Urban–rural differences in partisan political loyalty are as familiar in the United States as they are in other countries. In this paper, we examine Gallup survey data from the early-2000s through ...2018 to understand the urban–rural fissure that has been so noticeable in recent elections. We consider the potential mechanisms of an urban–rural political divide. We suggest that urban and rural dwellers oppose each other because they reside in far apart locations without much interaction and support different political parties because population size structures opinion quite differently in small towns compared with large cities. In particular, we consider the extent to which the compositional characteristics (i.e., race, income, education, etc.) of the individuals living in these locales drives the divide. We find that sizable urban–rural differences persist even after accounting for an array of individual-level characteristics that typically distinguish them.
In one of the earliest social scientific studies of voting behavior, Paul Lazarsfeld (1944) observed that the 1940 presidential election campaign was over for most people before it even started. ...Drawn from a study of voters over the course of the campaign in Erie County, Ohio, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues observed that voting decisions were largely based on social position, as indicated by religious affiliation, economic status, and place of residence (urban or rural) (1944, 318-319). Since membership in these social groupings rarely changed, and never very quickly, the statics of a political campaign were far more impressive than the dynamics. This analysis suggested that political allegiances are deeply habituated, if not permanent, and that only a few voters make up their mind during the course of the campaign. In the 1940 election, for instance, 80 percent of votes were decided by the time of the nominating conventions (Lazarsfeld, 1944, 327). In short, campaigns matter, but their impact is typically small. The editor of Public Opinion Quarterly wrote, in a brief lead-in to Lazarsfeld's paper, that these findings would be disconcerting to politicians raising and spending money as if every vote hung in the balance. Lazarsfeld concluded with a technologically dated but perfectly apt metaphor: "The campaign is like the chemical bath which develops a photograph. The chemical influence is necessary to bring out the picture, but only the picture pre-structured on the plate can come out" (Lazarsfeld, 1944, 330).
Patchwork nation Gimpel, James G; Schuknecht, Jason E
2003., 20091027, 2003, 2004., 20030101
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The unprecedented geographic and socioeconomic mobility of twentieth-century America was accompanied by a major reshuffling of political support in many parts of the country. Yet at the dawn of the ...new century these local and regional movements are still poorly understood. How can we account for persistent political regionalism and the sectional changes that have radically altered the nation's political landscape, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt? Patchwork Nation reveals answers to these vital questions. The masterful analysis in Patchwork Nation reminds us that the traditions and histories of individual states differ widely. Gimpel and Schuknecht's insightful examination of territorial cleavages thus provides us with a key to understanding the raw material that politicians use to fashion our party system. Their findings are an important reminder of geography's central role in our nation's political behavior. From the news analysts and pundits who use maps to identify electoral behavior patterns to the politicians and campaign strategists who study them to locate centers of support, experts of all stripes continue to recognize geography's importance to our political understanding. But in the wake of the survey research revolution of the late twentieth century, scholars often overlooked the relevance of geographic factors for the study of politics. Patchwork Nation retrieves this lost knowledge and extends it in important new directions, encouraging scholars to fundamentally reassess their thinking about the geographic basis of contemporary political behavior.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) came into being in response to the housing and debt crisis that accompanied the Great Recession. Created as a means for aggrieved consumers to bring ...problems to the attention of federal regulators empowered to fine banking and finance companies, the inflow of complaints began late in 2010 and has steadily risen in the years since. This research examines the variable emergence of complaints across 5 years, asking what types of constituencies are most likely to register grievances with the CFPB. The filing of complaints is mostly responsive to the presence of middle and upper income populations with mortgages, though contacts are also high from African American neighborhoods. Government contacting among lower income populations is facilitated by the presence of counseling and consultative services at the grassroots. Notably, legal aid services often present in lower and moderate income neighborhoods are associated with higher complaint frequency for several financial products. Through street-level consultative organizations, the gap in government service provision separating the affluent, who complain on their own, and less privileged, who do not know where to express their grievances, can be reduced.
