maps maps maps maps maps

[topaz]

The current meme going around seems to be electoral maps. We've all seen the state-by-state electoral breakdown, but here are some of the more interesting versions I've seen:

At http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap.htm, a map of Democratic and Republican votes, broken down by county rather than by state:


At http://www.electoral-vote.com/carto/nov04c.html, a "cartogram," which is apparently a map scaled to population rather than area:


From http://www.boingboing.net. This map describes just the margin of victory. Each state is colored a shade of purple depending on how many Republican (red) or Democrat (blue) votes it got. This gives a much better idea of how mixed the vote was:


moominmolly and claudia_ each posted a purple cartogram, combining the last two ideas. I think they did this independently, but I'm not sure. claudia_ posted her version here:


And moominmolly's is here:


I think this one is my favorite. A purple map drawn by county rather than by state. From KieranHealy.org.


Kieran links to a really huge version of this one: 1547x1053, 400KB.

Comments

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

There's a pretty strong correlation between Democratic counties and counties that contain at least one large metropolitan area. That's the significance of the county boundaries.

My co-worker put it this way: "Any time you have a lot of people crammed into a small space, they end up in the party that makes you get along with each other."

I didn't actually notice that the USA Today map didn't include Chicago results. Hmm.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

As reesei says, "water makes people liberal". =)

Of course, I don't actually believe it's something in the water; rather, just that big cities tend towards liberalism. I'd love an explanation (from a conservative) of that.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

This could be a chicken-or-egg problem, but isn't it true that cities tend to draw liberal types? Most have several large universities, which disproportionately attract and graduate liberals, and many people end uop sticking around the cities where they went to college. (I know I did.) Also, traditionally liberal groups, like Jews, African-Americans, and queer folk are concentrated in cities. It could be argued that the queers came for the tolerance, but it's clearer that the others ended up there for historical socioeconomic reasons.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

See, that's exactly why I want to know if there's any sort of canonical conservative answer. The city division isn't about money -- you find poor folks in both Chicago and Oklahoma. It could be about race, although is Schelling's hypothesis (http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Segregation) enough to explain why cities are clusters?

It seems awfully convenient to think that being exposed to different types of people makes one more tolerant (where "tolerant" is kinda a loaded word). But even that's not the only issue. Take gun control. Maybe you're more likely to believe in gun control when you're in a high population density area? And so on.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

See, I've never bought the contention that exposure necessarily breeds tolerance. In fact, I can think of many counterexamples. For instance, I knew someone in high school whose father grew up in a community where there were many Hispanics. As a result, he was very prejudiced against them, but had no particular prejudices against Blacks. In the small segregrated town I lived in, however, I ran into a lot of anti-Black prejudice among my schoolmates. But when Hispanics moved into the community for the first time, they were met with something like fascination (being from LA and up on all the trends).

Another thing: Given the history of Chicago--solidly Democratic since its origins--I don't see that "Democrat" correlates very well with "liberal" or "tolerant". That's why I'm more inclined to assume that urban environments attract more liberals rather then that living in a city makes you less conservative.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

I think I dropped the ball in actually responding to this, last response. Sorry about that. I suspect that large universities either are born in metropolitan areas, or that cities grow up around them, based on opportunities in either direction. I also believe that many people, having lived in a city for a while, grow used to what cities can offer and thus tend to stay around them. I think this will actually lessen over time -- now that Amazon ships darn near everywhere, the need to have good local bookstores isn't as great as it was 10 years ago.

As far as group concentrations, I think you're right about the historical reasons. I was thinking about New Mexico and my grandparents owning a bit of land, and reesei pointed out to me that they were white, and relatively well-off, being professorial types, and pre-Civil Rights, it was insanely difficult for African-Americans to own land. So they moved to the cities, 'cause that's where the money was, and at least in Chicago's case, have been there since.

Unfortunately, all that is to say that I think you're right, that was a chicken-or-egg thing, and we're back to the original question. Maybe your stock liberal, living in a big city, is exposed to more people who need help, and are thus more inclined to help them? This still seems like it's suffering from definitional blindness to me.

