Here in the U.K., we have the Tory Shires, and the Labour Inner Cities. Is there something similar in America? Is it real or perceived? Is there a real correlation between population density and voting habits?
Well sort of.
Blue is Democrats.
Red is Republican.
It kinda looks like the Democrats have the more dense urban states in the north east. While the GOP carry the rural states.
I believe I remember hearing, around 2004, that there is almost a perfect correlation between population density and voting habits in the U.S., but I’m not getting much from Google.
On the wiki linked to above, if you scroll down to the “purple state” section & look at the map in the right sidebar, you’ll see a more subtle color coding.
Clicking the map brings up a bigger version where it’s real obvious that in general, cities vote democatic, rural areas vote republican, and suburbs vary.
The map below on the left is particularly interesting, provided you have a decent grasp of US geography. The author distorted the geography to correctly indicate actual population. The Republicans much enjoyed that map from either 2000 or 2004 which showed the vast majority of the US land area as red. The fact it still represented less than 50% of the population didn’t seem very important to them. This map corrects for that.
Now getting back to the OP …
If voting Left is correlated to city living, that doesn’t explain how city living causes Left voting.
In 2004, the most urban areas were strongly blue, the most rural areas were strongly red, and everywhere else was pretty much tied.
There’s an interesting page here that contains the cartogram LSLGuy mentioned, as well as an explanation of why it’s useful.
Cities in the U.S. are overwhelmingly home to the poor and to minorities, with a thin sprinkling of the extremely rich on top. New York City is seeing average home prices over a million dollars. This drives the middle class out of cities, a trend that has been constant since the 1950s.
The poor and minorities vote Democratic for obvious reasons.
There is a smaller but not insignificant effect in that cities tend to be more diverse, culturally open, and tolerant. These are all liberal values and attract liberal voters, who correspondingly give cities a more liberal atmosphere, creating a cycle. This is acknowledged as part of the “culture war” that was created by conservatives asserting dominance during the Reagan era. (The phrase was popularized in a 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America, James Davison Hunter. It does not have any relationship to the counter-culture of the 1960s.]
Cities were a deliberate target of the Reagan administration, which cut funding to cities by enormous percentages.
Cities had this liberal bent before the 1950s, to be sure, but their voting character depended more heavily on which party’s political machine controlled any individual location. Suburbs garnered the huge middle class populations that
left the cities and they at first were anti-cities, homogeneous and deliberately restricted so that blacks (and sometimes Jews) could not buy properties there. While the decision to move to the suburbs had a sound rational basis - better homes, better schools, nicer environments - there was also a large anti-minority reaction that existed at their core, exacerbated by the contentiousness of the Civil Rights movement. Suburbs turned quickly and heavily Republican and a city-suburb animosity developed in most metropolitan areas.
This is slowly diminishing today. Karl Rove once stated his plans for a “permanent Republican majority.” This was foreseen by then Republican commentator Kevin Phillips in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. Although the Southern strategy of turning the once solidly-Democratic southern states Republican because of the Civil Rights Act (which Lyndon Johnson underestimated as losing the Democrats the South for 25 years) was a big piece of that, the suburbs were seen as another enormous voting bloc theirs for the picking. It has taken 40 years for the suburbs to become places in their own right rather than reactionary enclaves opposed to the cities left behind, but it is happening.
And that’s the correlation between density and voting. The most conservative areas of the country are still in the smaller and most homogeneous sections. Suburbs are denser but are now more evenly split because they are no longer as homogeneous as they once were. And the densest areas, cities, are the most liberal. Density is not the causal factor, however. It is the result of other factors. Diversity, it turns out, creates initial antagonisms but can in certain circumstances lead to a more satisfying mixture of culture that many find appealing.
More than that, it doesn’t *mean *that city living causes Left voting. This is what we mean when we say that correlation does not equal causation. It could be that being a Democrat means you’re more likely to move where people think like you, and that, right now, means living in an urban area. I know I’m not crazy at the idea of moving to a red state. It may be that people interested in current Republican values like lower tax rates, gun ownership and less perceived government interference in daily life gravitate to more rural areas, where they literally have more space to do their own thing.
Of course, it could also be that living in a city puts you knees to nuts with a lot more people, and you develop an idea that increased government social programs in these people’s lives would help them and you (by decreasing the visibility or the actuality of their problems) a lot. When your nearest neighbors are a 15 minute hike away, you might miss their difficulties, or your community efforts might be enough to deal with problems on a more informal or private level. When you’ve got 3 *million *neighbors and most of them need some sort of help, you feel like there’s more help needed than the private sector can handle.
