessing of heaven and earth I have greatly increased in power, united all the great nation and brought them under my reins" (paragraph 224). Genghis orders Dorbei the Fierce of the Dorbet tribe to "strictly govern your soldiers, pray to Eternal Tengri and try to conquer the Khori Tumed people" (paragraph 240). After being insulted by Asha Khambu of the Tanguts of being a weak Khan Genghis Khan says "If Eternal Tengri blesses me and I firmly pull my golden reins, then things will become clear at that time" (paragraph 256). When Asha Khambu of the Tangut insults him again after his return from the Khwarezmian campaign Genghis Khan says "How can we go back (to Mongolia) when he says such proud words? Though I die I won't let these words slip. Eternal Tengri, you decide" (paragraph 265). After Genghis Khan "ascends to Tengri" (paragraph 268) during his successful campaign against the Tangut (Xi Xia) the wheels of the returning funeral cart gets stuck in the ground and Gilugdei Baatar of the Sunud says "My horse-mounted divine lord born with destiny from Khukh Tengri, have you abandoned your great nation?" Batu Khan sends a secret letter to Ogedei Khan saying "Under the power of the Eternal Tengri, under the Majesty of my uncle the Khan, we set up a great tent to feast after we had broken the city of Meged, conquered the Orosuud (Russians), brought in eleven nations from all directions and pulled on our golden reins to hold one last meeting before going our separate directions" (paragraph 275).


title: Tengrism

text: A revival of Tengrism has played a role in search for native spiritual roots and Pan-Turkism ideology since the 1990s, especially, in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, some autonomous republics of the Russian Federation (Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Yakutia, and others), among the Crimean Karaites and Crimean Tatars.


title: Tengrism

text: After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and especially after the proclamation of the Republic in 1923, a nationalist ideology of Turanism and Kemalism contributed to the revival of Tengrism. Islamic censorship was abolished, which allowed an objective study of the pre-Islamic religion of the Turks. The Turkish language was purified of Arabic, Persian and other borrowings. A number of figures, while they did not officially abandon Islam, adopted Turkic names, such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ("Atatürk" — "father of Turks") and the historian of religion and ideologist of the Kemalist regime Ziya Gökalp ("Gökalp" — "sky hero").


title: Tengrism

text: The prominent Turkish writer and historian Nihal Atsız was Tengrist and the ideologue of Turanism. The followers of Tengrism in the paramilitary organisation Grey Wolves, mainly inspired by his work, replace the Arabic designation of the god "Allah" with the Turkish "Tanri" in the oath and pronounce: ""Tanrı Türkü Korusun"" ("Tengri, bless the Türks!").


title: Tengrism

text: The most famous modern ideologues and theorists of Tengrism are (1944–2018), (1938–2003), Aron Atabek, (1955–2010), Rafael Bezertinov, Shagdaryn Bira, , (1947–2018), Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, (1958–2016), Choiun Omuraliyev, Dastan Sarygulov, and Olzhas Suleimenov.


title: Tengrism

text: The poet, literary critic and Turkologist Olzhas Suleimenov, the eulogist of the Kazakh national identity, in his book "AZ-and-IA" that was banned after publication in 1975 in Soviet Kazakhstan, USSR, presented Tengrism ("Tengrianstvo") as one of most ancient religions in the world.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism has very few active adherents, but its revival of an ethnic religion reached a larger audience in intellectual circles. Former Presidents of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev and Kyrgyzstan Askar Akayev have called Tengrism the national, "natural" religion of the Turkic peoples. So, during the 2002 trip to Khakassia, Russia, Akayev spoke out that a visit to the Yenisei River and the runic steles constituted "a pilgrimage to a holy place for the Kyrgyz" just as the pilgrimage to Mecca. Presenting Islam as foreign to the Turkic peoples, as Semitic religion together with Christianity and Judaism, adherents are found primarily among the nationalistic parties of Central Asia. Tengrism may be interpreted as a Turkic version of Russian neopaganism, which is already well-established. It is partly similar to the new religious movements, such as New Age.


title: Tengrism

text: In Tatarstan, the only Tengrist periodical "Beznen-Yul" (Our Path) appeared in 1997, and also works a theorist of Tengrist movement Rafael Bezertinov. He writes:


title: Tengrism

text: Today it's hard to even say who the modern Turks and Mongols. Their names are 90% Arabic, Persian, Greek, Jewish, etc; religion is Semitic (Arabic, Christian, Jewish) and Indian; many do not know their philosophy and traditions; live by the laws and lifestyle of the West; clothes and their food is western; the alphabet is western; forgotten your kind and ancestors; they do not know the history of their folk; many city residents do not speak their native language. Who are they really and what do they have own for today? Only hereditary genes ...


title: Tengrism

text: The Yakut philologist Lazar Afanasyev-Teris, PhD has founded Tengrist organisation "Kut-Siur" (at present, Aiyy Faith) in the 1990–1993. The headquarters of the International Fund of Tengri Research is also located in Yakutsk.


title: Tengrism

text: Several Kyrgyz politicians are advocating Tengrism to fill a perceived ideological void. Dastan Sarygulov, secretary of state and former chair of the Kyrgyz state gold-mining company, established in 2005 the Tengir Ordo—a civic group promoting the values and traditions of Tengrism—and an International scientific center of Tengrist studies. He based on the ideas of one of the first ideologists of pre-Islamic religion in the post-Soviet space, the Kyrgyz writer Choiun Omuraliyev alias Choiun uulu Omuraly, described in his book "Tengrism" (1994).


title: Tengrism

text: Another Kyrgyz proponent of Tengrism, Kubanychbek Tezekbaev, was prosecuted for inciting religious and ethnic hatred in 2011 with statements in an interview describing Kyrgyz mullahs as "former alcoholics and murderers".


title: Tengrism

text: At the same time, the Kyrgyz authorities do not go for the official registration of "Tengirchilik" (Теңирчилик) and other Tengrist associations.


title: Tengrism

text: The ideology of de-Judaization and the revival of Tengrism is imbued with the works of the leaders of the Crimean Karaites and Krymchaks of Crimea, who traditionally professed forms of Judaism (Igor Achkinazi (1954–2006), (1922–2019), and others).


title: Tengrism

text: They are related to Tengrism or are part of it also movements within the framework of the anti-shamanistic Burkhanism (Ak Jang) that arose in 1904 in Altai (its famous proponents were the painter Grigory Gurkin and poet , 1938–2020) and the ethnic faith Vattisen Yaly in Chuvashia, Russia.


title: Tengrism

text: Some of the Slavic Bulgarian proponents of the Native Faith in Bulgaria identify themselves with the descendants of the Turkic Bulgars and revive Tengrism. They are incorporated into the "Tangra Warriors Movement" (Bulgarian: Движение "Воини на Тангра").


title: Tengrism

text: Articles on Tengrism have been published in social-scientific journals. In 2003 in Bishkek, the Tengir Ordo Foundation held the first international scientific symposium on Tengrism "Tengrism—the worldview of the Altaic peoples". The conference "Tengrism as a new factor for the identity construction in Central Asia" was organized by the French Institute for Central Asia Studies in Almaty, Kazakhstan, 25 February 2005. Since 2007, every two years, International scientific conferences "Tengrism and the epic heritage of Eurasian nomads: origins and modernity" have been held in Russia, Mongolia and other countries (the first was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Spiritual Development of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia)).


title: Tengrism

text: A symbol used by many Tengrists, representing the runic spelling of god Tengri and "shangrak" (an equilateral cross in a circle), depicting the roof opening of a yurt, and a shaman's drum.


title: Tengrism

text: Many world-pictures and symbols are attributed to folk religions of Central Asia and Russian Siberia. Shamanistic religious symbols in these areas are often intermixed. For example, drawings of world-pictures on Altaic shamanic drums.


title: Tengrism

text: The tallest mountain peaks usually became sacred places. Since the time of the Turkic Khaganate, this is "Otgontenger" in Mongolia—perhaps, the "Otuken" of the old inscriptions, state ceremonies are held were. Among others: "Belukha" (or Üch-Sümer) in Russia's Altai, "Khan Tengri" alias Jengish Chokusu in Kyrgyzstan (not to be confused with the modern Khan Tengri), and "Burkhan Khaldun" in Mongolia, associated with the name of Genghis Khan. Symbolic mountains are man-made shrines-ovoos.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism was an animistic all-encompassing system of belief that includes medicine, religion, a reverence of nature, and ancestor worship. Turkic spiritual wisdom has no finalized condition, but is dialogical and discursive. Tengrism as a monotheistic religion developed only at the imperial level in aristocratic circles.


