The Built Environment, Urban Context, and Political Behavior

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How do urban context and the built environment influence political attitudes and behaviors? Individuals’ context has been shown to shape their political attitudes and behaviors. Yet, less research has focused on the role of the urban built environment in shaping individuals’ contexts. Omnipresent, the built environment is an important component of where people live. The built environment influences whom and what people are exposed to daily, demanding a more explicit consideration of their political and social effects. This panel brings together a set of papers that theorize about the political and social effects of the built environment and urban context, focusing on how what and who people see each day influences their political perceptions and behavior.

The first two papers center on neighborhood and housing design, theorizing how housing and neighborhood design can influence the likelihood of contact between neighbors. In the first paper, Bollen and Nathan document how residential architecture influences voting behavior in urban Ghana by influencing residents' perception of social anonymity. LeVan’s paper complements this work by studying the effect of neighborhood design, specifically, whether designed for pedestrians or automobiles, on the likelihood of contact between neighbors and these communities’ civic life. These papers reveal how historic and modern-day design decisions can influence political behavior today.

While the first set of papers focuses on the impact of the urban built environment on the likelihood of contact between neighbors, the second set centers on the informational role of urban context and the built environment. Brown, Enos, and Park use Twitter data to emphasize the importance of the partisan composition of Americans’ neighborhood context and its relationship to how they discuss politics. Ben-Nun Bloom uses a unique field experiment to consider the effect of exposure to religious symbols and minority integration in Europe. Finally, Bollen and Sands consider how to best measure context outside of census demographics, proposing new models and measures that rely on subjective perceptions of street-level images from American cities.

Taken together, these papers consider the critical, yet understudied, relationship between the urban built environment, context, and political behavior. They examine this question across a variety of contexts - spanning the United States, Europe, and Africa. These papers use a variety of innovative methodologies, relying on observational, experimental, and survey analyses. Along the way, they propose new methods and measures meant to address questions related to the built environment’s effect as well as how we can best measure and model its effect. Although these papers vary in the contexts they study, the methods they use, and the outcomes they study, putting them into conversation helps us consider the interconnected role of the built environment and context, galvanizing further research on the subject.

Sub Unit

• Division 30: Urban Politics

Individual Presentations

• Architecture, Networks, and Collective Action in Urban Ghana’s Compound Houses - Paige Bollen, Ohio State University; Noah Nathan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Neighborhoods That Matter: How Places and People Affect Political Participation - Carrie Levan, Colby College

• Expressions of Minority Religion in the Urban Space and Immigrant Acculturation - Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

• Does Where You Live Influence How You Talk about Politics Online? - Ryan D. Enos, Harvard University; Jacob Brown, Harvard University; Sun Young Park, Harvard University

• Decoding the Political and Social Landscape of Perceived Neighborhood Context - Paige Bollen, Ohio State University; Melissa Sands, London School of Economics; Joe Higton, New York University

Chair

• Noah Nathan Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Discussant

• Elias Dinas European University Institute