Here’s my own guess at some of the reasons.
I think people in rural areas tend to be more independent. In a way they have to be: there are fewer people around and one has to fend for themselves. With less contact with other people they have less reason to legislate other people’s lives.
In cities there is a lot more contact between people, which means one person’s actions is more likely to affect someone else. This leads to more legislation in an attempt to smooth out some of the frictions.
A trivial example is noise ordinances. People living in rural areas don’t need–or want–someone telling them how loud they can play their stereo. Such ordinances are commonplace in cities.
A more controversial example is guns. In rural areas where it could take a cop an hour to arrive at one’s house it makes a lot of sense to be armed. An armed person in rural areas meets fewer people which leads to fewer violent encounters. In cities, however, a person with a gun can create a lot of havoc. Lots of armed citizens exponentially increases the number of encounters of people with guns.
I think if the question is rephrased from Republicans and Democrats to generally conservative and liberal/democrat labels, then this is (broadly speaking) true for other countries, too. In both big, former agrarian Southern states (Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg) the consies (CSU/CDU) have a solid hold (“black”), while the city-states like the Ruhr region in North-Rhine-Westfalia, are solidly “red” (social democratic). (In Bavaria, the 1 million-city of Munich is red-green = social liberal and green; in North-Rhine-Westfalia, the more rural areas like Muensterland are conservative again).
Now, while correlation isn’t always causation, some general principles seem to hold true (which sound like stereotypes because of simplification - you can certainly find opposite examples*, but while they are not true 100%, they will be true for 70% or similar):
- Rural people have less education and access to different opinions, even today. It’s not only that it’s not available, is that the desire to activly seek out. In many villages, there’s only one newspaper, one radio station. (My fiance’s cousin lives in the countryside, and the only newspaper for their region is the big paper Passauer Neue Presse - right-leaning - with local supplements).
Note: I’m not calling rural people/farmers dumb. But there are too many anecdotes to not believe that the social pressure combined with difficult access restrict critical thinking, and therefore tend towards conservative thinking. - Big cities are more liberal. Not only is it easier to have access to different opinons, from different newspapers, radio stations and TV stations, there are also different people. How many homosexuals or foreigners or other “different people” are you likely to meet at school or work in the country, and how many in a city? Plus, there’s less gossip and social pressure than in a village.
If you’re the only person in your village to read the left-leaning Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper instead of the right-wing paper, everybody will know it and talk about it. In the city apartment block, nobody cares what life you live, or what paper you read.
In the village, if you don’t go to church on Sunday because you aren’t a believing catholic, people will talk about it. In the city, you can go to a protestant church or a mosk or stay at home. - Tradition also plays a part (and works both ways - the blacks are entrechend for 3 generations in the south, with the accompanying corruption and delusions of no-accountability, similar to how many people automatically vote red in the Northwest since generations.
- One of the famous Bavarian green politicans is a farmer (although only 5-10 % of Bavarians are still farmers today, they are a cultural image) who went organic several years ago and then joined the Greens. When he wears Lederhosen, it’s not only show, but real tradition.
With the advent of the Internet, and the ease of accessing information is that changing?
Also, I wonder if there’s a time issue? People commuting from villages to the cities have that much less time available to them, and farming is hard work.
I assure you that big cities are chock-full of populations that may have access to information but never find it. The ability to run into other opinions and types cuts both ways: it can also increase insularity and prejudice.
The time issue is not a major one today either. Suburban commuters may well have less leisure time than farmers, who are a vanishingly small percentage of the population in the first place.
Do they? There are plenty of rural poor, aren’t there? Yet those areas in America are predominantly Republican, aren’t they?
To throw another example in the mix which supports the OP, the New Zealand election of 2005 showed an obvious split between low density rural areas (conservative, National Party) and high density urban areas (Labour Party).
I suspect the real causal links to conservative voting patterns are homeownership and having kids. Single people living in apartments can go on about how graffiti is a valid form of artistic expression, higher property taxes mean better services, diversity means more interesting restaurants, etc, because if things get too chaotic, they can just pick up and leave with little fuss. But when you have your life savings invested in a piece of property, and the value of that property goes down by $10,000 for every gang sign within a 1-mile radius, you tend to take a pretty hard line against crime. It’s true that the owner of an apartment building would have the same concern, but he only gets one vote, against a vote by each of his tenants. The proportion of voters who own houses and have kids are both higher in the suburbs and rural areas, so they tend to vote more conservatively.
