Big Sort Research Articles

The effect of politically homogenous neighbourhoods on affective polarization: Evidence from Britain

AbstractAffective polarization is increasingly evident around the world. This has been attributed in part to residential segregation by partisanship. The ‘Big Sort’ has meant that neighbourhoods in the United States, and elsewhere, have become more homogenous in terms of vote. Yet there is little systematic evidence on the relationship between homogenous partisan neighbourhoods and affective polarization. Does living among fellow partisans make people more negative towards the other side? In this Research Note, we use unique data from Britain to show that while people accurately recognize that their local area is more or less politically homogenous, neighbourhood political homogeneity is not correlated with any measure of affective polarization. These findings are robust to the type of political divide (partisanship or Brexit identity), the level of geography, length of residence and controls for ideology and social characteristics. We therefore suggest that while geographical sorting is an important phenomenon, it is unlikely to be a major cause of affective polarization.

Generative Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Entropy, and the Big Sort

Generative Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Entropy, and the Big Sort

The Big (Genetic) Sort? A Research Note on Migration Patterns and Their Genetic Imprint in the United Kingdom

This research note reinvestigates Abdellaoui et al.’s (2019) findings that genetically selective migration may lead to persistent and accumulating socioeconomic and health inequalities between types (coal mining or non–coal mining) of places in the United Kingdom. Their migration measure classified migrants who moved to the same type of place (coal mining to coal mining or non–coal mining to non–coal mining) into “stay” categories, preventing them from distinguishing migrants from nonmigrants. We reinvestigate the question of genetically selective migration by examining migration patterns between places rather than place types and find genetic selectivity in whether people migrate and where. For example, we find evidence of positive selection: people with genetic variants correlated with better education moved from non–coal mining to coal mining places with our measure of migration. Such findings were obscured in earlier work that could not distinguish nonmigrants from migrants.

The role of the big geographic sort in online news circulation among U.S. Reddit users

Past research has attributed the circulation of online news to two main factors—individual characteristics (e.g., a person’s information literacy) and social media effects (e.g., algorithm-mediated information diffusion)—and has overlooked a third one: the critical mass created by the offline self-segregation of Americans into like-minded geographical regions such as states (a phenomenon called ‘The Big Sort’). We hypothesized that this latter factor matters for the online spreading of news not least because online interactions, despite having the potential of being global, end up being localized: interaction probability is known to rapidly decay with distance. Upon analysis of more than 8M Reddit comments containing news links spanning four years, from January 2016 to December 2019, we found that Reddit did not work as an ‘hype machine’ for news (as opposed to what previous work reported for other platforms, circulation was not mainly caused by platform-facilitated network effects). Rather, news circulation in Reddit worked as a supply-and-demand system: news items scaled linearly with the number of users in each state (with a scaling exponent beta approx 1, and a goodness of fit R^2approx 0.95). Furthermore, deviations from such a universal pattern were best explained by state-level personality and cultural factors (R^2approx {0.12, 0.39}), rather than socioeconomic conditions (R^2approx {0.15, 0.29}) or political characteristics (R^2approx {0.06, 0.21}). Higher-than-expected circulation of any type of news was found in states characterised by residents who tend to be less diligent in terms of their personality (low in conscientiousness) and by loose cultures understating the importance of adherence to norms (low in cultural tightness). Interestingly, the combination of those factors with low levels of education was then associated with the circulation of a particular type of news, that is, misinformation. These results suggest that online interactions are geographically bounded and, as such, news circulation cannot be studied purely as an Internet phenomenon but should be grounded into a user’s offline cultural environment, which has become increasingly segregated over the decades, and is admittedly hard to change.

