Thread by @NiskanenCenter

NEW PAPER (all 85 pages of it): The rising global tide of populist nationalism has kindled a widespread dread that the liberal order is unraveling. According to @willwilkinson, urbanization might be to blame. But there’s hope…
niskanencenter.org/blog/the-densi…

@willwilkinson Wilkinson explores the much neglected “urbanization” thesis, arguing that other theories come up short.

Urbanization has segregated national populations/concentrated economic production in megacities. This drives us apart—culturally, economically, and politically—along the lines of ethnicity, education, and population density.

And while diversity in and of itself does not breed distrust, spacial segregation does. medium.com/trust-media-an…

Temperamentally liberal individuals have self-selected into higher education and big cities. That has left a rural population that is relatively uniform in white ethnicity, conservative disposition, and lower economic productivity.

Economic growth (now centered in cities) tends to shift people toward more progressive, “self- expression” social values, whatever their native ideological temperaments.

Meanwhile, stagnant or declining material prospects (present in many rural areas) tend to generate a rising sense of anxiety and threat, leading people to adopt a zero-sum, “us or them” frame of mind.

The 2016 election is a great example of the starkness of the “density divide.” William Frey of @BrookingsMetro notes that Donald Trump won 80% of U.S. counties but only 45% of the popular vote. Clinton dominated in urban areas. brookings.edu/blog/the-avenu…

“There has long been a divide between urban and rural parts of the United States, but that divide has sharpened,” says @pbump. washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/…

It’s not new knowledge that voting is split among population density lines. But as Jonathan Rodden of @Stanford @StanfordPoliSci shows, this phenomenon is relatively new. At the beginning of the 20th century, the trend was non-existent.

@Stanford @StanfordPoliSci Clinton’s 472 counties also accounted for 64% of the GDP, according to @MarkMuro1 and @Sifan_Liu

One can even make the case that Republican cities are basically non-existent. And it’s the “density divide” that seems to predict which areas vote blue and which vote red.

If the population density of an area seems to drive overall political affiliation, what’s driving this “density divide?” The answer, says @WillWilkinson, is #urbanization.

Economics are a big part of the picture. As smaller, less-educated cities and towns languish, their best-schooled daughters and sons decamp to the metropolis, further widening the big city/small town productivity and employment gap.

It’s tempting to think just in economic terms (i.e. cities are where the jobs are), but that misses the extent to which identity, or group membership, drives migration or constrains individuals’ sense of eligible destinations.

Ethnicity seems to be one of these factors. Ethnic minorities have been attracted to cities both because of the opportunities they find there and because of the ethnic and religious enclaves they find there.

In 2014, 57 metro areas with “distinctive patterns of historical immigrant settlement” contained about 80 percent of America’s immigrants, notes @audsinger. brookings.edu/articles/migra…

And 80% of today’s immigrants to the United States are not of European descent, explaining the rapid increase of the nonwhite population of these cities. pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/mod… 59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065/

Even within cities, minorities find their subgroups by moving toward diversity across the board. Only white Americans have the option of satisfying their taste for homophily by steering clear of urban diversity.

The suburbs around cities tend to reflect these trends. But rural areas remain predominantly white, and there are few attractive options for minorities looking for those of the same ethnocultural background.

Another big factor: The personalities of liberal- and conservative- minded people differ along certain key dimensions (see research by @ChrisPolPsych, @howard_lavine, and Christopher Johnson).

.@WillWilkinson pays close attention to the “Big Five” personality traits in this study. These characteristics are constant throughout life and have a genetic basis.

Hypothesis: If the personality traits that predict “conservative” temperament also leave white Americans with those traits less inclined seek higher education and move to cities, we should expect urbanization to have spatially sorted the white population on those traits...

...And as it turns out, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience are strongly predictive of liberal or conservative attitudes (see the illustration of UK election results via @JamesRDennison)....

...and people with low Openness and high Conscientiousness are less likely to move...and vice versa.

Based on what we know about the “Big Five”, we’d expect to see a higher concentration of whites with high Openness for instance in higher density areas. And indeed we do.

.@willwilkinson points out a number of other reasons people select into high or low density areas to support his thesis that urbanization drives #politicalpolarization. Read his paper for the full list. niskanencenter.org/blog/the-densi…

Urbanization is happening at an increasing rate.

As @DougSaunders wrote, “What will be remembered about the 21st century, more than anything else, is the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life and into cities.”

Given the rate of urbanization, It’s tempting to think that political polarization and populism is irreversible and that it will tear the fabric of this country (and indeed the global order) apart. But according to @willwilkinson, there’s hope…

...hope that comes with serious implications for the Republican party, whose base tends to cluster in the shrinking rural areas.

According to Wilkinson: “This Republican Party, defined by seething hostility to the urban multicultural majority, is teetering on the brink of irrelevance. Continued urbanizing migration...is likely to push it over, sooner or later.”

The healing process that will come with the reimagining of the GOP is our best hope for overcoming the polarizing trends we are now seeing.

.@willwilkinson concludes that in the past, we’ve failed to recognize the impacts urbanization would have on our political system, leaving us without the tools needed to manage the chaos.

Will we start to pay attention to urbanization, now that the consequences of political polarization are becoming a daily reality? The fate of the “American Experiment” depends on it. niskanencenter.org/blog/the-densi…

By the way, if you’d rather listen to this paper, it’s available here (Read by none other than @willwilkinson himself): soundcloud.com/user-866129262…

And for more ideas on how to address regional inequality, check out our Struggling Regions project, headed up by @hamandcheese in partnership with @RockefellerFdn. strugglingregions.com

@hamandcheese @RockefellerFdn Interested to see what @mattyglesias, @MaxBoot, @J_RubinBlogger, @anneapplebaum, @SykesCharlie, @jonathanchait, @Edsall and others think about Will’s thesis!