Why are cities so uniformly far to the left politically? Some hypotheses:
1. They attract the educated professionals who are on the left. But suburbs also attract educated professionals, and they are not so uniformly left.
2. They create many more externalities, and you can only tolerate living there if you have faith in government. The more dense the population, the more potential there is for some people to harm others, and the less likely it is that the people harming one another know one another well enough to resolve the issue on their own. The example I use is a noisy party that disturbs other people. If it happens in a small town, you have a discussion among the neighbors. If it happens in an apartment building, you call the police.
3. Cities have more division of labor. This selects for people who are less oriented toward doing things for themselves, which in turn selects for people who want more government.
4. Cities have more wealth that can be extracted by government. Winning public office can be more profitable in a city, so more ambitious people run for mayor of a big city than run for mayor of Podunk.
Scale – Issues in cities are experienced at scale. Peoples’ assumption is that they need to be addressed at scale, instinctively that means government or quasi-governmental bodies.
The biggest thing government does for most people is schools and public order. It’s not like these people moving to the suburbs don’t need government services. Rather, the cities fail to provide them. Young single professionals don’t need those services and this don’t mind if their governments fail to provide them.
1) Minority presence is high in cities.
2) The economics of cities (bad schools, expensive real estate) selection for low marriage rate low fertility people, especially relative to their socioeconomic class.
It’s certainly possible for there to be conservatives in a city (see Staten Island), but generally it tended to be in the form of “white ethnic” neighborhoods. They have mostly been driven out of the cities by a variety of factors, post 60s crime and school decay being a big one. Post 60s de facto segregation holds a lot of cities together but it requires large income inequality.
Isn’t it easy to just ask people why they moved to the suburbs. “We got married and had a kid and then…”
I think this is the right answer: cities select strongly for people without children, whose perspective leans short-term and cosmopolitan relative to people with children.
Perhaps this question might help: why do we have any red urban areas at all? How did that come to pass and what variables might be in play in those red urban areas vs. in the blue urban areas?
San Diego, CA
Jacksonville, FL
Fort Worth, TX (go North Texas!)
Etc.
None of those places are actually urban. They are large suburbs.
1. begs the question of why educated professionals are on the left. That aside, suburbs tend to attract educated professionals who are (have become) parents, and becoming a parent has a well-known effect of making people more conservative. This accounts for the suburbs not being so uniformly left and increases the plausibility of this hypothesis compared to the other three economics-based ones.
The educated professionals question seems incredibly obvious to me and I assumed it was to everyone else and that is why it is never addressed. In the modern West educated professionals livelihoods are overwhelmingly dependent on capture. Educated professionals in the West haven’t been productive (in a degree that would justify them being in their positions) for about 50 years and yet have been acquiring more wealth and status, this requires large amounts of government coercion.
It’s mostly number 2.
Modern right/left controversies tend to be mostly about whether government should do more or less. Regardless of where you fall on that theoretical spectrum in terms of general principles, you probably recognize that more externalities mean more need for government involvement.
The best example is probably municipal water and sewer. If you live in the country, it makes perfect sense for you to have your own well and septic system. In cities, one person polluting the water supply could make thousands sick. Seeing government successfully solve some problems, and experiencing that everyday, makes you more receptive to the idea it might be able to solve other problems. Not needing that yourself makes you less concerned about whether or not other people need it.
There is another aspect to the noise issue that makes it a good example. When people live farther away from each other they can make a lot more noise without disturbing anyone in the first place.
Once polarization starts, it tends to be self perpetuating as people have a natural tendency to identify others as either allies or enemies.
Hey, I came here to post this but you beat me to it! Totally agree.
The thing is, most people in suburbs and the countryside get the same services from the government the city dwellers do, few actually own their own generators and septic system; and I think people in cities may be *less* willing to call the police to deal with noise or other externalities than people in suburbs.
Urban density also means services for which there are economies of scale are more easily provided by markets than in low density places: schooling, healthcare, delivery services. Rural areas are much more dependent on heavily subsidized hospitals, public schools, the postal service etc. And the fact that almost all of the political issues that divide cities and suburbs/small towns have nothing to do with externalities (and aren’t local anyway) casts suspicion on this as well I think.