Urban–ruraljustice

<scp>Urban–rural</scp>justice

Analysis of the results of presidential elections in the US agglomerations in the XXI century

In the second half of the 20th century, the USA faced the problem of polarizing society. It is expressed, among other things, in political preferences. With the development of transport infrastructure and income increase, Americans began to migrate more often, choosing for residence areas with people with similar politic views. Such migrations form electorally homogeneous regions, which may eventually lead to isolationism and even tribalism. This phenomenon is called “The Big Sort”. The study proposes to identify the dynamics of polarization of the American nation, as well as agglomerations with different electoral preferences using a new quantitative method – Partisan Voting Index.

Exploring Comfort and Discomfort for Arabs and Jews in Kentucky

Exploring Comfort and Discomfort for Arabs and Jews in Kentucky Nora Rose Moosnick Introduction Kentucky is not normally a place that comes to mind when talking about Arabs and Jews. But small populations of both communities have made Kentucky home for generations even while Arabs (particularly Muslim Arabs) and Jews remain a entive to a changing sense of danger there and elsewhere. In this article I revisit my work, Arab and Jewish Women of Kentucky: Stories of Accommodation and Audacity,1 to explore how Arabs and Jews gauge danger and safety, comfort and discomfort in contemporary Kentucky. The stories of Arabs and Jews are characterized by success and comfort but not lacking in uneasiness. Kentucky Jews and Arabs (both Christians and Muslims) in the past and currently have coped with comfort and discomfort simultaneously. "Good" stories are often told by Arabs and Jews, who in the early part of the twentieth century changed from roaming peddlers to respected merchants in out of the way places like Kentucky.2 The narratives at once extol the trailblazers' achievements while downplaying any hardships they may have faced, even while insinuating that difficulties might be expected in farflung locales. Success, no doubt, marks the stories of Arabs and Jews in Kentucky. The Kentucky section of the Institute for Southern Jewish Life (ISJL) web site, for example, chronicles endless Jewish accomplishments in the state, such as long-standing Jewish roots in the bourbon industry and contemporary feats such as Jerry Abramson's election as Lieutenant Governor in 2011.3 The Arab-American museum, meanwhile, features Kentucky's own Teresa Isaac, who was mayor of Lexington in 2006. At the time, she was the only Arab-American woman who was mayor of a mid-sized city or larger.4 Accomplishments certainly characterize the Arab and Jewish experience in Kentucky. And such "good" stories of the Arab and Jew can be useful in exposing invisible stories and countering a wider cultural narrative that belittles [End Page 211] Kentucky as a place unfriendly and perhaps even dangerous for "outsiders." It is a narrative so deeply ingrained that sometimes Arabs and Jews perpetuate it. I. J. Schwartz (1885–1971) the famous Yiddish poet, chronicled the years he lived in Lexington, from 1918 to 1929, in his epic poem, Kentucky. Writing in post-Civil War America, Schwartz related that the Jew might find financial success away from the northeast, in the South. But this success might come at the cost of forsaking a Jewish identity or, in rural Kentucky, facing precarious situations, including death.5 The contemporary image of Kentucky is not far removed from the one Schwartz depicted. Since the 2016 presidential election, national commentaries have highlighted racial, cultural, and geographic gaps between voters, transforming voters into political foes and underscoring intolerance between them. Bill Bishop, in his 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, foresaw the current political landscape marked by increased segregation and greater hostility between political adversaries, with geographic spaces demarcating the rift.6 The rural se ing becomes a scary place for urban dwellers, particularly for minorities, while urban voices alienate and beli le persons from the countryside.7 According to this characterization, rural spaces lack the tolerance of urbane locales. Whole states, particularly Appalachian ones like Kentucky, are regularly construed as rural and intolerant, even as safe havens for the proliferation of hate groups. Not surprisingly, this post-2016 election political climate does not help Kentucky's image as dangerous to "outsiders," but instead entrenches disparaging notions of the state. Kentucky is no doubt white; an estimated 85 percent of its population is white.8 The whiteness of the state's population might contribute to the state not faring well on tolerance scales.9 Tolerance or lack thereof, however, does not necessarily equate with rurality. In the 2010 US Census, only 23 percent of the Kentucky population was classified rural, with more and more of the state's population found in urban hubs.10 A cursory glance at the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate map offers an ambiguous picture; the state boasts eleven reported hate groups, not far ahead of Massachuse s with ten...

