Political Partisanship, Religion, and Local Commerce: The Spatial Distribution of Retailers on a Conservative Christian Platform

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13. Placing Politics

Abstract

How strongly associated are local commerce and ideological values? Partisan sorting, the rise of virtual communities, the expansion of conservative media outlets, and the growing political and economic power of conservative Christianity has encouraged the creation of local businesses that fulfill the economic needs of conservative Christians at an unprecedented scale . At the center of that change has been the emergence of PublicSquare, an explicitly conservative Christian e-commerce platform and business directory that frames itself as a right-wing alternative to both Amazon and Yelp. Recent events, like the rightward shift in urban centers in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, have complicated our understanding of where we would expect to see the kinds of businesses that join PublicSquare. Furthermore, existing theory can describe the geographic evolution of identity-oriented businesses in arts districts, ethnic enclaves, and gayborhoods, but little if any existing theory explains when and where business communities form around shared political and religious ideology. We examine the spatial distribution of local businesses listed on PublicSquare to understand the kinds of communities to which conservative Christian businesses would appeal. In line with received wisdom, large clusters of conservative Christian businesses formed in counties that were sparsely populated, had high shares of White residents, and voted overwhelmingly Republican in 2024. In contrast to received wisdom, however, counties with at least one retailer listed on PublicSquare spanned the country and were, on average, slightly less White and more Democratic than other counties. Preliminary analyses at the Census tract level resolve this paradox by showing that many conservative Christian businesses cluster in highly White suburbs, a region that has historically been ignored by scholarship on identity-oriented businesses, and for which political and religious ideology are rarely attributed as a causal influence on patterns of local commerce.

Authors

• Ian Kennedy, University of Illinois-Chicago

• Mahesh Somashekhar, University of Illinois-Chicago