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism is centered on the worship of the Tengri (gods) and the sky deity Tengri (Heaven, God of Heaven). This is similar to Taoism and Tengri is often linked to the Chinese Tian. "Kök Tengri" (Blue Sky) is the sky deity and often considered as the highest god, father of gods, similar to Susanoo. It is known as "Tangara" to the Yakut.


title: Tengrism

text: The highest group in the pantheon consisted of 99 "tngri" (55 of them benevolent or "white" and 44 terrifying or "black"); 77 "earth-spirits"; and others. The "tngri" were called upon only by leaders and great shamans and were common to all the clans. After these, three groups of ancestral spirits dominated. The "Lord-Spirits" were the souls of clan leaders to whom any member of a clan could appeal for physical or spiritual help. The "Protector-Spirits" included the souls of great shamans and shamanesses. The "Guardian-Spirits" were made up of the souls of smaller shamans and shamanesses and were associated with a specific locality (including mountains, rivers, etc.) in the clan's territory.


title: Tengrism

text: Turkic mythology, especially within Siberian Central Asian religious systems divided the world into three parts; there is a "celestial world", the ground to which "Earth-Water" (Yer-Su) belongs too, and the "underworld" ruled by the spirits beneath the earth. They are connected through the "Tree of Worlds" or Tree of Life in the center of the worlds.


title: Tengrism

text: The celestial and the subterranean world are divided into seven layers (the underworld sometimes nine layers and the celestial world 17 layers). Shamans can recognize entries to travel into these realms. In the multiples of these realms, there are beings, living just like humans on the earth. They also have their own respected souls and shamans and nature spirits. Sometimes these beings visit the earth, but are invisible to people. They manifest themselves only in a strange sizzling fire or a bark to the shaman.


title: Tengrism

text: The heavens are inhabited by righteous souls, the Creator and the protector deities. The celestial world has many similarities with the earth, but as undefiled by humans. There is a healthy, untouched nature here, and the natives of this place have never deviated from the traditions of their ancestors. This world is much brighter than the earth and is under the auspices of Ulgen another son of Tengri. Shamans can also visit this world.


title: Tengrism

text: On some days, the doors of this heavenly world are opened and the light shines through the clouds. During this moment, the prayers of the shamans are most influential. A shaman performs his imaginary journey, which takes him to the heavens, by riding a black bird, a deer or a horse or by going into the shape into these animals. Otherwise he may scale the World-Tree or pass the rainbow to reach the heavenly world.


title: Tengrism

text: The underworld is the abode of wicked souls, ifrits (devils) and evil deities. There are many similarities between the earth and the underworld and its inhabitants resemble humans, but have only two souls instead of three. They lack the "Ami soul", that produces body temperature and allows breathing. Therefore, they are pale and their blood is dark. The sun and the moon of the underworld give far less light than the sun and the moon of the earth. There are also forests, rivers and settlements underground.


title: Tengrism

text: Erlik Khan (Mongolian: Erleg Khan), one of the sons of Tengri, is the ruler of the underworld. He controls the souls here, some of them waiting to be reborn again. Extremely evil souls were believed to be extinguished forever in Ela Guren. If a sick human is not dead yet, a shaman can move to the underworld to negotiate with Erlik to bring the person back to life. If he fails, the person dies.


title: Tengrism

text: It is believed that people and animals have many souls. Generally, each person is considered to have three souls, but the names, characteristics and numbers of the souls may be different among some of the tribes: For example, Samoyeds, a Uralic tribe living in the north of Siberia, believe that women consist of four and men of five souls. Since animals also have souls, humans must respect animals.


title: Tengrism

text: According to Paulsen and Jultkratz, who conducted research in North America, North Asia and Central Asia, two souls of this belief are the same to all people:


title: Tengrism

text: There are many different names for human souls among the Turks and the Mongols, but their features and meanings have not been adequately researched yet.


title: Tengrism

text: In addition to these spirits, Jean Paul Roux draws attention to the "Özkonuk" spirit mentioned in the writings from the Buddhist periods of the Uighurs.


title: Tengrism

text: Julie Stewart, who devoted her life to research in Mongolia described the belief in the soul in one of her articles:


title: Tengrism

text: The 17th century Mongolian chronicle Altan Tobchi ("Golden Summary") contains references to Tengri. Tengrism was assimilated into Mongolian Buddhism while surviving in purer forms only in far-northern Mongolia. Tengrist formulas and ceremonies were subsumed into the state religion. This is similar to the fusion of Buddhism and Shinto in Japan. The Altan Tobchi contains the following prayer at its very end:


title: Tengrism

text: The figure of the God of War (Daichin Tengri) was iconographically depicted in Buddhist-influenced form and carried into battle by certain armies even in the modern era. During the Napoleonic Wars the Kalmyk prince Serebzhab Tyumen (1774-1858) and 500 Kalmyks of his Second Cavalry Regiment, as well as 500 Kalmyks of the First Regiment of Prince Jamba-Taishi Tundutov, carried the yellow banner of Daichin Tengri (as well as Okhin Tengri) through the battles of Borodino, Warsaw, Leipzig, Fère-Champenoise (1814) as well as the capture of Paris. In early 1921 the Buddhist Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg (1886-1921) was reportedly recognized as the God of War (Daichin Tengri) by the Bogd Khan of Mongolia. James Palmer in his book "The Bloody White Baron" quotes Ossendowski who claims that Baron Ungern's imminent death in 130 days was foretold on three separate occasions. First by two monks in the "Shrine of Prophecies" of Urga (Ulaanbaatar) who cast dice and came up with the number 130, then by the Bogd Khan himself who said "You will not die but you will be incarnated in the highest form of being. Remember that, Incarnated God of War, Khan of grateful Mongolia" and finally by a female shaman in the ger of the Buryat prince Djambolon. Ossendowski relates:


title: Tengrism

text: Tengrism is based on personal relationship with the gods and spirits and personal experiences, which cannot be fixiated in writings; thus there can be no prophet, holy scripture, place of worship, clergy, dogma, rite and prayers. In contrast, orthodox Islam is based on a written corpus. Doctrines and religious law derive from the Quran and are explained by hadith. In this regard, both belief systems are fundamentally distinct.


title: Tengrism

text: When Turks converted to Islam, they probably assimilated their beliefs to Islam via Sufism, identifying Dervishes as something akin to shamans. In the writings of Ahmad Yasawi, both Tengrist elements as well as Islamic themes can be found. For example, Muhammad features as the prototype of human's way to unite with God, while simultaneously referring to God as both "kok tangir" (Gök Tengri) or "Allah". According to Yasawi, humans should seek to purify their soul to harmonize with God and the world. Turkic and Mongolian people in Central Asian largely converted to Islam during the fourteenth Century. However, they were not focusing on the laws, memorization and conformity offered by Islam, but were focused on the inwardly and personal experience. Thus, many scholars argued for a syncretism between Orthodox-Islam, Sufism, and pre-IslamicTurkic religion.


