Why Cities Lose by Jonathan A. Rodden

Author:Jonathan A. Rodden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2019-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS are geographically segregated in a very specific way. Both groups are more likely to live among their own kind, but there is a fascinating asymmetry to their segregation. At each geographic scale relevant for drawing state and congressional legislative districts, Democrats are more likely to live in homogeneous Democratic neighborhoods, and Republicans are more likely to live in mixed neighborhoods. Recall that Democratic presidential votes are far more geographically concentrated than Republican votes at the level of counties. But we have also now learned that most of the relevant segregation and clustering occurs within rather than across counties. We can get a clearer sense of the relative concentration of Democrats by applying the “nearest neighbor” technique introduced in the previous chapter to a national precinct-level data set from the 2008 election.

Figure 6.1 communicates the extent to which Democrats are more geographically concentrated than Republicans in each state, focusing on the geographic scale of state senate districts.1 The horizontal axis captures the share of the average Republican’s nearest neighbors who are Democrats, where the “neighborhood” is the size of a state senate district in that particular state. The vertical axis captures the share of the average Democrat’s nearest neighbors who are Democrats. As we move to the right on the horizontal axis, and as we move up on the vertical axis, neighborhoods are becoming more Democratic overall, meaning that we are moving from the most Republican to the most Democratic states. The key insight of the graph is that every single state is above the 45-degree line. This indicates that no matter the level of statewide partisanship, Democrats live in more homogeneous partisan neighborhoods than Republicans.

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