The Spatial Contexts of Civic Engagement

• In Event: Where We Live: How Neighborhoods Shape Civic Engagement

Abstract

How does space shape civic and political engagement? Civic engagement is correlated with age and socio-economic status, but is it also correlated with the physical structure of neighborhoods, such as housing structure and density? Neighborhood density is certainly correlated with residents’ unplanned social encounters — the people residents encounter in the course of their daily routines — but does it also shape the probability and type of civic behavior in which residents engage? The research so far makes very crude distinctions between urban, suburban and rural areas drawing on blunt Census definitions. Drawing on unique geocoded Census and voting data, and on original survey data with black, white and immigrant respondents from two metro areas, Atlanta and Philadelphia, this paper explores the relation between neighborhood structural characteristics and residents’ civic engagement. Its starting hypothesis is that, controlling for residents’ socio demographic characteristics, forms of housing and neighborhoods are correlated with distinct forms and rates of civic and political participation, with implications for our understandings of how spatial contexts shapes politics.

Authors

• Michael Jones-Correa, University of Pennsylvania

• Joshua Harrington Davidson, University of Pennsylvania