title: Tengrism

text: Recently, the syncretism-theory has been challanged. Scholars argued that an orthodox Islam simply did not existed during the Medieval period and has been a product of Modernization, thus there has been no strong distinction between Islam and Pre-Islamic Turkic beliefs when the first Turkic empires converted. First contact between shamanistic Turks and Islam took place during the Battle of Talas against the Chinese Tang dynasty. Many shamanistic beliefs were considered as genuinely Islamic by many average Muslims and are still prevalent today. Turkic Tengrism further influenced parts of Sufism and Folk Islam, especially Alevism with Bektashi Order, whose affiliation to Islam became disputed in the late Ottoman period.


title: Tengrism

text: Modern Tengrists see themselves as separate from the Abrahamic religions. According to some modern believers, by praying to the god of Islam the Turkic peoples would give their energy to the Jews and not to themselves (Aron Atabek). It excludes the experiences of other nations, but offers Semitic history as if it were the history of all humanity. The principle of submission (both in Islam as well as in Christianity) is disregarded as one of the major failings. It allows rich people to abuse the ordinary people and makes human development stagnant. They advocate Turanism and abandonment of Islam as an Arab religion (Nihal Atsız and others). Prayer from the heart can only be in native language, not Arabic. On the contrary, others assert that Tengri is indeed synonymous with Allah and that Turkic ancestors did not leave their former belief behind, but simply accepted "Allah" as new expression for "Tengri". Shoqan Walikhanov asserts, only the names but not the thoughts became Islamic. Thus, "Gök Tengri" (the "blue Sky") was called "Allah", the "spirit of the earth" "Shaitan", demons became "div", "peri" or "jinn", but the idea behind them remained shamanic.


title: Tengrism

text: Aron Atabek draws attention to how the Islamization of the Kazakhs and other Turkic peoples was carried out: runic letters were destroyed, physically persecuted shamans, national musical instruments were burned and playing on them was condemned, etc.


title: Tengrism

text: Muslim Turkic scholar Mahmud al-Kashgari, around the year 1075, whom he considered Tengrists as "infidel", offered this view: "The infidels — may God destroy them! — call the sky Tengri, also anything that is imposing in their eyes call Tengri, such as a great mountain or tree, and they bow down to such things."


title: Tengrism

text: Sociologist Rakhat Achylova studied how aspects of Tengrism were adopted into a Kyrgyz form of Islam.


title: Tengrism

text: Hulegu Khan sent a letter in Latin to King Louis IX of France on April 10, 1262, from his capital Maragheh in Iran. Kept in the Vienna National Library as MS 339 it is both an invitation for joint operations against the Mamluks as well as an imperious command to submit. The letter provides key insights into the Mongols' understanding of Tengrism's relationship to Christianity as well as furnishing one of the first Latin transcriptions of Tengri. Only a few sentences from the lengthy letter are shown below (those with relevancy to Tengrism):


title: Tengrism

text: The letter largely propounds the usual Mongol ideology and understanding of Tengrism with mentions of the supreme shaman Kokochu Teb Tengri. All meanings of Tengri including the sky, the most high God and "a god" are implied in the letter. Jesus Christ is called "Misicatengrin" or Messiah-Tengri in the letter. The "Misica" is from Syriac "mshiha" (Messiah, Christ) as opposed to Arabic "masih". Another Syriac word in the letter is "Barachmar" (greetings). This points to the well-known Nestorian heritage within the Mongol Empire which used Syriac as its liturgical language. The Mongolian letter of Arghun Khan to Pope Nicholas IV (1290) also uses the word Misica for Christ. William of Rubruck reported that Arig Boke, brother of Hulegu Khan, used the word Messiah near Karakorum in 1254 (Then they began to blaspheme against Christ, but Arabuccha stopped them saying: "You must not speak so, for we know that the Messiah is God"). There are elements of syncretism between Tengrism and Nestorian Christianity with overlapping notions of monotheism and a traditional view of Christ as "Misicatengrin" probably dating back to the Keraite conversion in 1007. In Hulegu's letter Tengrism takes the overarching, non-dogmatic role and contains Nestorianism as a compatible subset, in line with the religious pluralism practiced by the Mongols. Hulegu himself was not strictly a Christian, although his wife, his general Kitbuqa and mother were Nestorians. He was a Tengriist whose Nestorian interests were of the Mongol, syncretic type. His successor Abaqa Khan would take part in the Ninth Crusade with the future King Edward of England in 1271 and also storm the Krak des Chevaliers in February 1281 with the Hospitallers of Margat.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Masayoshi Son (, ) (born 11 August 1957) is a Korean-Japanese billionaire technology entrepreneur, investor, financier and philanthropist. A 3rd generation "Zainichi Korean", he naturalized as a Japanese citizen in 1990. He is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the Japanese holding company SoftBank, CEO of SoftBank Mobile and chairman of UK-based Arm Holdings.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Since Son founded SoftBank in 1981, he has made many investments, but the vast majority of those deals failed, and his reputation as an investor rests almost solely on his $20 million investment in Alibaba Group in 2000, a stake that was worth $130 billion in 2018. The morphing of his own telecom company SoftBank Corp. into an investment management firm called SoftBank Group Corp. made him noted worldwide as a stock investor. However, after a number of high-profile setbacks, Son's investing strategy in the first and second SoftBank Vision Funds established in 2017 and 2019, has been described as one reliant on the greater fool theory. A controversial figure, Son has been mocked by some specialized media and dubbed the worst investor ever.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: , Son ranks 67th on the Forbes list of The World's Billionaires 2022, despite having the distinction of losing the most money in history (approximately $70bn during the dot com crash of 2000).


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son was named the world's 45th most powerful person by Forbes Magazine's List of The World's Most Powerful People.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Masayoshi Son was born as the second of four sons in Tosu (鳥栖市, Tosu-shi), a city in the eastern part of Saga Prefecture on the island of Kyushu, Japan.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son is a 3rd generation Zainichi Korean. Zainichi Koreans are ethnic Koreans with permanent residency or citizenship in Japan. Son's grandfather, Son Jong-kyung, moved from Daegu to Japan during the Japanese colonial period, where he worked as a miner. His father is Son Sam-heon.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: His father and other Koreans illegally built their houses on land that was owned by Japan National Railways, which caused them trouble with the authorities. His father raised pigs and chickens on that land, and started an illegal sake business that eventually became successful enough for his family to become the first people in town to own a car. His family eventually moved out of the neighborhood so that Son could attend a better school.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son pursued his interests in business by securing a meeting with Japan McDonald's president Den Fujita. Taking his advice, Son began studying English and computer science.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: He left to study in the U.S. on the advice of Den Fujita. At age 16, Son moved from Japan to California and lived with his friends and family in South San Francisco. He finished high school in three weeks by taking the required exams at Serramonte High.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son attended the University of California, Berkeley. At age 19, Son became confident that computer technology would ignite the next commercial revolution after being enamoured by a microchip featured in a magazine.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: He began his first business endeavours while still a student. With the help of some professors, Son created an electronic translator that he sold to Sharp Corporation for $1.7 million. He made another $1.5 million by importing used video game machines from Japan, on credit and installing them in dormitories and restaurants.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son graduated from Berkeley with a B.A. in Economics in 1980, and started a video game company called Unison World in Oakland, CA. He later sold the company to an associate for close to $2 million, and the company was eventually acquired by Kyocera.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son used his family's adopted Japanese surname for much of his childhood. However, after he returned to Japan, Son decided to use his family's original Korean surname instead. For this action and other similar ones, Son is considered to be a role model for ethnic Korean children in Japan.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son was an early investor in internet firms, buying a share of Yahoo! in 1995 and investing a $20 million stake into Alibaba in 1999; he was briefly the richest person in the world before the stock market crashed. Son's holding company SoftBank owns 29.5% of Alibaba, which is worth around $108.7 billion as of 23 October 2018. Although SoftBank's stake in Yahoo! had dwindled to 7%, Son established Yahoo! BroadBand in September 2001 with Yahoo! Japan in which he still owned a controlling interest. After a severe devaluation of SoftBank's equity, Son was forced to focus his attention on Yahoo! BB and BB Phone. So far, SoftBank has accumulated about $1.3 billion in debt. Yet, Yahoo! BB acquired Japan Telecom, the then third largest broadband and landline provider with 600,000 residential and 170,000 commercial subscribers. Yahoo! BB is now Japan's leading broadband provider. In June 2020, Son stepped down from the Alibaba board.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In July 2016, SoftBank announced plans to acquire Arm Holdings for £23.4 billion ($31.4 billion) which would be the largest ever purchase of a European technology company. In September 2016, SoftBank announced that the transaction was complete. The total acquisition price was approximately £24 billion ($34 billion).