It’s tempting to talk about externalities but most priorities of the left actually are not about externalities: welfare, unions, wokeness. Those are all about wealth transfers and/or raising the status of one group over another, both zero-sum games.
Thus, I favor a version of (4): not wealth per se, but a diversity of interest groups. Wealthy suburbs have a lot of wealth but, since they are homogenous, there are not as many distinct groups to compete for wealth transfers and status. Cities have a greater number of special interest groups that try to seize and expand the powers of government to capture wealth transfers and raise their own status.
This also explains why the Left prefers to nationalize politics rather than keep issues local. National politics includes the greatest number interest groups — all of the nation’s interest groups actually — and thus presents more opportunities to transfer wealth and raise/lower status of various groups.
The real question is why cities are progressive and other areas are less so. For instance, a suburban HOA can be very intrusive, ‘big government’ and so on – but it is unlikely to be progressive in any more than a defensive manner (i.e. to avoid legal liability).
In the end, I’m not yet sure. I would have talked about the transgenerational nature of the rural community, but that doesn’t really explain the effect in the transient suburbs. It may be a self-sorting effect about family size and structure? But it seems to me that the trends are long lasting (i.e. going back to the 1800s) and that many of those trends are more recent.
London
BY WILLIAM BLAKE
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
I disagree with the framing of “so uniformly far to the left.” That implies a preference for positions that are “far to the left”, which I think is probably overstated. To be sure, cities reliably vote for Democratic candidates over Republican candidates, but it’s a mistake to equate that to a preference for policies “far to the left.” That may be true in some places, but not universally. Democratic votes != votes “far to the left”.
As to the question, any answer that focuses on contemporary politics misses the point. City-dwellers have been more liberal than rural folk for millenia. My two takes: (1) The Port City effect. Cities have greater turnover and greater anonymity. This will yield a more libertine social environment. (2) The Cosmopolitan Effect. If you are exposed to others who live differently from yourself, you’re more likely to recognize the non-determinancy of your own society. In a memetic sense, merely knowing about other cultures and people makes you less likely to defer to “how things have always been done” (i.e. conservative beliefs). It is not coincidental that anti-intellectualism is a feature that has commonly arisen in conservative movements over the centuries.
Hayek notes “specialists” are more likely to be collectivists, because they imagine how much better the world would be they and people like them could be given power to control others. Cities attract specialists for professional reasons.
Cities also create a lot of *positive* externalities. You can live on the street 365 days a year in San Francisco and you will find something to eat and won’t get eaten by wild animals. You don’t have a lot of homeless people living outside cities. Indigent people are more likely to vote for more government services.
I googled “fastest growing cities”. The list that came up is overwhelmingly in TX, AZ, FL, AZ….I suspect these are not typically Left-leaning cities. I think static cities, further along the line of Mancur Olson’s decline into “distributional coalitions” are more likely to lean Left, because a major function for government there is distributing spoils, a significant portion of which is financed by borrowing.
Large American cities resemble 3rd world countries in many ways. Rich and poor with little middle class. Corrupt governance. Elections in 3rd world counties produce more authoritarian rather than libertarian results. That maps roughly to the Left in America.
I’d guess around 2/3rds of the answer is demographics. In the past we’ve gotten good cross-tabulation data and the differences in features and groups are immense. So if you’ve got areas that tend to concentrate people with multiple features which all correlate with leaning-left, you’ll end up with very left-leaning places.
For example in 2012 the Romney rate for homeowners v renters, and holding everything else equal, was 56% v 35%, and cities have more renters. For marrieds v singles it was 57% v 37%, and cities have more singles. For whites v non-whites it was 59% v 44%, and cities have more non-whites.
But the major story is blacks, because of the extreme urbanization due to the historical contingency of The Great Migration. In 1910, over 90% of blacks lived in the South, and 80% of those in rural areas. By 1970, only half of blacks lived in the South, and four-fifths of American blacks lived in cities. Like foreign immigrants, these domestic immigrants, when they moved away from very poor areas, they went looking for economic opportunities and ethnic enclaves which were mostly in the cities.
I think the other third of the reason is city-specific reasons, but again, it’s mostly due to who lives in cities.
Republican large cities like Tulsa and Colorado Springs prove this rule, because they lack large black populations and are mostly composed of suburban homeowners.
