Porches and People: Effects of Neighborhood Design on Minority Voter Turnout

• In Event: Political Mobilization and Race

Abstract

Well established in the literature is that social context, like the racial or partisan composition of neighborhoods, affect individual political behavior. Less understood is how the design of neighborhoods—whether homes have porches, streets are tree-lined, neighborhoods have natural gathering places— may also influence these behaviors. This paper asks: how do the political behaviors of either racial/ethnic or socioeconomic minorities changes when they live in neighborhoods designed to increase neighborly contacts versus those who live in neighborhoods with primarily isolating design characteristics. I use a nationally representative survey with measures of the frequency of neighbor interaction and individual voter turnout and to which I merged respondents’ census tract information and then used Google Maps images to code respondents’ neighborhood design features to address these questions.

Author

• Carrie Levan, Colby College