Local Governance and Partisan Sorting

• In Event: Local Ideology and Polarization: Partisanship in Urban Governance

Abstract

Is partisan residential sorting driven by local governance and the provision of public goods? The United States’ political geography gives rise to a patchwork of incorporated places (i.e. municipalities with local jurisdiction) and unincorporated regions; residential sorting into these places involves a tradeoff between taxation and local public goods consumption. This tradeoff is moderated by political ideology, leading to partisan sorting at municipal boundaries. Contributing to the literature on the urban-rural divide, I match precinct-level election results with city/town borders and find that in recent presidential elections, support for Democratic candidates is 2.7 percentage points lower in areas just outside city limits. This concentration of relatively Republican voters at the margin cannot be explained by precinct size or density, suggesting that the ‘partisan gradient’ that characterizes the U.S.’s urban-rural divide exhibits meaningful variation at the edges of incorporated space. I then use California voter registration data to map voters and their expressed partisanship to municipalities, school districts, and other special purpose districts in order to assess differences in partisanship at the edges of overlapping local governments.

Author

• Kyle Van Rensselaer, New York University