Political Geography

We explore the foundations of the urban-rural political gulf, which is well-documented in the United States and other western democracies. We theorize that it is anchored in the variable extent of residents’ satisfaction and place attachment. Consistent with a long tradition of sociological findings, we first demonstrate that attachment to one’s neighborhood of residence is much higher among rural populations than in big cities. This variation in place attachment is an important font of political and policy attitudes, substantively contributing to the ideological differences between urban and rural areas. Politically relevant grievances arise most acutely when they are shared as prevailing conditions in specific social environments. The more dissatisfied one is with the place they live, the more attractive they find the policy goals and political agenda of liberal progressivism in US politics. Greater contentment with place, on the other hand, is predictive of politically conservative viewpoints.

Americans are anxious about crime regardless of their actual exposure or risk. Given this pervasive concern, US presidents frequently talk about crime, take actions to address it, and list crime prevention efforts among their top accomplishments. We argue that presidents act this way, in part, because fear of crime translates into lowered presidential approval. However, this penalty is not applied evenly. Given the parties’ stances toward crime and the criminal justice system, White Americans punish Democratic presidents (i.e., Clinton and Obama) more severely when they are anxious about crime, while Black Americans are more punitive toward Republican presidents (i.e., Bush and Trump). We examine twenty years of survey data and find evidence consistent with our theory. Our results suggest that the relationship between fear of crime and presidential accountability is conditioned by an individual’s race and the president’s party.

Politically relevant identities and opinions about politics and government are neither randomly nor evenly distributed across space. The task of social scientists studying electoral geography is to understand why. Explanations go to individual characteristics, the characteristics of the settings where they live out their lives, or interesting interactions of the two. Moreover, social influence apparently has a physical and geographic component in the sense that proximity matters. Although people can form more contacts over longer distances than in the past, that does not seem to have diminished the greater weight placed on contacts close-by, pointing to the sustained coincidence of social and geographic space. Size and density of settlement also matter over and above compositional effects, continuing to account for many negative social outcomes. The chapter closes with the consideration of challenges to social scientific inference posed by the effort to account for the experience of a living in a multi-level world.

We examine the notion of a “bellwether” location in the electoral political context. Bellwethers are thought to have predictive power because they supposedly signal how the entire electorate will move on election day. We consider how the number of bellwether counties—defined in several ways—has fluctuated since the 1930s. We also explore the extent to which bellwethers successfully predict future elections. With the proliferation of geographic polarization, few counties can successively and successfully pick the winner of presidential elections. Other bellwether measures fare slightly better or worse, but as Tufte and Sun (1975) found nearly half a century ago, bellwethers today continue to be poor predictors of future performance.

Across disciplines, scholars strive to better understand individuals’ milieus—the people, places, and institutions individuals encounter in their daily lives. In particular, political scientists argue that racial and ethnic context shapes attitudes about candidates, policies, and fellow citizens. Yet, the current standard of measuring milieus is to place survey respondents in a geographic container and then to ascribe all that container’s characteristics to the individual’s milieu. Using a new dataset of over 2.6 million GPS records from over 400 individuals, we compare conventional static measures of racial and ethnic context to dynamic, precise measures of milieus. We demonstrate how low-level static measures tend to overstate how extreme individuals’ racial and ethnic contexts are and offer suggestions for future researchers.

How does local unemployment influence presidential elections? Some argue that, for voters, the state of the local economy is an afterthought to that of the national economy. On the other hand, those who argue that local unemployment matters fall into two camps. Recent research finds that local unemployment is a reputation issue that benefits Democratic candidates because voters believe they are the party best equipped to deal with the issue. Alternatively, others have posited that the local economy provides voters with information for evaluating the governing party’s job performance. This view holds that the incumbent party, Democrat or Republican, will be punished when local unemployment is high. In this article, we investigate these distinct mechanisms jointly. In an individual-level mediation analysis of the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections, we present evidence that both mechanisms are at work. Rising local unemployment bolsters support for Democratic presidential candidates, but, through its influence on views of the national economy, drives down support for the incumbent, Democrat or Republican.

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.

We report on an evaluation of the pedagogical value of a research project involving 23 colleges and universities across the country. Faculty trained and supervised students who observed polling places in the 2016 General Election. Our findings indicate that this was a valuable learning experience in both the short and long terms. Students found their experiences to be valuable and reported learning generally and specifically related to course material. Postelection, they also felt more knowledgeable about election science topics, voting behavior, and research methods. Students reported interest in participating in similar research in the future, would recommend other students to do so, and expressed interest in more learning and research about the topics central to their experience. Our results suggest that participants appreciated the importance of elections and their study. Collectively, the participating students are engaged and efficacious—essential qualities of citizens in a democracy.

In this chapter, we give an overview of the ways that scholars and policymakers are currently using individual geolocation data. We also describe some new analytic and service-provision possibilities that geolocation data enables. We discuss several challenges inherent in obtaining geolocation data and making that data useful for social, political, and policy research and practice. We highlight the unique concerns over privacy that arise in this rich data environment, and note some promising approaches for addressing them.

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.

We examine county-level campaign appearances by the Republican and Democratic tickets during the 2008 general election. Our analysis reveals that the McCain-Palin ticket campaigned in a way that was quite different from the Obama-Biden ticket. McCain-Palin pursued a “base” strategy that was focused on counties where Bush-Cheney performed well in 2004. They also stayed away from counties that showed vote swings from 2000 to 2004 or population growth. On the other hand, the performance of the Kerry-Edwards ticket in 2004 was a very weak predictor of where Obama-Biden campaigned in 2008. They pursued a “peripheral” strategy that targeted counties that had experienced significant population growth. Their efforts to target peripheral, rather than base constituencies, have significant implications for our understanding of presidential campaign strategy.

We consider how the high volume of short-distance migration within metropolitan areas contributes to partisan sorting across the United States. Compared to long-distance moves, these local moves involve many more individuals each year and thus have substantial potential to shape political geography. At the same time, short-distance moves set a high bar for any assortative hypothesis because local movers face more limited destination options. If one cannot find a more politically compatible neighborhood nearby, it may be impossible to move to one. We draw on voter records comparing movers and nonmovers within 215 metro areas across nine states. Our results show surprisingly high levels of sorting even when moves occur within the same core-based statistical area and state. These patterns persist even after accounting for other destination characteristics known to influence relocation. Short-distance moves contribute modestly but meaningfully to the growing political lopsidedness of many legislative districts between censuses.