City Limits to Partisan Polarization in the American Public

• In Event: Is US Local Politics Becoming "Nationalized"?

Abstract

How pervasive is partisan sorting and polarization over public policies in the American public? We examine whether the patterns of partisan sorting and polarization documented for national issues extend to a wide range of local public policies that shape economic development. Employing conjoint survey experiments in representative surveys for eight U.S. metropolitan areas, we define and estimate conditional average marginal component effects (CAMCE) to measure the extent of partisan sorting and polarization over local development policies. We find that even strong partisans are not highly sorted by political party, much less polarized, in their policy opinions. The same voters who disagree greatly about national issues have fairly similar preferences about local development issues. We argue that this is a result of the competitive pressures among local governments that limit disagreements about what works to improve public policy outcomes and the lower salience of partisan cues about these issues.

Authors

• Amalie Sofie Jensen, Princeton University

• William Marble, Stanford University

• Kenneth F. Scheve, Stanford University

• Matthew Slaughter, Dartmouth College