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In 2020, SoftBank Group agreed to sell U.K. chip designer Arm Limited to U.S. chip-maker Nvidia in a cash and stock deal worth up to $40 billion. Announcing the deal, SoftBank said the combination of Arm and Nvidia will create a computing company "that will lead the era" of artificial intelligence. However, the deal with Nvidia later failed.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In the 2010s, through his holdings in SoftBank, Son bought a 76% share in Sprint. SoftBank has further accumulated shares in Sprint to about 84% ownership.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, Masayoshi Son criticized the nuclear industry for creating "the problem that worries Japanese the most today" and engaged in investing in a nationwide solar power network for Japan. In March 2018, it was announced that Son was investing in the biggest ever solar project, a 200GW development planned for Saudi Arabia as part of its Vision 2030.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In July 2018, coverage indicated that Son "would underwrite most of 100 GW" of a planned 275 GW of new renewable provision in India by 2027.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Established in 2017, SoftBank Group's investment vehicle, the $100 billion Vision Fund, was intended to invest in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and the internet of things. As of 2019, it aimed to nearly double its portfolio of AI companies from 70 to 125. However, it also invested in companies supposedly focused on revolutionizing real estate, transportation, and retail. Son claimed he would make personal connections with the CEOs of all companies funded by Vision Fund in order to enhance the creation of intertwined synergies among those companies. Son planned to raise $100 billion for a new fund every few years, investing about $50 billion a year in startups. In 2019, a second Vision Fund was created with a target of $108 billion, of which $38 billion would come from Softbank itself. But the amount was scaled down due to lack of investing partners beyond Softbank Group itself and Masayoshi Son.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: As of 2020, the first fund had invested in 88 companies including Coupang, Didi, Doordash, Fanatics, Grab, Oyo, Paytm Uber, and WeWork, but had experienced an awkward fall from grace as the COVID-19 pandemic and a Chinese anti-monopoly crackdown accelerated the exposure of the Japanese investment management conglomerate's portfolio weaknesses. Son became noted as a stock investor after the meteoric rise of Alibaba Group. He had invested $20 million in Jack Ma's Alibaba back in 2000 when it was a young Chinese startup company although regrettably passing up early opportunities to invest in both Amazon and Tesla. In addition, he raised his global profile as stock investor since starting Softbank Vision Fund in 2017, creating an unprecedented investment vehicle of almost $100 billion to back technology startups. But by 2021, he was still struggling to persuade investors of the value of his efforts, in part because of fiascoes and troublesome losses with companies such as WeWork, OneWeb, Wirecard, OYO Rooms, Katerra or Greensill Capital, and SoftBank Group's own stock chronically traded far below the value of its assets reflecting a discount associated to tax liabilities, risk, past performance, losses, performance fees and high probability of occurrence of several haircuts given Son’s poor track record while running the Vision Fund and high enthusiasm for investing vast sums in loss-making companies at eye-popping valuations. By October 2021, Masayoshi Son had accelerated the pace of his startup investments quintupling the number of companies in his Vision Fund 2 portfolio in less than 9 months, SoftBank was cutting more deals with fewer staff than ever and the average investment amount per company had fallen from $943 million in Vision Fund 1 to $192 million in Vision Fund 2. In 2022, SoftBank Vision Fund posted a record 3.5 trillion yen loss ($27.4 billion) for its financial year ended on 31 March 2022 as the valuation of its stock portfolio plummeted. SoftBank's bad timing-prone, impulsive investment decisions regarding previously overhyped and consequently overvalued startups like Klarna, had plunged in value while some other investment firms had even been able to cash in before the startups' comedown to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. In August 2022, Masayoshi Son said he was “embarrassed” and “ashamed” when asked to talk about the way he had run the SoftBank Vision Fund and Barron's characterized the fund as a “failed experiment” while The Wall Street Journal called SoftBank a “big loser" and Bloomberg elaborated on “Masayoshi Son’s broken business model."


title: Masayoshi Son

text: As of November 2022, according to the Financial Times, "Masayoshi Son personally owes SoftBank close to $5bn because of growing losses on the Japanese conglomerate’s technology bets, which have also rendered the value of his stake in the group’s second Vision Fund worthless."


title: Masayoshi Son

text: Son met his wife, Masami Ohno, the daughter of a prominent Japanese doctor, while both were students at the University of California, Berkeley. They have two daughters. He lives in Tokyo in a three-story mansion that is valued at $50 million and that has a golf range with technology to mimic the weather conditions and temperature of the world’s top golf courses. He has also bought a home near Silicon Valley in Woodside, California, that cost him $117 million. He owns the SoftBank Hawks, a professional Japanese baseball team. Son has three brothers and is the second oldest of the siblings. His youngest brother, Taizo Son, is a serial entrepreneur and investor, having founded GungHo Online Entertainment and the venture capital firm Mistletoe.


title: Masayoshi Son

text: When he went to the United States at 16 to attend high school and then the University of California Berkeley, he decided to use his real Korean surname. "If I had stayed all the time in Japan," Mr. Son said, "I probably would have become much more conservative, just as other Japanese."


title: Masayoshi Son

text: In 2011 Son pledged to donate 10 billion yen ($120 million) and his remaining salary until retirement to support victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.


title: Ostrich

text: Ostriches are large flightless birds of the genus Struthio in the order Struthioniformes, part of the infra-class Palaeognathae, a diverse group of flightless birds also known as ratites that includes the emus, rheas, and kiwis. There are two living species of ostrich: the common ostrich, native to large areas of sub-Saharan Africa and the Somali ostrich, native to the Horn of Africa. The common ostrich was also historically native to the Arabian Peninsula, and ostriches were present across Asia as far east as Mongolia during the Late Pleistocene and possibly into the Holocene. They lay the largest eggs of any living land animal. With the ability to run at 70 km/h (43.5 mph), they are the fastest birds on land. They are farmed worldwide, particularly for their feathers as they are used as decoration and feather dusters. Their skin is also used for leather products. They are the heaviest living birds.


title: Ostrich

text: The genus "Struthio" was first described by Carl Linnaeus in 1758. The genus was used by Linnaeus and other early taxonomists to include the emu, rhea, and cassowary, until they each were placed in their own genera. The Somali ostrich ("Struthio molybdophanes") has recently become recognized as a separate species by most authorities, while others are still reviewing the evidence.


title: Ostrich

text: Struthionidae is a member of the Struthioniformes, a group of paleognath birds which first appeared during the Early Eocene, and includes a variety of flightless forms which were present across the Northern Hemisphere (Europe, Asia and North America) during the Eocene epoch. The closest relatives of Struthionidae within the Struthioniformes are the Ergilornithidae, known from the late Eocene to early Pliocene of Asia. It is therefore most likely that Struthionidae originated in Asia.


title: Ostrich

text: The earliest fossils of the genus "Struthio" are from the early Miocene ~21 million years ago of Namibia in Africa, so it is proposed that genus is of African origin. By the middle to late Miocene (5–13 mya) they had spread to and become widespread across Eurasia. While the relationship of the African fossil species is comparatively straightforward, many Asian species of ostrich have been described from fragmentary remains, and their interrelationships and how they relate to the African ostriches are confusing. In India, Mongolia and China, ostriches are known to have become extinct only around, or even after, the end of the last ice age; images of ostriches have been found prehistoric Chinese pottery and petroglyphs.


