New research on political behavior finds that most Democratic and Republican voters live in partisan bubbles, with little daily exposure to those who belong to the other party.
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For instance the typical Democrat has "almost zero interactions" with Republicans in their neighborhood, according to an article by Harvard doctoral student Jacob R. Brown and government Professor Ryan D. Enos published March 8 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
Using geolocation data and the exact addresses of all 180 million registered voters in the U.S. as of June 2018, the two were able to precisely map, for the first time, where Democrats and Republicans live in relation to each other in every town, city, and state in the U.S. Then, rather than rely on the usual precinct or data aggregations, they used weighted measures and recorded the distance between voters to show how people are divided by geography and partisanship across the country.
No area of the country is immune to the segregation, but its intensity varies. Democrats in large, densely populated cities like New York are the most politically isolated, with 10 percent of them encountering a Republican only one out of 10 times in their neighborhood. Republicans in rural areas are similarly segregated.
Overall, most Democrats and Republicans live in levels of partisan segregation that exceed what scholars of racial segregation consider highly segregated, the study found.
Their analysis of U.S. Census tract data showed that 98 to 99 percent of Americans live in areas segregated by partisanship. Loving County, Texas, a county of about 200 people along the New Mexico border, is the only tract in the entire U.S. where Democrats and Republicans mix freely, the researchers found.
This social splitting is not the result of an urban/rural divide, where cities attract more Democrats, and Republicans typically favor the country life, Brown and Enos say. Whether in small to mid-size cities, the suburbs or ex-urbs in between, the data showed that Republicans stick close to other Republicans, and Democrats stick close to other Democrats.
"Even within a neighborhood, Democrats and Republicans are separating from each other a little bit," said Enos. That seems like "an almost unnatural level of segregation" given the similarities people from the same neighborhood usually share and "might indicate there's something pretty pernicious going on," he added.
Race and ethnicity are closely associated with partisanship and do affect where people live. The study shows, however, that partisan segregation is distinct from racial and ethnic segregation. White Democrats who do not identify as Hispanic had similar levels of exposure to members of the other political party as white Republicans, levels that were greater than Democrats from other racial and ethnic groups, who are the most isolated. Since non-Hispanic whites are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats, their lower rate of partisan segregation among whites, when race and ethnicity are taken into account, is "suggestive evidence" that white voters cluster with other whites regardless of party, according to the study.
"If white people were more willing to live near non-white people, partisan segregation would be even higher," said Enos. ■