Staten Island is still 60% white and only 11% black. It went for Trump. It’s not impossible to live densely and support Trump. But Staten Island is…a literal island. Its unique situation has allowed it to hole up as one of the last “white ethnic” urban strongholds left.
I think this is largely it.
You can add additional factors:
Education. Being to some degree leftist seminaries, the highly educated skew left, and if you’ve got a good set of credentials most of the jobs those credentials will get you are in cities. If you don’t have much education, the bigger cities are expensive and your income potential is usually quite a bit lower.
Personality. If you’re an artsy person, you’re going to want to congregate in places with Museums, art festivals, broadway shows, etc. Artsy people tend to be pretty left leaning. Conversely, if you’re a “leave me alone and get off my lawn” type person, you’re probably conservative and also much happier having some property in the exurbs/rural areas.
Social networks and hesitancy to move to some place substantially different from a culture perspective reinforce these factors. If your office is full of liberal people, people who aren’t otherwise too inclined towards politics will probably see liberal views as normative and vice versa for conservative areas. Many liberal people would never move to the sticks and many conservative people would never consider living in San Francisco.
Related to (4), I’ve noticed that per-capita taxes are higher in the core city than the suburbs (at least in my metro area; probably others). Intuitively, this should not be so – it seems like it should be cheaper to provide the same municipal services to 1,000 people in an apartment building than 1,000 people scattered about a square mile. My hypothesis is that it’s easier to switch from one suburb to another. If the local gov’t in North Suberbville becomes too inefficient, then South Suburbville is probably a close substitute. But for many people, there are unique benefits of living in an urban core that can’t be replicated elsewhere; hence it’s easier for a big city government to extract wealth.
(That is more of an effect of cities in general than a cause of urban leftism. As for causes, Jonathan Haidt’s moral dimensions theory probably offers some insights. And once a tribe’s proportion within a population reaches critical mass, that changes the signaling behavior of everyone else…)
I like Ryan’s observations.
Cities were created originally to benefit from scale economies of defense and trade. But today, for some reason, the scale economics of having lots of people living close together doesn’t work – it’s more expensive.
Of course, a lot of the cost of government in large cities isn’t direct operating expenditure. It’s liabilities accrued over time – pensions and benefits.
And his observation about switching cost, the ease of moving between jurisdictions outside of cities to escape bad government, identifies an important mechanism for a vicious cycle in cities. I think switching cost is particularly high for people with government jobs or who receive government benefits.
I would add that there’s a lot of fixed capital in cities – buildings, infrastructure. You can have libertarians build a factory, but once it’s there an cannot be moved, it’s a target for extraction from leftist interests – unions, corrupt politicians. “Highway Robbers” prey on highways, because the cost of not using the highway is large compared to the cost of paying off the robbers.
This ties to my point about Mancur Olson’s distributional coalitions.
The Curley Effect. Get those that disagreed with you to move out of cities.
San Diego voted 61% Biden
Duval county (Jacksonville) 51% Biden
Tarrant County (Ft Worth) Biden by a few hundred votes
Its close, but none of these three is reported as red this cycle.
Cities have more single people.
This is important— the marriage gap is huge.
There are related amplifying factors – people in urban cities are single for different reasons and the family structures diverge rather than converge. Rural children who go through urban environments come out differently – very differently – than those who go through commuter schools and vocational programs, for example.
I think the answer is also in considering the reciprocal.
Looking at cities rationally, they provide scale, and scale provides the economic base to do much more. They are more efficient economic zones, but they demand cooperation.
The people that are not attracted to (or perhaps we should say repelled by) that are of a certain political stance (the costs of constant cooperating and tolerating the density/churn are not worth it). Subtracting them from the politics of cities hollows out a more rounded political mindset
I can’t decide if this is a related or unrelated topic but: why is there so little competition at the ideological or policy level today? The urban-dwellers that I know aren’t happy with the current state of their cities – poor schools, crime, homelessness – but they never are presented with a choice for a different kind of approach. This didn’t seem to be the case in the late 80s / early 90s, when a number of cities were dramatically improving their quality of life.
Urban areas, by virtue of their dense population, attract and encourage collectivist/solidarity in thinking; while rural areas attract/encourage individualist/subsidiarity in thinking.
The Left is more attractive to the hive-mind, collectivist philosophy. The Right, witheringly poor it is at this, is more attractive to the individualist.