title: Ostrich

text: Today, ostriches are only found natively in the wild in Africa, where they occur in a range of open arid and semi-arid habitats such as savannas and the Sahel, both north and south of the equatorial forest zone. The Somali ostrich occurs in the Horn of Africa, having evolved isolated from the common ostrich by the geographic barrier of the East African Rift. In some areas, the common ostrich's Masai subspecies occurs alongside the Somali ostrich, but they are kept from interbreeding by behavioral and ecological differences. The Arabian ostriches in Asia Minor and Arabia were hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century, and in Israel attempts to introduce North African ostriches to fill their ecological role have failed. Escaped common ostriches in Australia have established feral populations.


title: Ostrich

text: In 2008, "S. linxiaensis" was transferred to the genus "Orientornis." Three additional species, "S. pannonicus", "S. dmanisensis", and "S. transcaucasicus", were transferred to the genus "Pachystruthio" in 2019. Several additional fossil forms are ichnotaxa (that is, classified according to the organism's trace fossils such as footprints rather than its body) and their association with those described from distinctive bones is contentious and in need of revision pending more good material.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In representative democracies, gerrymandering (, originally ) is the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries with the intent to create undue advantage for a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency. The manipulation may involve "cracking" (diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) or "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). Gerrymandering can also be used to protect incumbents. Wayne Dawkins describes it as politicians picking their voters instead of voters picking their politicians.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The term "gerrymandering" is named after American politician Elbridge Gerry, Vice President of the United States at the time of his death, who, as governor of Massachusetts in 1812, signed a bill that created a partisan district in the Boston area that was compared to the shape of a mythological salamander. The term has negative connotations, and gerrymandering is almost always considered a corruption of the democratic process. The resulting district is known as a "gerrymander" (). The word is also a verb for the process.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The word "gerrymander" (originally written "Gerry-mander"; a portmanteau of the name "Gerry" and the animal "salamander") was used for the first time in the "Boston Gazette" on 26 March 1812 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. This word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts Senate election districts under Governor Elbridge Gerry, later Vice President of the United States. Gerry, who personally disapproved of the practice, signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts for the benefit of the Democratic-Republican Party. When mapped, one of the contorted districts in the Boston area was said to resemble a mythological salamander. Appearing with the term, and helping spread and sustain its popularity, was a political cartoon depicting a strange animal with claws, wings and a dragon-like head that supposedly resembled the oddly shaped district.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The cartoon was most likely drawn by Elkanah Tisdale, an early-19th-century painter, designer, and engraver who lived in Boston at the time. Tisdale had the engraving skills to cut the woodblocks to print the original cartoon. These woodblocks survive and are preserved in the Library of Congress. The creator of the term "gerrymander", however, may never be definitively established. Historians widely believe that the Federalist newspaper editors Nathan Hale and Benjamin and John Russell coined the term, but there is no definitive evidence as to who created or uttered the word for the first time.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The redistricting was a notable success for Gerry's Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1812 election, both the Massachusetts House and governorship were comfortably won by Federalists, losing Gerry his job, but the redistricted state senate remained firmly in Democratic-Republican hands.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The word "gerrymander" was reprinted numerous times in Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, New England, and nationwide for the rest of 1812. This suggests an organized activity by the Federalists to disparage Gerry in particular and the growing Democratic-Republican party in general. "Gerrymandering" soon began to be used to describe cases of district shape manipulation for partisan gain in other states. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary," the word's acceptance was marked by its publication in a dictionary (1848) and in an encyclopedia (1868). Since the eponymous "Gerry" is pronounced with a hard g as in "get", the word "gerrymander" was originally pronounced , but pronunciation as , with a soft g as in "gentle," has become dominant. Residents of Marblehead, Massachusetts, Gerry's hometown, continue to use the original pronunciation.


title: Gerrymandering

text: From time to time, other names have been suffixed with "-mander" to tie a particular effort to a particular politician or group. Examples are the 1852 "Henry-mandering", "Jerrymander" (referring to California Governor Jerry Brown), "Perrymander" (a reference to Texas Governor Rick Perry), "Tullymander" (after the Irish politician James Tully), and "Bjelkemander" (referencing Australian politician Joh Bjelke-Petersen).


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering's primary goals are to maximize the effect of supporters' votes and minimize the effect of opponents' votes. A partisan gerrymander's main purpose is to influence not only the districting statute but the entire corpus of legislative decisions enacted in its path.


title: Gerrymandering

text: These tactics are typically combined in some form, creating a few "forfeit" seats for packed voters of one type in order to secure more seats and greater representation for voters of another type. This results in candidates of one party (the one responsible for the gerrymandering) winning by small majorities in most of the districts, and another party winning by a large majority in only a few. Any party that endeavors to make a district more favorable to voting for it based on the physical boundary is gerrymandering.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. "Wasted votes" are votes that did not contribute to electing a candidate, either because they were in excess of the number needed for victory or because the candidate lost. By moving geographic boundaries, the incumbent party packs opposition voters into a few districts they will already win, wasting the extra votes. Other districts are more tightly constructed, with the opposition party allowed a bare minority count, thereby wasting all the minority votes for the losing candidate. These districts constitute the majority of districts and are drawn to produce a result favoring the incumbent party.


title: Gerrymandering

text: A quantitative measure of the effect of gerrymandering is the efficiency gap, computed from the difference in the wasted votes for two different political parties summed over all the districts. Citing in part an efficiency gap of 11.69% to 13%, a U.S. District Court in 2016 ruled against the 2011 drawing of Wisconsin legislative districts. In the 2012 election for the state legislature, that gap in wasted votes meant that one party had 48.6% of the two-party votes but won 61% of the 99 districts.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The wasted vote effect is strongest when a party wins by narrow margins across multiple districts, but gerrymandering narrow margins can be risky when voters are less predictable. To minimize the risk of demographic or political shifts swinging a district to the opposition, politicians can create more packed districts, leading to more comfortable margins in unpacked ones.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Some political science research suggests that, contrary to common belief, gerrymandering does not decrease electoral competition and can even increase it. Some say that, rather than packing the voters of their party into uncompetitive districts, party leaders tend to prefer to spread their party's voters into multiple districts so that their party can win more races. (See scenario (c) in the box.) This may lead to increased competition. Instead of gerrymandering, some researchers find that other factors, such as partisan polarization and the incumbency advantage, have driven the recent decreases in electoral competition. Similarly, a 2009 study found that "congressional polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a function of which districts each party represents or the distribution of constituency preferences."


