America above Fahrenheit 451: Political Geography of Banned Books

• In Event: Federalism and Local Politics in the United States

Abstract

Polarization in the United States now manifests itself through a heated battle over competing ideas regarding which values and priorities should be taught to the next generation. Book banning has become a central feature of the American culture war, with conservative parents and politicians limiting students' access to stories by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. We describe the political geography of book bans by assembling the most comprehensive dataset of American school library catalogs. By combining 185 million unique book titles across every school library in five red states with detailed book descriptions scraped from one of the largest crowdsourced book review websites, we investigate where controversial books are held, how much the rates of censorship vary by topic, and whether they appear in competitive and conservative districts at similar rates. Conditional on holding these books, we then explore the political correlates of where book challenges occur and where they are successful.

Authors

• Jane Esberg, University of Pennsylvania

• Eunji Kim, Columbia University