Perhaps the better way to view it is the individualist is more repulsed by the Left than the Right.
I don’t think ‘tolerance of government intervention’ is the main driver here.
Looking just to American cities, my off-the-cuff theory is that cities foster, or require, tolerance of diversity. Cities especially foreground the kinds of diversity that are apparent at a glance (e.g. the racial diversity of Queens or the sexual diversity of The Castro). The party that celebrates/tolerates these is the left-wing party.
In the same way that abortion makes the Democrats a non-starter for many Americans, discomfort with (and sometimes hostility for) these types of diversity makes conservatives a non-starter for urban Americans. Republicans do well in these environments by being conspicuously diversity-tolerant (Rudy cross dressing at a campaign stop) or true RINOs (Michael Bloomberg).
Bloomberg demonstrated that a neoliberal candidate could do well in an urban setting, though it’s proven hard to replicate his success. But a conservative candidate is much harder to imagine.
Is my rough theory.
Except the people living in these cities are highly segregated. If you living in an almost exclusively UMC white (maybe a little Asian) neighborhood and going to white (and maybe a little Asian) public/private schools…you aren’t celebrating diversity. You are paying millions for a brownstone or 40k/year kindergarten tuition to get as little “diversity” as you can.
It seems to me that people in the suburbs as fine with that level of diversity too, they just prefer to get it more cheaply through zoning regs.
I agree. Cities are diverse places. Conservative ideologies are almost definitionally adverse to diversity. Cities will therefore be more liberal than conservative.
As to asdf: It seems to me that the segregation issue is neither here nor there. First, whatever the level of integration, it is almost certainly higher in the city than in suburbs or rural areas. Second, I think it is a straw man to define “diversity” in such a way as to only mean a non-segregated melting-pot. I think history strongly indicates that some level of self-segregation is normal and expected any time we have majority and minority groups (see also, e.g., Schelling’s work). The more important thing is the temperamental/mood affiliation associated with people different from yourself. By necessity, those living in a city are more likely to be tolerant/accepting/open etc. to those who are different than themselves.
At least as far as worldview, cities strike me as pretty homogeneous and not particularly tolerant. I think you’d find a broader array of viewpoints in rural Alabama (and definitely any northern suburb) than New York or San Francisco, where there’s definitely a strong, socially enforced political orthodoxy. I think this applies to religion too; e.g., I’m doubtful NYC is more tolerant of, say, evangelical Christians than rural Alabama is of atheists (‘minority religions’ are generally excepted though).
I think it’s the kind of people they attract (poor people on the one hand and well off, educated, young people on the other, especially without children). Older people and people with kids tend to live in lower cost of living and lower density places.
It’s worth noting that once there’s even a slight difference, self selection and peer effects will exacerbate it. It may be that cities would tend to be 60% left and 40% right, but once that happens, progressives will tend to opt to live in cities to be near people like them, conservatives will be more likely to opt for suburbs or smaller towns, and people who live in cities will also change their politics to be like the people around them. So I don’t think it requires an overwhelming tilt to ultimately end up with a pretty big difference between cities and elsewhere.
Urban areas see benefits from government programs that are larger, earlier, and/or more conspicuous.
It may or may not be that improved highways in the Palouse are more expensive, per capita, but light rail is obvious and has a bigger impact on people’s lives. Once it exists, it is assumed to good, because it was an improvement over the old status quo.
And how many research universities are in rural areas?
In addition, programs acquire a devoted consituency, and that skews to urban areas. Regular users of public transits favor improvments strongly; everyone else can be “meh” but the levy will still pass. Those renters and rentees who rely on Section 8 have a serious stake in avoiding cuts in Section 8.
Charles Ham found, writing in 1886, that freedom of thought was being circumscribed and part of it was both the division of labor and the crowding into cities creating an interdependency that promotes mimicry.
“Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are catchpenny phrases. There is much of the former, but very little of the latter. Speech is generally the result of automatic thought rather than of ratiocination. Independent thought is of all mental processes the most difficult and the most rare; habit, tradition, and reverence for antiquity unite to forbid it, and these combined influences are strengthened by the law of heredity. The tendency to automatic action of the mind is still further promoted by the environment of modern life. The crowding of populations into cities, and the division and subdivision of labor in the factory and the shop, and even in the so-called learned professions, have a tendency to increase the dependence of the individual upon the mass of society. And this interdependence of the units of society renders them more and more imitative, and hence more and more automatic both mentally and physically.”
