Battle lines will be drawn in a political forum running up to the 2016 caucuses.

The University of Iowa Public Policy Center will host a political symposium today titled “Political Discourse: The Impact of Redistricting, Campaign Finance, and the Media” in the Old Capitol Senate Chamber.

The conference will examine three pressing problems of politics: redistricting, campaign-finance laws, and how the media report on politics.

Tracy Osborn, the director of the Politics and Policy Group at the UI, said the event is about important issues in the current election and will discuss topics that many people feel deserve reforms.

The symposium is part of the Forkenback Series of forums for dialogues about policy areas from a variety of perspectives.

“This particular one [symposium] is aimed at the upcoming caucus.” Osborn said. “Generating some discussions about these key issues.”

One issue to be discussed about campaign financial laws is money spent by independent groups during election campaigns, she said.

“The second issue is redistricting,” Osborn said. “We are going to talk about the controversies in that [redistricting] and an alternative to how they could be drawn.”

Redistricting is the process of drawing U.S. congressional districts.

The last issue that will be discussed at the symposium is how new media cover elections and their effects on election communication, Osborn said.

Bob Biersack, a senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics and a panelist in the forum, said he would talk about the importance and changes of disclosing information about campaign finance.

“The reason why I think it is important is because that system has changed in recent years,” he said. “It’s become more open, and it’s possible to spend unlimited amounts of money pretty much from unrestricted sources in many ways in federal elections.

Kelly Dittmar, assistant professor in political science at Rutgers University-Camden and an expert on the media panel, said she would be focusing on gender dynamics and the media in political campaigns.

“I’m going to focus on gender bias in media coverage and then also how those dynamics may be changing with a new atmosphere,” she said. “Things like social media and a 24-hour news cycle, and how does that change, and how campaign or even just all of us respond to it.”

Osborn said the UI Public Policy Center’s goal is to create a nonpartisan discourse on politics and to have experts lay out problems and solutions to the issues as a means to open up political talks in a more positive context.

She said she believes people will get a lot of information and hear a lot of different perspectives from the forum, rather than just having people argue about politics.