Proximate Polity
People have the power to change where they live, where they work, where they vote, and where they spend their money. This geographic uncertainty has important implications for the policies cities pursue as it impacts the relative value of local goods provision. In this dissertation I examine how the potential movement of people within metropolitan areas influences developmental goods provision and production.
The proximate polity theory begins with the assumption that city officials aim to maximize the economic and political benefits of developmental policies while also minimizing the economic and political risks of policy failure. Accordingly, local leaders strike this balance by anticipating how their policy choices are likely to influence the movement of people in and out of the jurisdiction. In order to make this assessment, public officials must be keenly aware of who resides in nearby cities and also which policies nearby cities are engaging. Because policy consequences do not end at the jurisdiction’s edge, leaders must also pay attention to how their policies will influence the political relationships that exist between themselves and other cities.
Using spatial statistics and network analysis tools, I test the theory on a dataset of 15 metropolitan areas across the United States. I then focus in Colorado’s Front Range cities for a closer analysis that includes original survey data, time-space models of development policy over a 25 year period, and a dyadic analysis of intergovernmental developmental cooperation.
Papers from this Project: The Proximate Polity (UAR), From Competition to Cooperation (APR)
Neighborhood Spaces & Inequality
The Spaces in Your Neighborhood: Public Goods Quality and the Development of Social Capital | Drawing on a range of different literatures, this article identifies a link between neighborhood public goods context and the development of individual-level social capital. The study utilizes a 2014 geocoded survey of New York City residents to connect respondent-observed neighborhood attributes to a social capital factor and its component variables. Social capital and perceived public goods quality are analyzed using spatial analysis and regression models. Results support a theory that how people evaluate and interact with their neighborhood goods context affects social interactions, behaviors, and attitudes—an effect that appears to be particularly strong among lower-income residents. The results have implications for how people think about public goods provision: they show that variation in the implementation of local policy can have critical social externalities that play a vital role in civil society. Read the paper.
Living with Inequality | Income inequality has risen steadily in recent decades, yet Americans’ political attitudes and perceptions of economic factors do not appear to have changed in response. This raises the question of what drives perceptions and attitudes about inequality? Jeff Lyons and I are exploring whether the places where people live – and specifically the diversity of incomes where people live – influence views about inequality. Using my unique geo-coded survey of New York City, we find consistent evidence that attitudes about inequality are influenced by the places where we live – those who are exposed to more income diversity in their place of residence perceive larger gaps between the rich and everybody else and are more likely to believe that the gap should be smaller. However, these contextual effects appear to be conditional upon racial distributions – as the percentage of non-whites increases, contextual income diversity more weakly informs the attitudes of whites. This work has recently been publish in American Politics Research.
Politics on Display
Political signs are one of the most conspicuous features of American campaigns, yet they have received relatively little scholarly attention. In a recently published book (Politics on Display, Oxford University Press), Todd Makse (Florida International), Anand Sokhey (CU Boulder), and I address a series of important questions about this familiar feature of electoral politics, documenting political life in residential areas with a comprehensive approach that spans multiple elections. Focusing on diverse areas in battleground states, we combine observational and survey data into a geo-database that also includes demographic data, voter turnout data, and election results; we supplement our (several) community studies with nationally representative data, and other novel surveys of portions of the American public. Together, we provide an unprecedented view and analysis of political communication and participation as it is tied to the spaces that citizens inhabit. We show that sign displays are fueled by individual and contextual attributes, and find that they exert a number of surprising effects. Against a backdrop of political polarization, our effort advances a new understanding of how everyday citizens actually experience campaigns, and provides important perspective on why many Americans insist on airing their views in public.