title: Gerrymandering

text: One state in which gerrymandering has arguably had an adverse effect on electoral competition is California. In 2000, a bipartisan redistricting effort redrew congressional district lines in ways that all but guaranteed incumbent victories; as a result, California saw only one congressional seat change hands between 2000 and 2010. In response to this obvious gerrymandering, a 2010 referendum in California gave the power to redraw congressional district lines to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, which had been created to draw California State Senate and Assembly districts by a 2008 referendum. In stark contrast to the redistricting efforts that followed the 2000 census, the redistricting commission has created a number of the most competitive congressional districts in the country.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The effect of gerrymandering for incumbents is particularly advantageous, as they are far more likely to be reelected under conditions of gerrymandering. For example, in 2002, according to political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, only four challengers were able to defeat incumbent members of the U.S. Congress, the lowest number in modern American history. Incumbents are likely to be of the majority party orchestrating a gerrymander, and are usually easily renominated in subsequent elections, including incumbents among the minority.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Mann, a Senior Fellow of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, has also noted that "Redistricting is a deeply political process, with incumbents actively seeking to minimize the risk to themselves (via bipartisan gerrymanders) or to gain additional seats for their party (via partisan gerrymanders)". The bipartisan gerrymandering Mann mentions refers to the fact that legislators often draw distorted legislative districts even when doing so does not give their party an advantage.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering of state legislative districts can effectively guarantee an incumbent's victory by "shoring up" a district with higher levels of partisan support, without disproportionately benefiting a particular political party. This can be highly problematic from a governance perspective, because forming districts to ensure high levels of partisanship often leads to higher levels of partisanship in legislative bodies. If a substantial number of districts are designed to be polarized, then those districts' representation will also likely act in a heavily partisan manner, which can create and perpetuate partisan gridlock.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering can thus have a deleterious effect on the principle of democratic accountability. With uncompetitive seats/districts reducing the fear that incumbent politicians may lose office, they have less incentive to represent their constituents' interests, even when those interests conform to majority support for an issue across the electorate as a whole. Incumbent politicians may look out more for their party's interests than for those of their constituents.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering can affect campaign costs for district elections. If districts become increasingly stretched out, candidates may incur higher costs for transportation and campaign advertising across a district. The incumbent's advantage in campaign fundraising is another benefit of having a gerrymandered seat.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering also has significant effects on the representation voters receive in gerrymandered districts. Because gerrymandering can be designed to increase the number of wasted votes among the electorate, the relative representation of particular groups can be drastically altered from their actual share of the voting population. This effect can significantly prevent a gerrymandered system from achieving proportional and descriptive representation, as the winners of elections are increasingly determined by who is drawing the districts, rather than the voters' preferences.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering may be advocated to improve representation within the legislature among otherwise underrepresented minority groups by packing them into a single district. This can be controversial, as it may lead to those groups' remaining marginalized in the government as they become confined to a single district. Candidates outside that district no longer need to represent them to win elections.


title: Gerrymandering

text: As an example, much of the redistricting conducted in the U.S. in the early 1990s involved the intentional creation of additional "majority-minority" districts where racial minorities such as African Americans were packed into the majority. This "maximization policy" drew support from both the Republican Party (which had limited support among African Americans and could concentrate its power elsewhere) and by minority representatives elected as Democrats from these constituencies, who then had safe seats.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The 2012 election provides a number of examples of how partisan gerrymandering can adversely affect the descriptive function of states' congressional delegations. In Pennsylvania, for example, Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received 83,000 more votes than Republican candidates, yet the Republican-controlled redistricting process in 2010 resulted in Democrats losing to their Republican counterparts in 13 of Pennsylvania's 18 districts.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the seven states where Republicans had complete control over the redistricting process, Republican House candidates received 16.7 million votes and Democratic House candidates received 16.4 million. The redistricting resulted in Republican victories in 73 out of the 107 affected seats; in those seven states, Republicans received 50.4% of the votes but won in over 68% of the congressional districts. While it is but one example of how gerrymandering can have a significant effect on election outcomes, this kind of disproportional representation of the public will seems problematic for the legitimacy of democratic systems, regardless of one's political affiliation.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In Michigan, redistricting was conducted by a Republican legislature in 2011. Federal congressional districts were designed so that cities such as Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, Jackson, Kalamazoo, Lansing, and East Lansing were separated into districts with large conservative-leaning hinterlands that diluted the Democratic votes in those cities in Congressional elections. Since 2010, not one of those cities is within a district in which a Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives has a reasonable chance of winning, short of Democratic landslide.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering can also be done to help incumbents as a whole, effectively making every district a packed one and greatly reducing the potential for competitive elections. This is particularly likely to occur when the minority party has significant obstruction power: unable to enact a partisan gerrymander, the legislature instead agrees to ensure its own reelection.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In an unusual occurrence in 2000, for example, the two dominant parties in the state of California cooperatively redrew both state and federal legislative districts to preserve the status quo, insulating the incumbents from unpredictable voting. This move proved completely effective, as no state or federal legislative office changed party in the 2004 election, although 53 congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats were potentially at risk.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In 2006, the term "70/30 district" came to signify the equitable split of two evenly split (i.e. 50/50) districts. The resulting districts gave each party a guaranteed seat and retained their respective power base.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Prison-based gerrymandering occurs when prisoners are counted as residents of a district, increasing its population with non-voters when assigning political apportionment. This phenomenon violates the principle of one person, one vote because, although many prisoners come from (and return to) urban communities, they are counted as "residents" of the rural districts that contain large prisons, artificially inflating the political representation in districts with prisons at the expense of voters in districts without them. Others contend that prisoners should not be counted as residents of their original districts when they do not reside there and are not legally eligible to vote.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Due to the perceived issues associated with gerrymandering and its effect on competitive elections and democratic accountability, numerous countries have enacted reforms making the practice more difficult or less effective. Countries such as the U.K., Australia, Canada and most of those in Europe have transferred responsibility for defining constituency boundaries to neutral or cross-party bodies. In Spain, they are constitutionally fixed since 1978. Open party-list proportional representation makes gerrymandering obsolete by erasing district lines and empowering voters to rank a list of candidates any party puts forth. This method is used in Austria, Brazil, Sweden, and Switzerland.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the U.S., such reforms are controversial and face particularly strong opposition from groups that benefit from gerrymandering. In a more neutral system, they might lose considerable influence.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The most commonly advocated electoral reform proposal targeted at gerrymandering is to change the redistricting process. Under these proposals, an independent and presumably objective commission is created specifically for redistricting, rather than having the legislature do it.


title: Gerrymandering

text: This is the system used in the U.K., where independent boundary commissions determine the boundaries for constituencies in the House of Commons and the devolved legislatures, subject to ratification by the body in question (almost always granted without debate). A similar situation exists in Australia, where the independent Australian Electoral Commission and its state-based counterparts determine electoral boundaries for federal, state and local jurisdictions.


title: Gerrymandering

text: To help ensure neutrality, members of a redistricting agency may be appointed from relatively apolitical sources, such as retired judges or longstanding members of the civil service, possibly with requirements for adequate representation among competing political parties. Additionally, members of the board can be denied information that might aid in gerrymandering, such as the demographic makeup or voting patterns of the population.


title: Gerrymandering

text: As a further constraint, consensus requirements can be imposed to ensure that the resulting district map reflects a wider perception of fairness, such as a requirement for a supermajority approval of the commission for any district proposal. But consensus requirements can lead to deadlock, as occurred in Missouri following the 2000 census. There, the equally numbered partisan appointees were unable to reach consensus in a reasonable time, and so the courts had to determine district lines.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the U.S. state of Iowa, the nonpartisan Legislative Services Bureau (LSB, akin to the U.S. Congressional Research Service) determines electoral district boundaries. Aside from satisfying federally mandated contiguity and population equality criteria, the LSB mandates unity of counties and cities. Consideration of political factors such as location of incumbents, previous boundary locations, and political party proportions is specifically forbidden. Since Iowa's counties are chiefly regularly shaped polygons, the LSB process has led to districts that follow county lines.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In 2005, the U.S. state of Ohio had a ballot measure to create an independent commission whose first priority was competitive districts, a sort of "reverse gerrymander". A complex mathematical formula was to be used to determine the competitiveness of a district. The measure failed voter approval chiefly due to voter concerns that communities of interest would be broken up.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In 2017, Representative John Delaney submitted the Open Our Democracy Act of 2017 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a means to implement nonpartisan redistricting.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Many redistricting reforms seek to remove partisanship to ensure fairness in the redistricting process. The I-cut-you-choose method achieves fairness by putting the two major-parties in direct competition. I-cut-you-choose is a fair division method to divide resources amongst two parties, regardless of which party cuts first. This method typically relies on assumptions of contiguity of districts but ignores all other constraints such as keeping communities of interest together. This method has been applied to nominal redistricting problems but it generally has less public interest than other types of redistricting reforms. The I-cut-you-choose concept was popularized by the board game Berrymandering. Problems with this method arise when minor parties are shut-out of the process which will reinforce the two-party system. Additionally, while this method is provably fair to the two parties creating the districts, it is not necessarily fair to the communities they represent.