US urban agglomerations electoral shifts in 2000–2016

More than 80% of US population live in metropolitan areas. Voting in agglomerations largely determines the outcome of the presidential, or any other, elections. The electoral processes inside high-density territories are a derivative of settlement peculiarities, and socio-economic status, ethnic and racial composition of people at these areas. Researchers record the increase of polarization level in recent decades. This increase closely related to the population’s political preferences. Polarization can lead to the disunity of society, a reduction in socio-economic interactions and to local isolationism in the long term. This article analyzes the results of the US presidential election at the level of metropolitan areas in the period of 2000–2016 and shows the distribution of all 382 agglomerations depending on the voting results within their boundaries. It is also revealing the spatial patterns of locations of these agglomerations. The article determined that more than two-thirds of all agglomeration’s population has stable electoral preferences, and also provides evidence of the ongoing and, in some cases, intensifying process of “The Big Sort” and an increase of polarization level in US urban population.

Do Nonprofit Missions Vary by the Political Ideology of Supporting Communities? Some Preliminary Results

Nonprofit missions reflect the values of those that create, manage, and support them. We know that the U.S. population has undergone a “big sort” that has resulted in increased community homogeneity along racial, economic, and political lines. We do not know, however, how this process has impacted the nonprofit sector, as there is little work looking at the geographic distribution of nonprofit missions as a function of the demographics of communities in which they operate. To identify the effects of community values on the nonprofit mission, we use landslide voting districts as a proxy for political ideology and propensity score matching to pair districts with statistically equivalent demographic characteristics. Nonprofits in matched voting districts are compared to identify differences in activities, mission, and funding. Missions shape how communities allocate resources to target populations and interest groups, so observed differences in mission may help explain variation in social outcomes across communities.

The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

We explore how college reputation affects the “big sort,” the process by which students choose colleges and find their first jobs. We incorporate a simple definition of college reputation—graduates' mean admission scores—into a competitive labor market model. This generates a clear prediction: if employers use reputation to set wages, then the introduction of a new measure of individual skill will decrease the return to reputation. Administrative data and a natural experiment from the country of Colombia confirm this. Finally, we show that college reputation is positively correlated with graduates' earnings growth, suggesting that reputation matters beyond signaling individual skill. (JEL I23, I26, J24, J31)

Toward a Geographic Understanding of the Sharing Economy

Despite the geographically situated nature of most sharing economy tasks, little attention has been paid to the role that geography plays in the sharing economy. In this article, we help to address this gap in the literature by examining how four key principles from human geography—distance decay, structured variation in population density, mental maps, and “the Big Sort” (spatial homophily)—manifest in sharing economy platforms. We find that these principles interact with platform design decisions to create systemic biases in which the sharing economy is significantly more effective in dense, high socioeconomic status (SES) areas than in low-SES areas and the suburbs. We further show that these results are robust across two sharing economy platforms: UberX and TaskRabbit. In addition to highlighting systemic sharing economy biases, this article more fundamentally demonstrates the importance of considering well-known geographic principles when designing and studying sharing economy platforms.

Spatial Polarization of Presidential Voting in the United States, 1992–2012: The “Big Sort” Revisited

Much has been written in recent years about the claimed polarization of the U.S. electorate, with substantial differences as to whether there has been greater spatial polarization, at several geographical scales, over recent decades. To assess the veracity of those alternative views, a bespoke data set showing percentage support for the Democratic Party's presidential candidates at the county, state, and divisional scales has been analyzed using a robust, statistically based measure of polarization and segregation. The ecological results provide clear and compelling evidence of a trend toward greater polarization across the nine census divisions, across the forty-nine states within those divisions, and across the 3,077 counties within the states—with strong evidence that the differences over time at the last of those scales are highly statistically significant. Within those general trends, polarization has been greater in some states than others and also within some states more than others—identifying additional geographies calling for further research.