—Charles H. Ham, ‘Mind and Hand: manual training, the chief factor in education’
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The following comes from Civil Government in the United States (1902), John Fiske with the observation that the republican form of government doesn’t seem to work well in cities with their sundry of services provided. I would observe that in the 20th century, the tendency was for state and especially federal government to become more city like in the direct service provision with the accompanying problems of corruption and mismanagement:
“Our republican government, which, after making all due allowances, seems to work remarkably well in rural districts, and in the states, and in the nation, has certainly been far less successful as applied to cities. ”
After displaying the long list of positions in city government, Fiske offers:
“This long list may serve to give some idea of the mere quantity of administrative work required in a large city. Obviously under such circumstances city government must become more or less of a a mystery mystery to the great mass of citizens. They cannot watch its operations as the inhabitants of a small village can watch the proceedings of their township and county governments. Much work must go on which cannot even be intelligently criticized without such special knowledge as it would be idle to expect in the average voter, or perhaps in any voter. It becomes exceedingly difficult for the taxpayer to understand just what his money goes for, or how far the city expenses might reasonably be reduced ; and it becomes correspondingly easy for municipal corruption to start and acquire a considerable headway before it can be detected and in some rechecked. In some respects city government is harder to watch intelligently than the government of the state or of the nation. For these wider governments are to some extent limited to work of general supervision. As compared with the city, they are more concerned with the establishment and enforcement of certain general principles, and less with the administration of endlessly complicated details. I do not mean to be understood as saying that there is not plenty of intricate detail about state and national governments. I am only comparing one thing with another, and it seems to me that one chief difficulty with city government is the bewildering vastness and multifariousness of the details with which it is concerned. The modern city has come to be a huge corporation for carrying on a huge business with many branches, most of which call for special aptitude and training.
“As these points have gradually forced themselves upon public attention there has been a tendency in many of our large cities toward remodeling their governments on new principles. The most noticeable feature of this tendency is the increase in the powers of the mayor. A hundred years ago our legislators and constitution-makers were much afraid of what was called the “one-man power.””
“As compared with the city, they are more concerned with the establishment and enforcement of certain general principles, and less with the administration of endlessly complicated details. ”
+1
The devil is in the details. Also the corruption.
“The modern city has come to be a huge corporation for carrying on a huge business with many branches, most of which call for special aptitude and training.”
This is related to the #2 externalities, and #3 specialization, as well both #1 educated professionals, as well as #4 greedy rent seekers.
There’s significant influence of all these.
As noted in comments above, the marriage rates are likely quite different, with a far higher percentage of working & marriage aged singles in cities. (#5?)
Missing is #6 – Colleges have become extremely leftist, and are the leading intolerant anti-Republican / right American institution, almost always trying and most often succeeding in the indoctrination of students with both an undue respect for gov’t and a distaste for much of profit oriented business.
Also missing is #7. Comfy people with good jobs seeing a lot more poor people. In the country, there are poor folk taking care of themselves, or trying to, and not so obviously helpless beggars. The “lazy drunks” are known, and have been known since they were younger, and the history of their bad luck plus their many many bad decisions & bad behavior is known. They are known poor and often considered undeserving poor – they don’t need “more help” so much as need to stop making dumb choices.
In cities, the poor seem even poorer, since they’re begging outside stores or restaurants filled with stuff they can’t afford. “From no fault of their own” – or at least many comfy city folk can think. And they do NOT want to talk to the beggars to find out. But they don’t want poor people to be poor.
The left’s takeover of colleges has allowed the Democrats to claim to be the only Party that “cares”. They care about the poor, the lonely, the uneducated … and it’s better, it’s morally superior, to care. They show this care by supporting gov’t programs that promise to solve the problem. Only people who don’t care, the bad people, are against gov’t solving the problem.
I think the answer is much more simple – Republicans haven’t even made an attempt to establish grassroots organizations in urban cities for decades. They’ve simply accepted the manifest destiny view of minority voters and assumed that they can’t win, so why try?
