Sorted Nation Podcast

I'm a huge fan of Planetizen and of Bill Bishop, author of the fabulous new book, The Big Sort.  Click here for a Planetizen podcast of Bill and I with Nate Berg.

Writing in the NYTimes Magazine, Bill Galston and Pietro Nivola reflect on the sort:

You are less likely to live near someone whose politics differ from your own. It’s well known that fewer states are competitive in presidential races than in decades past. We find similar results at the county level. In 1976, only 27 percent of voters lived in landslide counties where one candidate prevailed by 20 points or more. By 2004, 48 percent of voters lived in such counties.

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop, a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue, stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become supermajorities.  ... Polarization feeds on itself.

 

Comments

[Michael R. Bernstein]

So, if Whites and Blacks are sorting themselves into different cities, what are Hispanics (the fastest growing minority group) doing?

[Wendy]

I'm wondering whether people whose political views differ from the apparent mainstream in any neighbourhood simply keep quiet -- they don't discuss politics.

I've looked at detailed voting results for my area and have found that yes, the expected candidate won, but the plurality of opinion and votes was quite striking. My neighborhood (in Vancouver) is an NDP stronghold (NDP is like a Labour Party, left of the US Democratic party). And yet the centre / centre-right candidates will often combine for close to 50% of the vote suggesting far from uniformity in opinion.

[Matt]

Wendy, I wonder if this is simply a difference between the U.S. and Canada. Has there ever been an election in the U.S. like Canada's 1993 federal election? (In it, the governing Conservative party was reduced from 169 seats to just 2, with about half of Conservative candidates getting below the 15% threshold to get their deposit back from Elections Canada.)

Maybe it has to do with the two-party system. When there's a middle party, the "defections" into (or out of) that party tip the overall balance. But when your choice is binary (Democrat or Republican), it's easy to get polarized. Subtle differences of opinion might be there, but there are no political outlets for them.