From Ballot Box to Block Party: “Little Sort” Strategies and the Micro-Politics of Division

• In Event: Ethnographic Approaches to Social Psychology

Abstract

National political division has become the subject of much journalistic and scholarly work, particularly with increases in political violence and distrust of institutions. Work of this ilk attends to the macro-level patterns and structural mechanisms for things like the nationalization of politics and spatial political sorting. Everyday interactions and the struggle over communities’ cultural construction are under-explored facets of political division. Through ethnographic observation and analysis of in-depth interviews (n=68) in a politically diverse small city, I examine what happens when two groups with diverging cultural frames are neighbors. I find that residents use strategies to establish a sense of belonging in three ways—finding their past, people, and place—that inform the struggle over local political culture. These findings have important implications for understanding the local as a foundation for political division and implicate it as a realm in which cultures of civil discourse can be cultivated to safeguard our democracy.

Author

• Jennifer L. Garfield-Abrams, Suffolk University