Opinion dynamics: inhomogeneous Boltzmann-type equations modelling opinion leadership and political segregation

We propose and investigate different kinetic models for opinion formation, when the opinion formation process depends on an additional independent variable, e.g. a leadership or a spatial variable. More specifically, we consider (i) opinion dynamics under the effect of opinion leadership, where each individual is characterized not only by its opinion but also by another independent variable which quantifies leadership qualities; (ii) opinion dynamics modelling political segregation in ‘The Big Sort’, a phenomenon that US citizens increasingly prefer to live in neighbourhoods with politically like-minded individuals. Based on microscopic opinion consensus dynamics such models lead to inhomogeneous Boltzmann-type equations for the opinion distribution. We derive macroscopic Fokker–Planck-type equations in a quasi-invariant opinion limit and present results of numerical experiments.

A “Sorted” America? Geographic Polarization and Value Overlap in the American Electorate*

ObjectiveGeographic political polarization is an increasingly salient topic of academic and popular discourse. Using Bill Bishop's bestseller The Big Sort as a foil, this article tests the claim that America has split into “ideologically inbred” “red” and “blue” communities.MethodDrawing on Bishop's concept of “landslide” Democratic and Republican counties, the article uses survey data to measure the overlap in opinion between respondents from opposing “landslide” counties. This is done both graphically and with a quantitative measure developed by Levendusky and Pope (2011).ResultsAcross economic, social, and cultural value dimensions, there is vastly more common ground than difference between respondents from “landslide” Democratic and Republican counties.ConclusionHyperbolic claims of a “sorted” country aside, geographic polarization in the United States is limited at best. Partisan polarization could be a real and consequential phenomenon in the electorate, but it has little geographic, “red versus blue” manifestation.

The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

The Big Sort: College Reputation and Labor Market Outcomes

Finding a City’s Activity Bubbles in Geotagged Social Media

Bill Bishop popularized the idea that we all live in a self-curated world of bubbles in his book, “The Big Sort” (Bishop 2009). People often spend most of their time in completely different places from their neighbors, and this fragmentation of society leads to reduced empathy, policy quarrels, and even violence. People may not even be aware that they are segregating themselves so dramatically. Fortunately, thanks to the abundance of available geotagged social media data, we can easily and cheaply detect these social bubbles and give people a greater insight into their activity patterns. Understanding how we spend our time can be the first step in changing from isolated citizens into a connected community.

New Support for the Big Sort Hypothesis: An Assessment of Partisan Geographic Sorting in California, 1992–2010

AbstractThis article empirically examines the “Big Sort hypothesis”—the notion that, in recent years, liberal and conservative Americans have become increasingly spatially isolated from one another. Using block group-, tract-, and county-level party registration data and presidential election returns, I construct two formal indices of segregation for 1992–2010 in California and evaluate those indices for evidence of growth in the segregation of Californians along ideological lines. Evidence of rising geographic segregation between Democrats and Republicans for measures generated from both party registration and presidential vote data is found. This growth is statistically significant for 10 of the 12 segregation measures analyzed. In addition, many of the increases are practically significant, with estimates of growth in segregation during the observation period ranging from 2% to 23%.

“The Big Sort” That Wasn't: A Skeptical Reexamination

In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishop's thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.

Book Reviews

“From Growth to Convergence: Asia’s Next Two Decades” is reviewed by Nalitra Thaiprasert. “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America Is Tearing Us Apart” is reviewed by Cynthia Rogers. “The Great Migration, Rural-Urban Migration in China and Indonesia” is reviewed by Christiadi.

The big sort: why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart

The big sort: why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart