Geographic-Political Polarization in the Electorate

We often hear commentators and pundits claim that American politics is more polarized than ever. It sure seems like it, but is it true? How polarized is American politics today?

I'm currently reading Ronald Brownstein's new book, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America, which provides considerable support for the thesis.

But check out William Galston and Pietro Nivola's piece over at the New York Times, "Vote Like Thy Neighbor," which includes this interesting passage discrediting some more recent claims of a shift to "post-partisanship":

The buzz these days is that American politics may be entering a “postpartisan” era, as a new generation finds the old ideological quarrels among baby boomers to be increasingly irrelevant. In reality, matters are not so simple. Far from being postpartisan, today’s young adults are significantly more likely to identify as Democrats than were their predecessors....

The great majority of voters now fuse their party identification, ideology and decisions in the voting booth. The share of Democrats who could be called conservative has shrunk, and so has the share of liberal Republicans. The American National Election Studies asks voters a series of issues-based questions and then arrays respondents along a 15-point scale from -7 (the most liberal) to +7 (the most conservative). These data indicate that 41 percent of the voters in 1984 were located at or near the midpoint of the ideological spectrum, compared with only 28 percent in 2004. Meanwhile, the percentage of voters clustering toward the left and right tails of the spectrum rose from 10 to 23 percent.

The authors then review some of the evidence on the "social geography of political polarization," which claims that people move to locations where they can be around people more like themselves ideologically. It's not so much "white flight" as a more natural, demographic-educational sorting around geographic regions:

...young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences.

Apparently this geographic-political sorting exacerbates political polarization.

This sounds plausble, although I'd like to see more evidence that people really move to different regions according to the causal relationship stressed here (i.e., desire to be near ideological brethren causes a shift in socio-demographic movement patterns).

A good place to start is with Bill Bishop's, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, which is cited by Galston and Nivola.

I'll have more later on this stuff later, but in the meanwhile, check out Greg Wythe's interesting observations, "The Not-So-Big Sort."