[reesei.livejournal.com]

On the last point - my take on that is slightly different. Now, I'm a biochemist not a social philosopher so I'm probably being very simplistic about this, and lots of people we know could probably tear my arguments apart. But oh well.

People tend to define "us" as the group surrounding them. In the bible belt, your "us" is a small community, often built around churches as a community organization, and large extended families. If anyone in their community needs help, they take care of them... and if someone needs help, people know it. It's a great system as far as it goes.

When you live in a big city, your "us" group has to encompass more people than you can personally know. And there are a lot more cracks to fall through... the personal support net has a looser weave. And not everyone belongs to the same church, and in fact not everyone even belongs to a church. And the population is more mobile, so the extended family unit is missing too. So people in big cities are used to passing the charity duty off to the government, because otherwise there is no one there to help.

People in small towns say "hey, we take care of our own, why should those city folk get the benefit of our tax dollars to take care of theirs? Stupid lazy godless welfare-state people."

People in big cities say "but you're getting _our_ tax dollars for your highways, farm subsidies, phone/water/electricity hookups, etc, at a much greater dollar-distributed-for-dollar-taken rate. What are you whining about?" (note: went to go check my facts before posting this... found this (http://www.nemw.org/fundsrank.htm). Note bottom 14 return-on-tax-dollar states: they're pretty much all blue. We're the ones getting taxed more and served less, and we're _still_ for larger government.)

And then we're stalemated.

And yes, I do see the value of not-big-city lifestyle... after all, I'm the insane one who is trying to go _back_ to the midwest, albeit in a college-town environment, which is more blue than most of it.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

Note: this helps explain Salt Lake City. It's a fairly big city, but it's not really diverse in the way that the others are.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

How do the suburbs fit into this idealised model? It seems to me that the community structure more closely resembles that of the city whereas the voting patterns have more in common with rural areas.

[khedron.livejournal.com]

I think I'd argue (based on no real evidence) that suburbs and small towns are very much the same structure -- less diverse, more cohesive, based on some notion of us-ness. And I'm quite sure that Willamette wants to keep its taxes at home for its own schools, and ignore the Chicago public schools as much as possible.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

One can say that of a lot of urban neighbourhoods as well. I mean, if you want to see community cohesiveness, go to Chicago's Pilsen sometime or St. Louis' Hill. Both are at least as ethnically homogenous as most suburbs or small towns and the robustness of their local organisations overwhelms anything I experienced in the countryside. I'm sure they'd love to keep their taxes for their own use as well (Pilsen's 18th St. generates more sales tax revenues per square foot than any other shopping district in Chicago outside of the Mag Mile), but they simply aren't allowed. True, community organisations are in an all-out battle against the local TIF, but that's because they (rightly, in my opinion) suspect that the money collected by this will be diverted to gentrify University Village and other areas within the shadow of UIC.

[reesei.livejournal.com]

I'd always thought of suburbs as being rather like Iowa, actually. At least the "citified" part of Iowa where I grew up (where city is defined as 80,000 person town).

- Emphasis on quality education overwhelming almost everything else, because the main point of moving to the suburbs is family life
- Not quite having the culture of the big cities, not quite having the community of a small town, but trying hard for both
- Being slightly afraid that "city problems" - drugs, gangs - will invade and make your idyllic community much less so
- Strip-mall economy ;)

Iowa has been split right down the middle in voting for the past few elections. I don't know how the suburbs usually fare, but I'd always assumed they were the "soccer moms and nascar dads" that make up the middle both sides were chasing.

