(iPoster) Priced Out of Democracy: Gentrification and the Erosion of Democratic Attitudes

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Opinion 2

Abstract

While no research to date has examined whether gentrification affects democratic attitudes, there is some pre-existing research on how home prices affect electoral democracy in the comparative context. For instance, Han (2024) finds that as home prices relative to income increase, electoral democracy decreases when more people are outright homeowners, as opposed to mortgage holders. Moreover, Gidron, Adams, and Horne (2020) show that economic hardship and inequality are associated with higher levels of affective polarization, suggesting that personal economic experiences shape attitudes towards out-groups. However, no research to date has assessed how gentrification broadly, and home prices specifically, affect democratic values, including affective polarization, support for democratic norms, political tolerance, and tendencies towards authoritarianism, particularly in the United States.
We argue here that gentrification will have a negative effect on democratic attitudes among longstanding residents. Because gentrification is typified by inflows of wealthier individuals, individuals might feel as if they are being pushed aside in favor of these new residents. Indeed, many long-time residents reported feeling like their local government was complicit or encouraged inflows of wealthier people (Chou and Dancygier 2021). We posit that this process might spur people to feel as if democratic systems are not responsive to them and therefore sour on democracy broadly. Moreover, changes to the demographics of an area likely increases social tensions and reduces feelings of belonging among longstanding residents. Oftentimes longstanding residents perceive that, during gentrification, the new population inflows are from groups to which they do not belong, and original residents feel politically alienated from these new residents (Chandra 2024). Longstanding residents will take perceived alienation out on political out-groups, in turn increasing affective polarization and decreasing political tolerance. Ultimately, we posit that individuals experiencing gentrification will report being less satisfied with democracy, greater levels of affective polarization, lower levels of political tolerance towards out-groups, and higher levels of authoritarianism.
In order to test our hypotheses, we rely on two empirical approaches—the first observational and the second an original survey experiment. The first employs ANES data from the 2016-2020-2024 panel with geographic identifiers, like zip code. This allows us to observe changes in political attitudes across time during the time period in which home values rose the most in the United States. Within zip codes, we operationalize gentrification using Lee and Velez’s (2023) measure, which captures both the economic facets of gentrification similar to Hammel and Wyly (1996) and Freeman (2005), but also the racial dynamics. Using a difference-in-difference model, we expect that individuals from zip codes that experience economic and demographic gentrification from 2016 to 2024 will be more likely to report lower democratic satisfaction and political tolerance, but higher levels of affective polarization and authoritarianism, compared to those in non-gentrifying communities.
In the second analysis, in order to better causally identify which dimensions of gentrification affect democratic attitudes, we employ an original survey experiment. Specifically, individuals will be exposed to one of three treatments: the first asks respondents to imagine that their hypothetical community’s home prices increased due to inflows of newer wealthier residents (financial self-interest); the second treatment exposes respondents to a similar vignette of home and rental prices increasing, and that this also results in the displacement of their longstanding friends and neighbors (social displacement); and the third treatment asks respondents to imagine home and rental prices increasing, thereby re-shaping the business and economic landscape (economic displacement). The control will instead imagine that their hypothetical community, its demographics, and economies have remained relatively stable over the past five years.

Authors

• Markie McBrayer, University of Idaho

• Florian Justwan, University of Idaho