title: Gerrymandering

text: When a single political party controls both legislative houses of a state during redistricting, both Democrats and Republicans have displayed a marked propensity for couching the process in secrecy; in May 2010, for example, the Republican National Committee held a redistricting training session in Ohio where the theme was "Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe". The need for increased transparency in redistricting processes is clear; a 2012 investigation by The Center for Public Integrity reviewed every state's redistricting processes for both transparency and potential for public input, and ultimately assigned 24 states grades of either D or F.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In response to these types of problems, redistricting transparency legislation has been introduced to US Congress a number of times in recent years, including the Redistricting Transparency Acts of 2010, 2011, and 2013. Such policy proposals aim to increase the transparency and responsiveness of the redistricting systems in the US. The merit of increasing transparency in redistricting processes is based largely on the premise that lawmakers would be less inclined to draw gerrymandered districts if they were forced to defend such districts in a public forum.


title: Gerrymandering

text: As gerrymandering relies on the wasted-vote effect, the use of a different voting system with fewer wasted votes can help reduce gerrymandering. In particular, the use of multi-member districts alongside voting systems establishing proportional representation such as single transferable voting can reduce wasted votes and gerrymandering. Semi-proportional voting systems such as single non-transferable vote or cumulative voting are relatively simple and similar to "first past the post" and can also reduce the proportion of wasted votes and thus potential gerrymandering. Electoral reformers have advocated all three as replacement systems.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Electoral systems with various forms of proportional representation are now found in nearly all European countries, resulting in multi-party systems (with many parties represented in the parliaments) with higher voter attendance in the elections, fewer wasted votes, and a wider variety of political opinions represented.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Electoral systems with election of just one winner in each district (i.e., "winner-takes-all" electoral systems) and no proportional distribution of extra mandates to smaller parties tend to create two-party systems. This effect, labeled "Duverger's law" by political scientists, was described by Maurice Duverger.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Another way to avoid gerrymandering is simply to stop redistricting altogether and use existing political boundaries such as state, county, or provincial lines. While this prevents future gerrymandering, any existing advantage may become deeply ingrained. The United States Senate, for instance, has more competitive elections than the House of Representatives due to the use of existing state borders rather than gerrymandered districts—Senators are elected by their entire state, while Representatives are elected in legislatively drawn districts.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The use of fixed districts creates an additional problem, however, in that fixed districts do not take into account changes in population. Individual voters can come to have very different degrees of influence on the legislative process. This malapportionment can greatly affect representation after long periods of time or large population movements. In the United Kingdom during the Industrial Revolution, several constituencies that had been fixed since they gained representation in the Parliament of England became so small that they could be won with only a handful of voters ("rotten boroughs"). Similarly, in the U.S. the Alabama Legislature refused to redistrict for more than 60 years, despite major changes in population patterns. By 1960 less than a quarter of the state's population controlled the majority of seats in the legislature. This practice of using fixed districts for state legislatures was effectively banned in the United States after the "Reynolds v. Sims" Supreme Court decision in 1964, establishing a rule of one man, one vote.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Another means to reduce gerrymandering is to create objective, precise criteria with which any district map must comply. Courts in the United States, for instance, have ruled that congressional districts must be contiguous in order to be constitutional. This, however, is not a particularly effective constraint, as very narrow strips of land with few or no voters in them may be used to connect separate regions for inclusion in one district, as is the case in Illinois's 4th congressional district.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Depending on the distribution of voters for a particular party, metrics that maximize compactness can be opposed to metrics that minimize the efficiency gap. For example, in the United States, voters registered with the Democratic Party tend to be concentrated in cities, potentially resulting in a large number of "wasted" votes if compact districts are drawn around city populations. Neither of these metrics take into consideration other possible goals, such as proportional representation based on other demographic characteristics (such as race, ethnicity, gender, or income), maximizing competitiveness of elections (the greatest number of districts where party affiliation is 50/50), avoiding splits of existing government units (like cities and counties), and ensuring representation of major interest groups (like farmers or voters in a specific transportation corridor), though any of these could be incorporated into a more complicated metric.


title: Gerrymandering

text: One method is to define a minimum district to convex polygon ratio . To use this method, every proposed district is circumscribed by the smallest possible convex polygon (its convex hull; think of stretching a rubberband around the outline of the district). Then, the area of the district is divided by the area of the polygon; or, if at the edge of the state, by the portion of the area of the polygon within state boundaries.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The advantages of this method are that it allows a certain amount of human intervention to take place (thus solving the Colorado problem of splitline districting); it allows the borders of the district to follow existing jagged subdivisions, such as neighbourhoods or voting districts (something isoperimetric rules would discourage); and it allows concave coastline districts, such as the Florida gulf coast area. It would mostly eliminate bent districts, but still permit long, straight ones. However, since human intervention is still allowed, the gerrymandering issues of packing and cracking would still occur, just to a lesser extent.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The Center for Range Voting has proposed a way to draw districts by a simple algorithm. The algorithm uses only the shape of the state, the number of districts wanted, and the population distribution as inputs. The algorithm (slightly simplified) is:


title: Gerrymandering

text: This district-drawing algorithm has the advantages of simplicity, ultra-low cost, a single possible result (thus no possibility of human interference), lack of intentional bias, and it produces simple boundaries that do not meander needlessly. It has the disadvantage of ignoring geographic features such as rivers, cliffs, and highways and cultural features such as tribal boundaries. This landscape oversight causes it to produce districts different from those a human would produce. Ignoring geographic features can induce very simple boundaries.


title: Gerrymandering

text: While most districts produced by the method will be fairly compact and either roughly rectangular or triangular, some of the resulting districts can still be long and narrow strips (or triangles) of land.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Like most automatic redistricting rules, the shortest splitline algorithm will fail to create majority-minority districts, for both ethnic and political minorities, if the minority populations are not very compact. This might reduce minority representation.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Another criticism of the system is that splitline districts sometimes divide and diffuse the voters in a large metropolitan area. This condition is most likely to occur when one of the first splitlines cuts through the metropolitan area. It is often considered a drawback of the system because residents of the same agglomeration are assumed to be a community of common interest. This is most evident in the splitline allocation of Colorado.


title: Gerrymandering

text: However, in cases when the splitline divides a large metropolitan area, it is usually because that large area has enough population for multiple districts. In cases which the large area only has the population for one district, then the splitline usually results in the urban area being in one district with the other district being rural.


title: Gerrymandering

text: As of July 2007, shortest-splitline redistricting pictures, based on the results of the 2000 census, are available for all 50 states.


title: Gerrymandering

text: It is possible to define a specific minimum isoperimetric quotient, proportional to the ratio between the area and the square of the perimeter of any given congressional voting district. Although technologies presently exist to define districts in this manner, there are no rules in place mandating their use, and no national movement to implement such a policy. One problem with the simplest version of this rule is that it would prevent incorporation of jagged natural boundaries, such as rivers or mountains; when such boundaries are required, such as at the edge of a state, certain districts may not be able to meet the required minima. One way of avoiding this problem is to allow districts which share a border with a state border to replace that border with a polygon or semi-circle enclosing the state boundary as a kind of virtual boundary definition, but using the actual perimeter of the district whenever this occurs inside the state boundaries. Enforcing a minimum isoperimetric quotient would encourage districts with a high ratio between area and perimeter.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The efficiency gap is a simply-calculable measure that can show the effects of gerrymandering. It measures wasted votes for each party: the sum of votes cast in losing districts (losses due to cracking) and excess votes cast in winning districts (losses due to packing). The difference in these wasted votes are divided by total votes cast, and the resulting percentage is the efficiency gap.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In 2017, Boris Alexeev and Dustin Mixon proved that "sometimes, a small efficiency gap is only possible with bizarrely shaped districts". This means that it is mathematically impossible to always devise boundaries which would simultaneously meet certain Polsby–Popper and efficiency gap targets.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The introduction of modern computers alongside the development of elaborate voter databases and special districting software has made gerrymandering a far more precise science. Using such databases, political parties can obtain detailed information about every household including political party registration, previous campaign donations, and the number of times residents voted in previous elections and combine it with other predictors of voting behavior such as age, income, race, or education level. With this data, gerrymandering politicians can predict the voting behavior of each potential district with an astonishing degree of precision, leaving little chance for creating an accidentally competitive district.


