Crankyhawk
Brownlow Medallist
remembering that a major difficulty in the USA system is the non compulsory nature of their vote, as well as barriers to being allowed to vote, even before you get to the issue of gerrymandering
2020 United States redistricting cycle - Wikipedia
This appears to be a relatively balanced summary of the current state of play there in terms of how they draw up districts for representatives, you can see that 44 of these are in the control of the politicians themselves with only 6 states using independent commissions. Governors can also veto changes in many of the states.
And this article (from 2014)
Mapping the history of U.S. state politics
A new study conducted by MIT political scientists Christopher Warshaw and Devin Caughey shows for the first time the modern political trajectory of all 50 U.S. states, since 1936, by examining their laws in relation to nearly 150 policy issues.
"The paper, “The Dynamics of State Policy Liberalism, 1936-2014,” is being published in the forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
To conduct the study, Warshaw and Caughey — along with research assistants at MIT — examined 148 different state-level policy issues, evaluating each state’s position on them. To be sure, not all of those policy issues existed throughout the period studied; abortion rights, for instance, barely registered at the state level until the 1970s. Thus the political ideology that the scholars assigned to each state is derived from a set of issues — of which many, but not all, overlap at any given time.
Perhaps defying the basic intuition of some observers, Warshaw and Caughey found that state-level politics have been essentially “one-dimensional” from the 1930s onward — that is, if a state has conservative policies on economic issues, for instance, it will also have conservative policies on social issues."
