Urbanization and Competitive Party Politics

Abstract

T HIS ARTICLE EXAMINES the relationship between urbanization and two-party competition at the county level in ten states. The primary stimulus for this research stems from the apparently contradictory findings of Gold and Schmidhauser in their study of Iowa and the Ohio case as presented by Eulau.' Eulau's study had been inspired by V. 0. Key's then recently published American State Politics2. Key compared the voting behavior of metropolitan as compared to non-metropolitan voters in several northern states and found notable differences. The ecological factor that attracted the attention of Eulau and then Gold and Schmidhauser was the urbanization of American counties and the impact of this ecological process on contemporary American politics and the possible implications of the process for competitive party politics in the future. Both articles accept as their working hypothesis the idea that counties high on an indicator of urbanization should also be high on an indicator of politicalparty competition. The results of these two efforts to examine in detail what Key had painted in broad strokes is a sharp contradiction: In Ohio urbanization is strongly associated with two party competition but in Iowa it is not. In this article we will briefly review the methods used to measure urbanization and party competition in Iowa and Ohio and then apply standardized measures of our own to test the hypothesis that