As I mentioned earlier, the Democrats have a long history, dating back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, of supporting and funding cities, while the Republicans have been largely hostile to cities and have cut the very funding that most helps poor city dwellers.
Republicans are obviously not non-existent in cities, but they are a distinct minority, even among the poor.
Speaking only for myself, when I first moved to a big city (Denver, then San Diego), I found I was exposed to fresh issues no one seemed to talk about in the smaller cities and towns. And those issues and the people who were concerned about them generally favored liberal and Democratic solutions.
After the 2004 election, I bought a tremendously informative book called “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America” that is chock full of political and demographic maps from the 2004 election. The authors chose “retro” instead of “rural” because that fits the nature of the divide much more cleanly and effectively than does the term “rural”, in large part due to murky geography but also because the “red” areas are highly opposed to modernization and reform in most social, religious, and political domains. This is a capsulized description from the book:
Retro American commonalities are religiosity, social conservatism, an economic base of extraction industries [with a corresponding contempt for environmentalism and science], agriculture, non-durable goods, manufacturing, military installations, and an [uncritical] commitment to the Republican Party.
Pollsters these days (perhaps starting only with this election cycle) refer to a demographic called “Low-Information Voters”. By far the largest component of this segment of the electorate consists of Retros/Republicans.
Here are some facts that appear to possibly contradict a few of some other posters’ claims.
First, the breakdown of the best schools strongly favor Metros rather than Retros. Of the top 100 high schools in the U.S., 85 are Metro schools and only 15 are Retro. Of the top 800 high schools, 623 are Metro schools.
There were twice as many Retro states without a ranked college/university than for Metro states.
Nobel Laureates are split 245 Metro and only 23 Retro.
That all corresponds perfectly with my experience working and living in Retro areas: respect for educational and intellectual endeavors are overwhelmingly limited to Metro areas. Retros typically have a strong dislike and distrust of intellectual matters, as demonstrated by their affinity to call anyone who knows much of anything an “elite” and also the overwhelming Retro showing in the “Low-Information Voter” demographic.
I find I can’t agree, Hyperelastic, that the link has anything much to do with home ownership and children. See my earlier post for why…
How many people (conservatives/Republican) do you know who only watch Fox news/CNN? Who only listen to talk show radio and believe it? How many rural people have internet access cheap? In the city, if you can’t afford a computer or internet, or are flustered by all that new-fangled technology, you can go into an internet-cafe and surf there, and the local libraries offer courses on how to use computers and internet. But out in the countryside, it’s more difficult and time-consuming. So if they think they already have sufficient “information” from Fox news, they don’t bother with other sources.
I know (anecdotally, yes) some of my fiance’s cousins who live in the countryside. The only local newspaper they can get is an offshot of the Passauer Neue Presse which is far right-wing conservative. So, in case they didn’t want to subscribe to normal newspapers additionally like Frankfurter Rundschau, Sueddeutsche Zeitung or taz, I gave them the homepage adresses of all major important newspapers and magazines (Zeit, Spiegel, telepolis). Did they read any articles there (for free) even once? Nope.
None on both counts.
Internet is dead cheap here. And we have pubs to chat.
Here in the U.K., the man newspapers - Telegraph, Times, Independent, Guardian, are all available nationally.
I didn’t find your earlier post very convincing.
Of course it’s true that a majority of the truly elite high schools are in metro areas. But virtually every big city school distinct, especially the ones in old industrial northeast, is in desperate failing condition outside of those few elite schools. That’s blamed in almost every case on the flight of the middle class, leaving behind families that are in disarray, poor, possibly illiterate or newly-arrived, and unable to cope with demanding better schools for their children. (Those better off tend to send their children to private or parochial schools, avoiding the issue.)
Bad school systems are the overwhelming reason why it is hard to recruit families with children to center cities.
Your numbers also conflate suburban with center city school districts. If you check lists of the best high schools, you’ll find that a majority of them are in suburbs not center cities. Metro in the book you cite is defined - idiosyncratically and opposite to all other uses of the term - as the blue states of the recent elections. But this thread is specifically about the divide between city and suburbs, even in those blue states, which as the voting maps show are as deeply cut between red and blue as the national state by state picture is.
None of this specifically addresses whether homeowners, whose percentages are indeed higher in suburbia, are more inherently conservative than renters. I think it’s a secondary effect, myself, a result of the larger reasons why people moved to suburbs in the first place. There are certainly large apartment complexes in the majority of suburbs so a comparison of voter data between homeowners and renters in specific areas is possible. I don’t know offhand of any studies on this, but it would be an interesting question to research.