title: Gerrymandering

text: On the other hand, the introduction of modern computers would allow the United States Census Bureau to calculate more equal populations in every voting district that are based only on districts being the most compact and equal populations. This could be done easily using their Block Centers based on the Global Positioning System rather than street addresses. With this data, gerrymandering politicians will not be in charge, thus allowing competitive districts again.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Online web apps such as Dave's Redistricting have allowed users to simulate redistricting states into legislative districts as they wish. According to Bradlee, the software was designed to "put power in people's hands," and so that they "can see how the process works, so it's a little less mysterious than it was 10 years ago."


title: Gerrymandering

text: Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) can measure the extent to which redistricting plans favor a particular party or group in election, and can support automated redistricting simulators.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering is most likely to emerge in majoritarian systems, where the country is divided into several voting districts and the candidate with the most votes wins the district. If the ruling party is in charge of drawing the district lines, it can abuse the fact that in a majoritarian system all votes that do not go to the winning candidate are essentially irrelevant to the composition of a new government. Even though gerrymandering can be used in other voting systems, it has the most significant impact on voting outcomes in first-past-the-post systems. Partisan redrawing of district lines is particularly harmful to democratic principles in majoritarian two-party systems. In general, two party systems tend to be more polarized than proportional systems. Possible consequences of gerrymandering in such a system can be an amplification of polarization in politics and a lack of representation of minorities, as a large part of the constituency is not represented in policy making. However, not every state using a first-past-the-post system is being confronted with the negative impacts of gerrymandering. Some countries, such as Australia, Canada and the UK, authorize non-partisan organizations to set constituency boundaries in attempt to prevent gerrymandering.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The introduction of a proportional system is often proposed as the most effective solution to partisan gerrymandering. In such systems, the entire constituency is being represented proportionally to their votes. Even though voting districts can be part of a proportional system, the redrawing of district lines would not benefit a party, as those districts are mainly of organizational value. For example, instead of having three districts, a single large district would exist where the top three candidates in the election would all represent the district. It would be harder to gerrymander a district where there are multiple winners from that district.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In mixed systems that use proportional and majoritarian voting principles, the usage of gerrymandering is a constitutional obstacle that states have to deal with. In mixed systems, the advantage a political actor can potentially gain from redrawing district lines is much less than in majoritarian systems. In addition, voting districts are mostly being used to avoid that elected parliamentarians are getting too detached from their constituency. The principle that determines the representation in parliament is usually the proportional aspect of the voting system. Seats in parliament are being allocated to each party in accordance to the proportion of their overall votes. In most mixed systems, winning a voting district merely means that a candidate is guaranteed a seat in parliament but does not expand a party's share in the overall seats. Gerrymandering can still be used to manipulate the outcome in voting districts. In most democracies with a mixed system, non-partisan institutions are in charge of drawing district lines and gerrymandering is a less common phenomenon.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering should not be confused with malapportionment, whereby the number of eligible voters per elected representative can vary widely without relation to how the boundaries are drawn. Nevertheless, the "-mander" suffix has been applied to particular malapportionments. Sometimes political representatives use both gerrymandering and malapportionment to try to maintain power.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Several western democracies, notably Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia employ an electoral system with only one (nationwide) voting district for election of national representatives. This virtually precludes gerrymandering. Other European countries such as Austria, the Czech Republic or Sweden, among many others, have electoral districts with fixed boundaries (usually one district for each administrative division). The number of representatives for each district can change after a census due to population shifts, but their boundaries do not change. This also effectively eliminates gerrymandering.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Additionally, many countries where the president is directly elected by the citizens (e.g. France, Poland, among others) use only one electoral district for their presidential election with the winner of the popular vote winning the position, despite using multiple districts to elect representatives.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Gerrymandering has not typically been considered a problem in the Australian electoral system largely because drawing of electoral boundaries has typically been done by non-partisan electoral commissions. There have been historical cases of malapportionment, whereby the distribution of electors to electorates was not in proportion to the population in several states.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the 1998 Australian federal election, the opposition Australian Labor Party, led by Kim Beazley, received 50.98% of the two-party-preferred vote in the House of Representatives, but won only 67/148 seats (45.05%). The incumbent Liberal National Coalition government led by Prime Minister John Howard won 49.02% of the vote and 80 of 148 seats (54.05%). Compared to the previous election, there was a swing of 4.61% against the Coalition, who lost 14 seats. After Howard's victory, many Coalition seats were extremely marginal, having only been won by less than 1% (less than 1200 votes). This election result is generally not attributed to gerrymandering or malapportionment.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Sir Thomas Playford was Premier of the state of South Australia from 1938 to 1965 as a result of a system of malapportionment, which became known as the Playmander, despite it not strictly speaking involving a gerrymander.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In 2022, the nominally independent South Australian Electoral Districts Boundaries Commission has been accused of favouring the Australian Labor Party, as the party has been able to form government in four of the last seven elections, despite receiving a lower two-party preferred vote.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the state of Queensland, malapportionment combined with a gerrymander under Country Party Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at his own request) became nicknamed the Bjelkemander in the 1970s and 1980s.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The malapportionment had been originally designed to favour rural areas in the 1930s-1950s by a Labor government who drew their support from agricultural and mine workers in rural areas. This helped Labor to stay in government from 1932–1957. As demographics and political views shifted over time, this system came to favour the Country Party instead.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The Country Party led by Frank Nicklin came to power in 1957, deciding to keep the malapportionment that favoured them. In 1968, Joh Bjelke-Petersen became leader of the Country Party and Premier. In the 1970s, he further expanded the malapportionment and gerrymandering which then became known as the "Bjelkemander". Under the system, electoral boundaries were drawn so that rural electorates had as few as half as many voters as metropolitan ones and regions with high levels of support for the Labor Party were concentrated into fewer electorates, allowing Bjelke-Petersen's government to remain in power for despite attracting substantially less than 50% of the vote.


title: Gerrymandering

text: In the 1986 election, for example, the National Party received 39.64% of the first preference vote and won 49 seats (in the 89 seat Parliament) whilst the Labor Opposition received 41.35% but won only 30 seats. Bjelke-Petersen also used the system to disadvantage Liberal Party (traditionally allied with the Country Party) voters in urban areas, allowing Bjelke-Petersen's Country Party to rule alone, shunning the Liberals.


title: Gerrymandering

text: Bjelke-Petersen also used Queensland Police brutality to quell protests, and Queensland under his government was frequently described as a police state. In 1987 he was eventually forced to resign in disgrace after the Fitzgerald Inquiry revealed wide-ranging corruption in his cabinet and the Queensland Police, resulting in the prosecution and jailing of Country Party members. Before resigning, Bjelke-Petersen asked the Governor of Queensland to sack his own cabinet, in an unsuccessful attempt to cling to power. Labor won the next election, and have remained the dominant party in Queensland since then. The Country Party and Liberal Party eventually merged in Queensland to become the Liberal-National Party, while the Country Party in other states was renamed as the National Party.


title: Gerrymandering

text: The 1962 Bahamian general election was likely influenced by gerrymandering. The election was the first to allow universal suffrage. The Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) received 44% of the vote, while the United Bahamian Party (UBP) won only 36% of the vote. The other 20% was for third parties and independents. Despite receiving a majority of the votes, the PLP won only 8 of the 33 seats in the House of Assembly, while the UBP won 18 seats.