Voter Registration

In contrast to presidential election returns that are highly dependent on the identities of the contending candidates and the conditions under which they occur, a more general and undoubtedly more stable measure of partisan preference is the standard attitudinal measure of party identification.Footnote ⁷ A Democratic gun lover might vote for Bush in 2000 without becoming a Republican. Similarly, a Republican wind-surfer might vote for Kerry in 2004 without becoming a Democrat. But even state-level measures of party identification did not become available until the 2000s, and reliable figures are not available for smaller units even now, so using party identification to study temporal changes in neighborhood homogeneity is impossible. A behavioral measure of party identification—voter registration—however, is available at the county level—the level from which Bishop's evidence comes. The drawback of voter registration is that not all states have partisan registration—29 states plus the District of Columbia have it today and somewhat fewer—23 had it in the mid-1970s.Footnote ⁸ Fortunately for our purposes scholars who have worked closely with such data have concluded after a number of validity tests that “The 21 states for which we were able to collect party registration data are surprisingly representative of the country as a whole” (McGhee and Krimm Reference McGhee and Krimm2009, 351).Footnote ⁹ That conclusion certainly holds for our purposes. The first column of table 1 reproduces Bishop's landslide county figures. Column 2 reports our replication from US Census Bureau data. Our figures are very close to his—within 1 percentage point in each year and the increase between 1976 and 2004 is actually slightly larger, so our conclusions do not depend on any differences in the raw data. Columns 3 and 4 compare landslide county percentages in states with and without party registration. The party registration states have a slightly lower figure in 1976 and a slightly higher figure in 2004, resulting in a greater increase using landslide voter population in the party registration states. Thus, if anything, the political trend identified by Bishop is even stronger in party registration states than in states without party registration.

Table 1

Presidential Landslide County Population: 1976 v. 2004 (Percentage of presidential voters living in counties where margin of victory was 60:40 or greater)

Source: Bishop, Reference Bishop and Cushing2008: 10.

Note: “Party Registration States” include the 21 states for which we have pre- and postsort registration data.

An examination of trends in voter registration in American counties leads to conclusions about geographic polarization quite different from those based on presidential election returns. First, as McGhee and Krimm, among others, note, in recent decades there has been a significant increase in the “independent,” “decline to state,” or “other” categories (henceforth referred to as “independents”).Footnote ¹⁰ As shown in figure 1, in 1976 more than 70% of the counties in partisan registration states had 10% or fewer independents. By 2004 the situation had reversed: more than 70% of the counties had 10% or more independent registrants. Across the 1,200 counties in these states, average independent registration increased from 12% to 18%, average Republican registration increased from 33% to 39%, and average Democratic registration fell from 55% to 42%. The proportion of counties where Republicans have a 20% or more registration edge (i.e., a “landslide” in Bishop's term) almost doubled, rising from 7% to nearly 13%, while the proportion of counties where Democrats have such a large margin halved, falling from 38% to 18% (no counties have a landslide independent registration edge). Thus, at the county level what has occurred is not counties increasingly polarizing into Democratic and Republican categories, but rather counties becoming less Democratic and more Republican and independent.Footnote ¹¹

Figure 1

Distribution of Independents by County: 1976 v. 2004 (1,198 counties in total for 21 states included in the sample)

Of course, because counties differ greatly in population, Bishop could still be correct. However, as the top panel of table 2 shows, the percentage of the population living in landslide counties has declined in tandem with the decline in the number of landslide counties.Footnote ¹² To repeat: if we define landslide counties according to their voter registration rather than their presidential vote, the proportion of the American population living in landslide counties has fallen significantly, from about 50% to 15%.Footnote ¹³ Only four of the 21 states under consideration fail to follow this pattern (Appendix table 2A). South Dakota shows a trivial (less than 1%) increase in the percentage of its population living in landslide counties. Kansas and Nebraska show small increases to absolute figures that are quite low (to 5.76% and 12.27%, respectively). Only Wyoming shows the kind of increased geographic polarization that Bishop claims to be the general pattern: from 21.74% in 1976 to 63.09% in 2008.

Table 2

Population Living in “Landslide” Counties Has Declined

Source: 21 states included in this sample. Census of Population and Housing, US Census Bureau. (http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/)

As Klinkner (Reference Klinkner2004b, 1) notes, the concept of a “landslide county” is vague—it is highly dependent on the definitional figure employed. In Bishop's defense one might object that the rise in independents makes it more difficult for either party to achieve the 20% margin that constitutes his definition of a landslide county. So, allowing for the increase in independents we have calculated two weaker measures of landslide counties: (1) one party enjoys a 20% or more registration margin (e.g., 45% Democrat, 35% Republican, 10% Independent), and weaker still, (2) one party simply has a majority of the registered voters (e.g., 50.1% Democrat, 41.9% Republican, 8% independent). Although these category definitions take us far from what most people would consider “landslides,” they are alternative measures of county political polarization. Whatever definition is used, the second and third panels of table 2 show that counties in the United States have become increasingly politically heterogeneous, not increasingly homogeneous. Using a 10% margin as the criterion for defining a landslide county, the percentage of the population living in such counties has declined from about 69% to 22%, with only Kansas and Wyoming constituting exceptions to the general downward trend (Appendix table 2b). Finally, the percentage of the population residing in counties where one party simply has an absolute majority—50% or more voter registration—has declined from 75% to 42%, with only Kansas, Massachusetts, South Dakota, and Wyoming as exceptions to the general trend (Appendix table 2c). In sum, two of three definitions find trace evidence of geographic sorting in Kansas and South Dakota, and Bishop's thesis looks great in Wyoming, but the large majority of states—and their populations—provide evidence to the contrary.