Cities have become more uniformly left because the middle classes have departed:
https://danielhertz.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/incseggif.gif?w=572&zoom=2
In the Chicago area, there are more wealthy households in various suburbs and exurbs than in the city. So what requires explanation is not why Chicago attracts wealthy professionals so much as it is why Chicago repels the middle class.
The urban environment itself pushes people toward liberalism. Surrounded at all times by strangers with whom one shares little in common, the appeal of social conservatism is diminished. What is there to conserve in a crush of randomized humanity, which is already so close to the max entropy state of atomized individuals? Family life is more expensive in cities, so family-oriented people move to the suburbs, (which is really just a less advanced state of alienation.) This pushes cities still farther left.
For conservatism to prosper, you need roots, traditions, organic community–human interaction that goes beyond the merely transactional. Unsurprisingly, conservatism is facing long-term decline under the churning of capitalist “creative destruction.”
Don’t underestimate needing government as a substitute for weaker communities. Because cities tend to be transient, there are fewer strong tribal type communities (big families, churches, etc) that reliably function as a safety net.
You know, I don’t really have a comment, other than I wanted to reflect on the comments of others. Most of these comments seem thoughtful, polite and well reasoned. Arnold, I don’t know quite how you’ve been able to dial up the quality of your comments, at least compared to many of the other blogs I follow, where the comment quality tends to range from so-so to atrocious.
🙂 🙂 I so totally agree that Arnold’s comments, so far, have avoided rage wars.
A few posts back, somebody’s comment edited/ deleted to reduce personal attacks, I think that was good. I also think most commenters wisely post their thoughts, but not argue too much about them if somebody posts disagreement. In many cases I would like to respond to each of the comments, but it’s not my blog, so I don’t quite feel it’s my place to do that.
I get the feeling Arnold is looking for the Truth, including thinking about different ideas, not trying to win an argument. I very much like the comments here, too.
Thanks Tom for the second.
Sorry, Arnold, I don’t agree with you. First, as much as no two humans are alike, no two cities are alike. This implies that any statement about cities must be based on well-identified similarities and differences —and that one should be cautious because the lists are always tentative.
Second, none of your four beliefs qualify as well-identified similarities. For example, your second point on externalities. Increasing agglomeration of people appears to lead to a larger number of externalities, but no two agglomerations are alike. History matters and law matters. Unfortunately, most economists ignore history and law when discussing an agglomeration in general and societies in particular. You have been posting about cultural evolution whose main lesson, so far, is that history and law matter (Ken Boulding wrote about the evolutionary interpretation of history more than 40 years ago, and Hayek wrote extensively about his evolutionary interpretation of society’s history and law more than 40 years ago). How can anyone ignore the different evolution of tort law and its implication for externalities? (Please remember what Jim Buchanan and others argue about externalities 60 years ago)
Third, your presumption that cities are so uniformly far to the left politically requires evidence that as far as I know, it’s not available. More importantly, you can hardly get it at any reasonable cost (to start with you should define clearly what leftist means and how to assess degrees for each one of the relevant dimensions).
Fourth, as shown by a quick review of basic sources, the history of all cities is complex enough to remind us that no “real-time” comparison makes sense. Since comparing humans of different ages soon becomes hard, we should ask ourselves how we would compare “eternal” cities, ones which in principle can live forever by transforming themselves.
Fifth, our knowledge of all the previous points is so speculative that you run the risk of deviating from “finding the truth, and seeking whatever you are seeking”. I will write on this in a separate comment.
Minorities — they came for the manufacturing jobs and stay for the government jobs. Obviously those dependent on government jobs and services vote left.
Affluent professionals — they are in cities because they value the urban amenities enough to put up with all of the downsides (high taxes, noise, crime, need to pay for private education, etc). This big city package filters out all but left-leaning professionals (other professionals won’t put up with the negatives).
Young singles — left-leaning young adults come to cities for excitement in their 20s while their conservative cousins tend to marry and have kids much younger and aren’t particularly attracted to city life. For me this is literally true — my two kids in their late 20s are big-city singles. Their more conservative cousins of a similar ages are married homeowners who’ve already started families, and never moved to a big city (even briefly).
This piece from an earlier, funnier era of The Onion seems on point.
I have 4 broad ideas there, some of which others have nicely put.
1: Unions. Labor unions pretty much were the left for the 20th century, and cities were where big manufacturing happened until the 1980s or so. Now manufacturing is gone, but civil service unions are big, filling the gap.