Again, I am not a sociologist - I don't necessarily have the facts to back any of this up; just my impression based on the variety of places I've lived and the prevalent attitudes there.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

I don't think suburban communities are that similar to metropolitan ones. People largely move to the suburbs in order to get away from the closely clustered people without having to leave their jobs in the city. Socially I think it's more closely related to the small rural community model that reesi talked about.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Really? Let's compare those two (admittedly idealised) models again:

In small rural communities:

1. "People tend to define 'us' as the group surrounding them."
2. "Your 'us' is a small community, often built around churches as a community organization, and large extended families."
3. "If anyone in their community needs help, they take care of them."
4. "If someone needs help, people know it."

Whereas in big cities:

1. "Your 'us' group has to encompass more people than you can personally know."
2. "The personal support net has a looser weave."
3. "And not everyone belongs to the same church, and in fact not everyone even belongs to a church."
4. "And the population is more mobile, so the extended family unit is missing too."
5. "So people in big cities are used to passing the charity duty off to the government, because otherwise there is no one there to help."

Do you know a lot of suburbs built around churches? Where families are sendentary and extended rather than nuclear and mobile? Where everyone knows everyone else and helps take care of them rather than expecting the government to step in? You say yourself that a lot of people move to them "in order to get away from the closely clustered people". Why would you expect those people to be quite significantly more involved in the lives of their neighbours than urban folk?

I've already pointed out elsewhere that many urban neighbourhoods are organised more like reesei's rural model than her urban one. I'm willing to bet, for instance, that all the dozens of extended Pakistani families in the Khan Associates-managed apartment building up the street from me know each other, know everyone's business, help each other, probably go to the same mosque, and don't expect much in the way of support from the government. Did they all vote Republican in that last election?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It's a similar story for the Jews: In much of the Old World, they were prohibited from owning land or farming until Emancipation in the 19th century. By that time, of course, they had become entrenched in urban areas and had no interest in a life of the soil. So, when they moved to the USA, they congregrated in larger cities while it was gentile peasants who founded farmsteads and villages.

Later immigrants also tended to congregate in cities. Was it primarily because cities were more tolerant or because, in an industrial society, that's where the jobs for unskilled labourers tend to be? The Great Migration, after all, didn't begin in the wake of the Civil War--most ex-slaves remained sharecroppers for generations--but in the shadow of WWII, when the factories of the Rust Belt needed every pair of hands they could find.

Due to the exploitative conditions, the urban proletariat was also ripe for radicalisation. I can't really see socialists and anarchists prosyletising from town to town in the Midwestern countryside, but I suppose some must've tried during the 20s and 30s. In contrast to the situation in Europe or Latin American, most of the rural dwellers were freeholders who had a stake in the status quo and no interest in revolution or redistribution. The same can't be said about factory workers living in urban slums.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It's a similar story for the Jews: In much of the Old World, they were prohibited from owning land or farming until Emancipation in the 19th century. By that time, of course, they had become entrenched in urban areas and had no interest in a life of the soil. So, when they moved to the USA, they congregrated in larger cities while it was gentile peasants who founded farmsteads and villages.

There are also problems that come with isolation for religious Jews, even if the surrounding community is tolerant. No kosher butcher (though kosher meat was shipped West pretty much as soon as transportation links were established). You need at least ten Jewish men for most significant religious observances. Even today, Sabbath restrictions make suburban (let alone rural) distances more inconvenient for Orthodox Jews than for others, which is one reason that in Chicago there's still a big contingent in the city and inner ring suburbs while Reform and Conservative Jewish communities have tended to follow the rest of the country into suburbanization.

Due to the exploitative conditions, the urban proletariat was also ripe for radicalisation.

Some of them came pre-radicalized, including my own ancestors (who AFAICT weren't quite Communists-- though a great-aunt was, and would defend Stalin till she died in the 1990s). My grandmother still doesn't know just what went wrong with me. :-)

I can't really see socialists and anarchists prosyletising from town to town in the Midwestern countryside, but I suppose some must've tried during the 20s and 30s.

My impression is that the Depression helped with that, what with lots of freeholders losing their farms due to debt, the Dust Bowl, and deflation. But they were ultimately diverted into the New Deal (which, let us remember, was still pretty radical by early twentieth century American standards).