The Atlantic, November 26, 2018: The real culprit behind geographical polarization
Geographic polarization—where supporters of one or the other party cluster together in homogeneous enclaves, producing localities with lopsided distributions of political preferences—has been growing steadily in the United States since the 1970s. Political polarization manifests itself geographically in large part because partisan preferences are strongly correlated with population density.
What explains the rapid growth of geographic polarization in the United States? One popular theory is that Americans choose to live in neighborhoods where most residents share beliefs similar to their own. Residential mobility leads to echo-chamber neighborhoods where people can avoid interacting with anyone who disagrees with them on political issues.
In a variant of this theory, political sorting is an unintended consequence of sorting based on lifestyle attributes that, for whatever reason, correlate with political beliefs.
In fact, Americans move for a complex and varied set of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with political or politically adjacent tastes. Commentators concerned about the geographic divide in U.S. politics should stop blaming voters for sorting themselves on partisan lines, and instead encourage party elites to invest in expanding their parties’ appeal outside their respective geographic bases.