Drawing on movement patterns of several million voters within a six state region across four biennial intervals, we evaluate whether migration patterns are consistent with the thesis that migrants ...are sensitive to the political balance of destination neighborhoods once we control for the important economic and demographic covariates of relocation. Substantial minorities of the movers we track appear drawn to neighborhoods that are more politically compatible with their party of registration than the ones they left behind. Notably, those who change their party registration upon relocating appear highly sensitive to differences in the political climate between origin and destination. But selective in-migration is not the only, or even the primary, force behind the development of politically one-sided opinion environments. We find evidence based on models for millions of non-movers that out-migration or abandonment is consistent with the entrenchment of single-party politics, just as economically robust areas attract a mix of partisans in search of employment and better housing. Evaluating who remains behind is as important as studying those who leave when we want to learn about the consequences of residential relocation.
We report the results of the first large-scale experiment involving paid political advertising. During the opening months of a 2006 gubernatorial campaign, approximately $2 million of television and ...radio advertising on behalf of the incumbent candidate was deployed experimentally. In each experimental media market, the launch date and volume of television advertising were randomly assigned. In order to gauge movement in public opinion, a tracking poll conducted brief telephone interviews with approximately 1,000 registered voters each day and a brief follow-up one month after the conclusion of the television campaign. Results indicate that televised ads have strong but short-lived effects on voting preferences. The ephemeral nature of these effects is more consistent with psychological models of priming than with models of on-line processing.
High rates of internal migration throughout the United States offer opportunities to examine the factors underlying residential selection and neighborhood choice. We devise a survey experiment where ...respondents are shown photographs of properties and information about the local socioeconomic environment. By providing and varying additional information about the neighborhood partisan composition, our survey experiment explores how political information affects property evaluation. We find that the same property will be evaluated more favorably by partisans when they learn that it is situated in a predominantly co-partisan neighborhood. A second experiment examines how people make judgments about neighborhood partisan composition in the absence of readily available information. We learn that correct inferences about the politics of a locale can be drawn from non-political information about it, even without exposure to direct information about its partisan balance.
Assessment of the nation's economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters' decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. ...One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren't making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.
Questions have been raised in recent years about the extent to which the nation is segregated by the political preferences of its electorate. Some have argued that internal migration selects either ...directly or indirectly on political criteria and thereby produces increasingly one-sided Republican and Democratic neighborhoods. We are among the first to empirically examine voter migration on a large scale. Relying on data for millions of partisan migrants across seven states, we show that partisans relocate based on destination characteristics such as racial composition, income, and population density but additionally prefer to relocate in areas populated with copartisans. This tendency is stronger among Republicans but is also true of Democratic registrants. Whether the role of partisanship is central or ancillary, if it is any part of the decision process it has the potential to make important imprints on the political landscape of the United States.
Natives who change residence do not settle in the same places as immigrants. Separate Destinations argues that these distinct mobility patterns, coupled with record levels of immigration from ...impoverished third world nations, are balkanizing the American electorate. James G. Gimpel examines the consequences of different patterns of movement and settlement on the politics of the communities in which these different groups settle. Newer immigrants are con-strained by a lack of education, money, English literacy, and information—and frequently by discrimination—to live in areas of coethnic settlement. Domestic, native-born migrants—predominantly Caucasian—free of discrimination and possessing more money and information, move where they wish, often to communities where immigrants are not welcome or cannot afford to live. Strong evidence suggests that spatially isolated immigrants are slower to naturalize and get involved in politics than domestic migrants. Gimpel looks closely at states with very different patterns of migration and immigration: California, Colorado, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York. In these states, Gimpel shows the impact of population mobility on party registration, party votes, and voter turnout and asks whether population changes have changed the dominant party in a state or produced a political reaction from natives. Separate Destinations contains a number of thematic maps detailing the settlement patterns of internal migrants and immigrants for both counties and census tracts. Blending insights from a number of social science disciplines, including economics, demography, sociology, political science, and anthropology, this book will be of interest to a wide and diverse readership of scholars, students, and policymakers.
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