Abstract
This paper advances a model of racially polarized voting that captures the intervening effects of urbanization and residential segregation on white voters’ political behavior. The model is tested for a 2011 referendum election in the U.S. state of Mississippi. Using King’s method of ecological inference and weighted least squares regression, we find that regional minority population size impacts white opposition to minority-preferred political alternatives both directly and indirectly through an effect on residential racial segregation. Importantly, these influences hinge on intra-regional patterns of urbanization. The findings have important implications for understanding spatial variation in regional political behavior and intergroup relations.
Highlights
Polarized voting outcomes in the United States attract ample attention from academic researchers, journalists, and legal scholars (McCrary, 1990; Voss, 2000; Orey, 1998, 2001; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003; Roch and Rushton, 2008; Donovan, 2010; Webster and Quinton, 2010; Cohen and Helderman, 2012)
We propose a conceptual model of racial vote polarization that introduces segregation as a mediator into the accepted relationship between urbanization, relative minority population size, and white majority support for non-minority preferred alternatives (Voss, 1996, 2000; Voss and Miller, 2001; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003; Orey et al, 2011)
We have argued that the contemporary literature on racial vote polarization is moving toward a consensus that the relationship originally studied by Key (1949)—between regional minority population density and majority white support for nonminority preferred alternatives—is affected by the level of regional urbanization (e.g., Voss and Miller, 2001; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003; Orey et al, 2011)
Summary
Polarized voting outcomes in the United States attract ample attention from academic researchers, journalists, and legal scholars (McCrary, 1990; Voss, 2000; Orey, 1998, 2001; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003; Roch and Rushton, 2008; Donovan, 2010; Webster and Quinton, 2010; Cohen and Helderman, 2012). The mechanism theorized to drive this process relates to the size of the minority population in the observed geographic unit: as the density of minority persons in a given space rises, white opposition to the preferred ballot choices of minority voters intensifies (Giles and Buckner, 1993; Orey, 1998, 2001) This effect is perceived to be a protective measure, in that whites supposedly identify decreases in their relative share of total areal population as threats to their collective economic and political power (Karahan and Shughart, 2004). Some researchers note that the underlying relationship between white majority opposition to minority preferred ballot alternatives and minority population density is likely moderated by local urbanization patterns (Voss, 1996, 2000; Orey, 1998, 2001; Tolbert and Grummel, 2003). The results strongly suggest that neither racial threat nor social contact comprehensively explains polarized election returns; rather, both mechanisms are operating across regions, but in different sociospatial contexts
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