I think this may be better as a debate topic, although I’d like to think there’s some facts that would help answer the question, hence I post it here. It seems as if there’s a fairly strong positive correlation between population density and liberal voting, i.e. - in higher population density areas, people tend to vote Democratic, and in lower density areas, Republican. I’m presuming that there’s a cause/effect relationship there, but if there is, in what direction does it mainly go?
Without question urban areas tend to be more liberal than rural areas. Just look at an election map of the US and the vast majority is red with the blue strongholds being large cities.
The reasons for this are debatable however and probably better suited for GD than GQ in my opinion.
There are at least 4 reasons for this, maybe more.
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High density urban areas tend to be full of ‘out-groups’. Non-whites, immigrants, non-christians, LGBT, etc. Out groups are treated poorly by republicans and as a result they tend to identify with the democrats. Rural areas tend to be full of in-groups. Whites, native born, christians, heterosexuals, etc.
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People who score high on the personality trait ‘openness to experience’ tend to prefer to live in large cities. Large cities offer more novelty and diversity, which is appealing to people with this personality trait. Openness to experience is also correlated with political liberalism
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High density urban areas are more attractive to the highly educated. Among white people at least, being highly educated makes you more democratic (or less republican). Trump won the high school educated whites by about 37 points. He won college educated whites by 3 points.
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Exposure to diversity reduces authoritarianism and fear of diversity. Large cities have more diversity, which I would assume reduce authoritarian personality traits. Authoritarianism is connected to being a republican. The more exposed to multiculturalism you have, in many instances the less threatening you find it.
Steve Sailer argues that “Affordable Family Formation” explains why some regions of the country vote Republican:
http://www.vdare.com/posts/affordable-family-formation-the-neglected-key-to-gops-future
My own opinion is that people who live in more densely populated situations are aware that libertarian philosophy doesn’t really work in cities. Everything you do has an affect on someone else, and vice-versa.
People who live in more rural situations, can fool themselves into thinking that they don’t need to consider their neighbors.
There is also probably a self-selecting aspect to it also.
Start with that, then consider: if you are a misfit, you probably would like to finally be among your own kind and cease to be the only person you know (or one of the few) in some smalltown or rural American setting. So you go somewhere where there are so freaking many people that even if you’re not merely an exception to the rule but an exception to the exception (etc) you can find others like yourself, maybe even an entire part of town.
And if you are a misfit, you would probably prefer a more formal social contract with the others of your species, rather than having to deal with the weird amalgamation of formal and informal laws and expectations that govern general society. In a formal structure, you can argue for and perhaps obtain recognition in the name of fairness of your right to be different without being subjected to unnecessary judgmental mistreatments. Informal social rules such as expectations and scripted behaviors and learned patterns of interaction etc don’t come with any kind of forum in which to ever discuss the rightness of treatment or to petition that they be changed.
Smalltown and rural America is at least superficially homogenous and it runs on patterns of informal rules that assume homogeneity, a fixed number of social roles and ways of being in the world. That works for people who aren’t exceptional. Such people often find formal social contracts intrusive, controlling, authoritarian; they don’t experience the informal-rules structure as if it existed as rules at all, so they think the way they life, the way they prefer to live, is a world nearly empty of rules, or else they think of those rules as the Natural Way, rules that humans didn’t make but which were instead just magically always already there.
I agree with all of these. I think Tatterdemalion hits on the fifth reason. Folks living in rural areas don’t really need a lot of government. A number of things work fairly well at low densities, such as minimal infrastructure, policing, education. As societies get larger and more complex, you really need governments to step in to provide these things. Urban-dwellers are exposed to these needs on a daily basis, and tend to reflexively oppose the party that wants to reduce government. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve gone for a run in a city park, taken public transportation, used public water and sewer, ducked into a public library to kill a few minutes and use the bathroom, and was exposed to countless homeless folks, wishing we could have more services to help them. A guy living twenty minutes outside the tri-cities in central Washington is unlikely to have had any of these experiences in the past 24 hours, and probably values them less.
Fun and insightful Cracked article on the subject.
In addition to what has been stated, I think the more homogeneous the area, the more conservative the population. Less densely populated areas tend to be more homogeneous, and also less tolerant to things they think are out of the norm. Higher-density areas tend to have more different kinds of people living in close quarters, so they are forced to accept one another’s diversity and get along.
There is also some conjecture that people with passports are more liberal-minded as well, which jibes with what has been said here.
Cities provide better access to “socialized” services and have high enough populations to support a variety of options.