Neighborhoods as Centers of American Life

A decade ago Robert Putnam published his magisterial work Bowling Alone (Reference Putnam2000). Over much of the period addressed by Bishop, Putnam found that Americans had become much less socially engaged than in earlier decades. They were strikingly less likely to join traditional community-based organizations such as the Elks, Lions, Eagles, Kiwanis, Rotary, Masons, Grange, the PTA, the American Legion—and a long list of other groups that had bound together previous generations of Americans.

Some critics noted that Putnam had ignored a plethora of new groups that had formed since the mid-twentieth century, but Putnam responded that many of these were not groups in the sense he meant. The groups he studied were community-based. Their members met regularly face-to-face; they elected officers and engaged in activities. In contrast, many of the newer groups were simply professional staffs with letterhead and mailing lists.Footnote ¹⁵ Their “members” wrote checks; they were “supporters,” not members in the traditional sense. Their connections were based on responding to the same direct mail solicitations or visiting the same websites, not personal conversations at a weeknight meeting. After analyzing a wealth of data Putnam (Reference Putnam2000, 63) concluded that “… active involvement in clubs and other voluntary organizations has collapsed at an astonishing rate, more than halving most indexes of participation within barely a few decades.” The decline was general—civic, political, religious, and, importantly, “informal.” In the latter category Putnam included neighborhood connections: “… when compared with neighborliness in the mid-1950s, neighborhood ties in the 1990s are perhaps less than half as strong.” (Reference Putnam2000, 106). Putnam identifies suburbanization as one of the contributing factors to the decline of neighborliness.

A majority of the American population now is suburban, more than twice the figure in 1950. According to urban sociologists the transformation of the United States into a suburban nation “had significant consequences for every aspect of American life … [it] fostered new patterns of localism and isolation that have also revolutionized relationships between individual communities and the nation” (Kruse and Sugrue Reference Kruse and Sugrue2006, 1). Housing patterns functioned to isolate families and residents from the street, from other neighbors and from the community at large, and helped promote a culture of privitism (Bellah Reference Bellah1985, 142–63; Clapson Reference Clapson2003; Duncan Reference Duncan and Duncan1981; Duncan and Lambert Reference Duncan, Lambert, Agnew and Smith2002; Keller Reference Keller2003; Kunstler Reference Kunstler1994; Moughtin Reference Moughtin2003). Suburban homes came to serve as a “refuge, a place where people attempt to insulate themselves from the problems of ‘others’” (Gainsborough Reference Gainsborough2001, 13). In fact, these modern suburban developments were designed “for people to live independently, each in his own self-sufficient home, dependent only on cars and roadways to take him wherever he needed to go” (Lovenheim Reference Lovenheim2010, 70). According to urban historian Kenneth Jackson “… the new idea was no longer to be part of a close community, but to have a self-contained unit, a private wonderland walled off from the rest of the world” (Reference Jackson1985, 58). Rifkin (Reference Rifkin2004, 154) writes that because Americans like to keep their “… distance from … neighbors … there is little sense of community in the average American suburb.”

Far from interactive groups that discipline their members' thinking, observers and scholars alike have described contemporary Americans as “suspended in glorious, but terrifying, isolation” (Bellah Reference Bellah1985, 6) and fear that Americans “face social malnutrition” (78). Lane (Reference Lane2000, 9), for instance, found that, “there is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relationships, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solitary family life.” Beatley (Reference Beatley2004, 351) describes Americans as having a case of social numbness noting an “emergence of a socially detached, passive and disconnected citizenry.” Morris (Reference Morris2005, 2) describes American life as an “oppressively anonymous existence.” [See also McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears (Reference McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears2006, Reference McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brashears2008)].Footnote ¹⁶

Even discounting for hyperbole, the implication of this body of research is clear. Contemporary American neighborhoods are not the first places one would look for the operation of strong social pressures. Even if neighborhoods were becoming more homogeneous politically, any resulting tendency for neighborhoods to squelch dissent and enforce conformity would be at least partly offset by the fact that their denizens were less likely to be involved in neighborhood affairs, and consequently less likely to be sensitive to any purported neighborhood consensus. If a dissident regards her neighborhood as little more than a place to sleep, she can hardly be intimidated into adhering to the neighborhood consensus—if she knew there was one.Footnote ¹⁷

Do Residents of Neighborhoods Talk to Each Other?

