Just after posting the item below, I started surfing my favorite blogs and started, as I often do, with Josh Marshall’s “Talking Point Memo.” And low and behold, he had an item that linked to this article that suggests the reason for our increasing partisanship is that we are segregating ourselves into politically like-minded communities.
Political and racial segregation are moving in opposite directions. John Logan at the Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research calculated the change in segregation between blacks and whites from 1980 to 2000 in the nation’s more than 3,100 counties. Even though the country remains deeply divided by race, U.S. counties on average became more integrated racially over those 20 years.
Politically, however, the nation rapidly divided. Using the same demographic calculation that measures geographic racial disparity, and substituting Republican and Democrat for black and white, political segregation in U.S. counties grew by 47 percent from 1976 to 2000.
The result is that voters on average are less likely today to live in a community that has an even mix of Republican and Democratic voters than at any time since World War II. They are less likely to live near someone with a different political point of view and are more likely to live in a political atmosphere either overwhelmingly Republican or Democratic.
“I don’t think we are at a really dangerous stage,” said Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at the University of Chicago and an author of books exploring issues facing democracy, “but if it’s a case that people really are pretty rigidly Republican or Democratic and that’s widespread, that’s not healthy. Our democracy is supposed to be one where people learn from one another and listen.”
Sunstein’s concern is rooted in more than 300 social science experiments over the past 40 years that have found a striking phenomenon that occurs when like-minded people cluster: They tend to become more extreme in their thinking. They polarize.
This research would predict that the increasing physical segregation of voters in the United States would result in a more polarized and partisan political culture. And that is exactly what is happening.
I’d need a lot more information before I buy this hypothesis. After all, even in a county that is 70-30, your immediate neighbors, those who you might socialize with the most, could be of either party. But the article makes for good reading. And a note at the end indicates the American-Statesman will have other articles about our polarized politics.