When my parents moved from Philly to the 'burbs in 1955, they continued to vote and be Democrats. But it is known that a great many people who made similar moves did switch parties; at least that is what I have read. Why? Well, the obvious conjecture is that they are social chameleons; they take on the coloration of their neighbors, over the back conversations and the like.
Like most questions like this, the answer is both, for reasons stated above.
I just wanted to add more explicitly why outgroups would congregate in a city: because more people in one place means there will be more people who are in the outgroup, allowing the outgroup to form its own community. Then other people from that outgroup go to that community, making it even bigger, which then brings more people from the outgroup.
I’m not even against more rural groups having less government intrusion, as long as they keep a bare minimum when it comes to fighting bigotry. I just hate that they influence city life. For instance, guns are fine in the country–maybe even helpful when you need to defend yourself before the police arrive. But they are a problem in cities. So treating the two differently would go a long way in helping with the problem.
I can’t say that’s not an influence, but I’d argue that some of it is how less important the liberal stuff seems in your everyday life. People who can live in suburbia tend to be better off. If you moved out of the city, then you likely did not need the services the city provides. And you’re not in a truly rural area where there are usually a ton of working poor people.
You’re also likely more predisposed to the rugged individual concept, and often retreating from the overstimulation of the city environment, which correlates with some of what was said earlier. You’re already selecting the people more likely to sympathize with conservative ideas anyways.
One of the most ignored rules of statistics: correlation is not causation.
Topic: do high density areas CAUSE people to vote democratic?
post: there’s a strong CORRELATION.
To explain the logical error simply: it’s equally likely that people with democratic leaning prefer high density areas. If that’s not clear enough, there’s always the tired old ‘everybody who ate carrots in 1872 is now dead’ (replace “ate carrots” with any other common activity and it’s still true).
But they’re not fooling themselves; it’s pretty much true, IMO. I have lived in a very rural area on 15 acres for almost 20 years, and I have very little interaction with my neighbors.
People that live in rural areas tend to be self-sufficient. Self-sufficient people have a skeptical view of government and the “services” it provides. Suffice to say, many people who live in rural areas are conservative or libertarian for this reason.
I could be wrong, but I believe farmers tend to vote republican. Areas with lots of farms will have very low population.
Also, college towns can skew this. I recall hearing that the areas around UW-Milwaukee were heavily republican. The reason being that even though there’s so many college students there, they’re mostly renting. Also, they tend to be renting from career landlords (ie business owners) or renting in higher class neighborhoods than they’d be living in if they owned a house. IOW the students may be blue, but the homeowners and landlords are red.
Very good point, and I’d like to emphasise this further … rural areas often have worse large-scale public services (like, for instance, hospitals and high schools) - the excellent world-class ones are generally found in the middle of the city. So city-dwellers get more access to the benefits of government services that way too - the best examples of the service are likely to be where they live
I’ve heard the opposite, more homogeneous areas tend to become more liberal. At least regarding things like social welfare and redistribution. They are probably more conservative on social issues, I’d assume. But even then, places like Sweden tend to be more socially liberal too (that could be changing with an influx of immigrants from the middle east & africa).
In homogeneous societies, people don’t worry that ‘the others’ will benefit from welfare, redistribution, unions, etc. whereas in cultures with a lot of racial, religious, ethnic and cultural tensions there is a fear of creating a social safety net for fear that the others will benefit.
Vermont is very homogeneous, and it is the most liberal state in the union. So homogeneity plays a role, but there are other factors too.
An interesting little consequence of this: The more Republicans live in a county (or other geographic region of roughly fixed size), the more strongly that county votes for the Democrats. The most liberal county in Ohio had ten times as many Trump voters as the most conservative county.
There are a few truly self-sufficient folks out there, and most of them are rural. But most rural folks are just as dependent on others as the city folk are. Look around your house: How many of the things in it did you make yourself? How many of them could you even make yourself?
I’m not sure I agree with that. My parents live on 17 acres in rural North Carolina, just outside the triangle, so I am familiar with the mindset.
However, my parents lives would be a whole lot better, it the people, and companies, who live upstream from them would quit dumping crap in the water supply. It takes something like the EPA to deal with that. Then you get the “Live free or die” types saying no one can tell them not to go dumping their garbage wherever they want to.
There’s a lot of people in West Virginia, or the Mississippi Delta who live in rural circumstances, and have no recourse against the more powerful corporate interests who live upstream and up wind. That’s what you need government and all those regulations and things that the Republicans are trying to get rid of.
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