There is direct evidence on this question. A 2005 Georgetown University survey (Howard, Gibson, and Stolle Reference Howard, Gibson and Stolle2005) asked the following question: “Now I want to ask you about people who are not necessarily your close friends. Let's start with your neighbors. How many adults in your neighborhood would you know by name if you met them on the street?” Table 3 reports the responses.

Table 3

How Many Neighbors Do You Know by Name?

Source: Howard, Gibson, and Stolle Reference Howard, Gibson and Stolle2005

Almost two-thirds (65%) of Americans reports that they could not name more than one out of four residents of their neighborhoods. Almost a majority (46%) report that they could not name more than one out of 10. Evidently American neighborhoods in the 2000s are not places where “everyone knows your name.” For most Americans a close connection to the neighborhood is something seen only in old movies. Today, women are in the labor force not conversing over the backyard fence. In many places the neighborhood school is a relic of the past. People today work long hours, maintain busy after-work schedules, and are more likely to spend leisure time in solitary pursuits than they are to talk to their neighbors on front porches—few of which exist in any case. The clear implication is that contemporary Americans are unlikely to know the political inclinations of their neighbors, let alone be cajoled and bullied into adopting them. Even if people can guess the political inclinations of their neighbors on the basis of lifestyle correlations (e.g., are there beer cans or chardonnay bottles in the curbside recycling bins?), they are unlikely to feel much social pressure from nameless faces who happen to live down the street.

When Neighborhood Residents Talk, Do They Talk Politcs?

The Georgetown University study (Howard, Gibson, and Stolle Reference Howard, Gibson and Stolle2005) also speaks directly to this question. The survey included a question “When you talk to your neighbors, how often do you discuss political issues?” Table 4 reports the responses. Evidently American neighborhoods are not hotbeds of political debate. An absolute majority of Americans replies “never,” apparently not only still adhering to the old admonition not to discuss politics or religion at the dinner table, but generalizing it to broader arenas. Another 30% say “rarely.” Fewer than two in 100 Americans say “usually.” If these two individuals can create and enforce conformity in their neighborhoods, they are persuasive indeed.

Table 4

When You Talk to Your Neighbors, How Often Do You Discuss Political Issues?

Source: Howard, Gibson, and Stolle Reference Howard, Gibson and Stolle2005.

Of course, as noted one does not need to talk to a neighbor to infer their political inclinations. If one's neighbor regularly shoots groundhogs in her vegetable garden, the chances are better than even that she is a Republican. Similarly, if your neighbor does yoga in his backyard, the chances are better than even that he is a Democrat. People can infer (albeit with considerable error—according to the exit polls more than 35% of gun owners voted for John Kerry in 2004) the partisanship of their neighbors without ever having a conversation about politics. Happily the Georgetown University survey also included an item that would tap such possibilities: “Of the people you interact with in your neighborhood, how many of them have different political views than yours?”

Although more than four out of five respondents have just said that they rarely or never discuss politics with their neighbors, three-quarters of them at least are willing to hazard a guess about their neighbors' views. Table 5 shows that the majority who do so believe that their political environment is not homogeneous; a majority of Americans believes that at least one out of four neighbors have different views and a quarter believes that half or more of their neighbors have political views different from the respondent.

Table 5

Of the People You Interact with in Your Neighborhood, How Many of Them … Have Different Political Views from Yours?

Source: Howard, Gibson and Stolle Reference Howard, Gibson and Stolle2005.

The fact that so many Americans perceive their neighborhoods as politically diverse may partly explain their reluctance to talk politics (table 4). Diana Mutz (Reference Mutz2006, 123) writes that “… people entrenched in politically heterogeneous social networks retreat from political activity mainly out of a desire to avoid putting their social relationships at risk.” Members of the political class may be willing to end friendships over political disagreement, but politics does not rank so highly for most people. Indeed, political affiliation appears to be a surprisingly unimportant part of most people's self-images. Table 6 reports the responses to a survey item on an older (1995) ISSP survey.Footnote ¹⁸ The item reads “We are all part of different groups. Some are more important to us than others when we think of ourselves. In general, which in the following list is most important to you in describing who you are? (and the second most important? and the third?).” As shown in the table, of 10 “groups” listed, political party came in dead last: only five respondents out of more than 1,200 thought of themselves first as partisans, and only 51 put party among their top three reference groups.

Table 6

Most Important Group Respondent Identifies With

In sum, neighborhoods are not important centers of contemporary American life. Americans today do not know their neighbors very well, do not talk to their neighbors very much, and talk to their neighbors about politics even less. And they do not see themselves as swimming in a sea of like-minded people who have intimidated or cast out anyone who believed otherwise; they are aware that their neighbors differ politically. Even if geographic political sorting were ongoing, its effects would be limited by the preceding facts about contemporary neighborhood life.