Abstract
In this chapter we examine the arguments in Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart from the perspective of a stronger synthesis between demographers and political scientists. We argue that such a synthesis can provide considerable insights into the question of the geographic sorting of partisans. After examining critiques leveled by political scientists against the analyses in The Big Sort, we examine the quite limited consideration of migration studies in Bishop’s book. Here, we identify four central limitations in the book that are produced by this inattention to migration studies. We conclude by examining the opportunity that The Big Sort and its arguments provide for the movement away from research silos and toward greater interdisciplinary research on migration-induced political polarization. Ironically, if Bishop is correct that “the clustering of like-minded Americans is tearing us apart,” the clustering of like-minded scholars – demographers and political scientists engaging in a closer, more fruitful dialogue – may provide us with insights that can help remedy any negative effects of geographic polarization.
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- 1.
Lesthaeghe’s Second Demographic Transition thesis provides an existing, critically important linkage between these two disciplines. Lesthaeghe (2010, 1–211) argues that in contrast to the First Demographic Transition (FDT) that occurred in Western countries beginning in the eighteenth century, the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) that began in the 1950s brought “sustained sub-replacement fertility, a multitude of living arrangements other than marriage, the disconnection between marriage and procreation, and no stationary population”. Lesthaeghe and Neidert (2006, 2009) find a strong relationship between the SDT and the spatial patterns in voting that are the focus of Bishop’s work, and particularly find that blue states and counties are more likely to exhibit features of the SDT than are red states and counties.
- 2.
- 3.
Of course, it is impossible to determine and measure every demographic characteristic that contributes to political opinion. The compositional approach only suggests that these sort of variables, if they all could be measured, could perfectly explain change in public opinion (without relying on “socialization” or “contextual” effects).
- 4.
Examples of this argument date back to Campbell et al’s The American Voter (1960).
- 5.
In addition to being a spurious driver of migration, “post-materialist” lifestyle positioning has also been called into question as a driver of local economic development. For a particularly strong critique of the “creative class” thesis, see Peck (2005).
- 6.
Despite the research discussed here, demographers have perhaps not examined patterns and effects of internal migration in the United States as fully as they could. Ellis (2012), for example, laments the fact that migration scholars have focused on international migration into the US in lieu of internal migration, and discusses ways migration scholars can both transfer international-level analytical tools to internal migration studies as well as link internal and international migration together. Skeldon (2006, 17) also recognizes this shift, arguing that, in migration research, “the word ‘migration’ has come to mean ‘international migration’…”.
- 7.
If Bishop were to limit his inferences to those at the aggregate level, his analysis would suffer from the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), the fact that aggregate-level findings depend upon the aggregate-level areal units used for analysis. Even limiting one’s interest to the aggregate level, there is little reason to believe that counties as arbitrary units drawn for purposes of governmental administration are the appropriate areal units for a study of citizens’ chosen local contexts. For discussions of MAUP see Openshaw and Taylor (1979, 1981).
- 8.
It is important to incorporate both origin and destination characteristics when modeling migration decisions. If only the latter are modeled, a common flaw in the existing literature, we will be limited in our understanding of how individuals drawn from particular origin locales are drawn to particular destination locales. See Pelligrini and Fotheringham (1999) for an important discussion of this concern (see also Farmer 2011).
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Darmofal, D., Strickler, R. (2016). Bringing Together Spatial Demography and Political Science: Reexamining the Big Sort. In: Howell, F., Porter, J., Matthews, S. (eds) Recapturing Space: New Middle-Range Theory in Spatial Demography. Spatial Demography Book Series, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22810-5_8
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