The Growing Spatial Polarization of Presidential Voting in the United States, 1992–2012: Myth or Reality?

Abstract

There has been considerable debate regarding a hypothesis that the American electorate has become spatially more polarized over recent decades. Using a new method for measuring polarization, this paper evaluates that hypothesis regarding voting for the Democratic party's presidential candidates at six elections since 1992, at three separate spatial scales. The fi ndings are unambiguous: polarization has increased substantially across the country's nine census divisions, across the 49 states within those divisions, and across the 3,077 counties within the states-with the most signifi cant change at the fi nest of those three scales. W riting in 2005, Glaeser and Ward addressedwhat they termed five myths regarding American political geography, of which the second was "the two parties [Republican and Democrat] are more spatially polarized than in the past" (Glaeser and Ward 2005 , 5). They claimed that "the number of states that can be considered 'safe' for either party has not been rising over time" and, using the well-established dissimilarity index for measuring spatial segregation, demonstrated that "county-level evidence shows that segregation by party is not signifi cantly increasing"-although they did identify a "slight upward trend" over the four Three years later, in a much-discussed book ( The Big Sort ), Bishop and Cushing ( 2008 ) argued that electoral polarization had indeed been taking place over the preceding three decades, as a result of sorting processes consequent upon major volumes of inter-region, inter-state and inter-community migration. Abrams and Fiorina ( 2012 ) published a major critique of The Big Sort , challenging both the conclusion that polarization had occurred and the processes-selective migration-that Bishop and Cushing claimed were the cause of that geographical outcome. Looking only at the fi rst part of that challenge-whether or not spatial polarization had occurred-Abrams and Fiorina rightly criticized Bishop and Cushing for relying on two arbitrary end-dates (especially the fi rst) to establish a trend. They also questioned the use of the binary division of the country into "landslide" and "non-landslide" counties as the elements of the portrayal; other indices suggested to them that counties were becoming "increasingly politically heterogeneous, not increasingly homogeneous" (Abrams and Fiorina 2012 , 205

Migration and political polarization in the U.S.: An analysis of the county-level migration network

“…In a result that is closely related to our analysis, Charyyev and Gunes (2019) [14] find that county-level migration flows in the U.S. point more heavily to Republican and politically moderate counties. The literature also indicates that counties and other geographic areas are becoming more polarized along party voting lines—a dynamic that is related to county in- and out-migration rates [15, 16]. In summary, the existing research has demonstrated a general tendency for individuals to prefer living among co-partisans, and that local areas have grown more partisan in recent years.…”

Political geographers and geographical political scientists – Crisis, what crisis?

“…Morrill was engaged as a population geographer by a court to redraw the electoral district of Washington State in the 1970s(Morrill, 1973) and wrote further about the issue(Morrill, 1981) but not about challenging gerrymanders. 7 I should note that our work on multilevel modelling of the spatial polarization of the US electorate appeared too late for Hopkins to notice it(Johnston et al, 2016a(Johnston et al, , 2016bRohla et al, 2018).…”

Political Fit as a Component of Neighborhood Preference and Satisfaction

“…In recent years, the partisan and ideological divide between urban and rural areas has become increasingly visible (Brownstein 2016;Cramer 2016;Johnston et al 2016;Sussell 2013;Walsh 2012). Throughout the nation there are increasingly one-sided voting patterns at many locations, and a steady erosion in the number of voters living in politically competitive settings (Bishop 2009;Johnston et al 2016). Psychologists propose that the formation of geographic pockets of sociopolitical similarity are a response to the psychological need for belonging (Golman et al 2016;Sirgy et al 2005).…”