2: Democrats are a mugging away from being republicans, and people who get mugged are probably more likely to leave. This is a little more tongue in cheek, but I suspect there is a lot to it. People seem to be a bit more “law and order” if they or someone close to them has been a direct victim of violence and crime. When cities have extreme problems with crime people are more likely to get mugged and leave, and people who tend to think crime is the fault of the person committing it (as opposed to the system etc.) are going to find the idea of cities unpleasant in general. So modern cities with their high crime rates tend to select for people who are not worried about crime (so not parents) or believe it is fixable if only the right programs were in place to help criminals.
3: Living in the country requires more doing for one’s self. I don’t mean suburbs, I mean the very rural areas where the percentage of Republican voters gets above 60%. Other than electricity there are basically zero public services. (The county I grew up in doesn’t have a policeman, for instance.) One effect of that is you get used to the idea of fixing your own stuff, providing your own stuff, and largely being left alone. Things that are annoying in a city or town like needing to get a permit to build a deck are seen as monstrous, because who the hell would even see the thing other than you? The tendency is then towards letting people do what they want unless they are actively causing harm. The threshold for being considered to cause harm is really low in cities by comparison, so people who like to do things themselves tend to leave. People who really want public services and people to make sure everyone else behaves are more attracted to cities.
4: Conservatives tend to think people are more like themselves, so dislike beggars more than liberals who think they must have some horrible history they can’t imagine. This is a pretty broad brush, but I think it is far more accurate than the argument that people on the right care less about the poor than people on the left. (People on the right give their own money to help the poor, while people on the left tend to push for government programs to give other people’s money to the poor.)
People on the right tend to see the behaviors that make people poor, apply that to themselves (there but for the grace of god go I) and respond “Stop doing the bad thing and do the good things like me, and you will be better off”.
People on the left tend to see circumstances that make people poor, think “I can’t even imagine being in that situation” and say “It’s not your fault, we need to help you.”
Both are true to an extent, and everyone does a little of both. But where someone on the left sees more deserving poor, someone on the right sees someone who could be a lot better off if they wanted to be by changing their bad habits.
What’s that have to do with cities? If you see homeless people, drug users, local crime/riots, people pooping on the streets, etc. and tend to think “These people are just making themselves and everyone else worse off. This is why we can’t have nice things,” living in the city is going to be pretty miserable. If you see the social problems of the city, e.g. rioting, as reasonable responses to a system that arbitrarily does things to people, then it isn’t so bad.
Sorry for the long response; this is something I have been thinking about for a long time.
Didn’t Mancur Olson cover this? In a sense, rich cities that have been around for a long time have a lot of rents that can be seized — both material and positional — that cannot be easily transferred. Hence a symbiotic relationship develops between the weath makers and the wealth transferers. After a time it becomes impossible to make productive use of the great resources available without making deals with the parasites who run things. Leaving or abandoning the place doesn’t produce the same opportunities in the medium run elsewhere, so they manage the costs of the rent-seeking in order to keep benefiting from the city. But without eternal reform and renewal, at some point the parastic rent-seeking destroys the basic productive capacity of the city itself or produces incentives for new centers to emerge.
The benefits of cities are enough to allow their governments to perform poorly and not drive people away. They do a bad job in part because they can get away with it. Tiebout effects exist, but they are weak.
This implies that reform is very difficult, because there is little incentive for it.
1. Is it the same in Europe where the poor tend to live in the suburbs?
2. How can North Dakota go 65% for Trump and Vermont go 66% for Biden? They look like very similar states to me.
Simple answer: workers affiliated with government are uniformly aligned with the party of big government. University workers and Government workers are concentrated in cities. Also, note that University workers and Government workers are more uniformly left and more left than urban cities in general.
An aspect of #3 – in cities most folk for most services go to strange professionals, not friends or those recommended by friends or relatives.
In cities, with strangers, it’s very easy to NOT go again for a service if one is slightly dissatisfied. When it’s a friend or social contact, it’s harder to say no; it’s harder to go somewhere else the next time; it’s harder to choose the professional you want for your own personality comfort.
The separation of social from professional is more difficult with fewer choices in towns or country.
Different value systems about work, pay, and service might follow from the thinness in connections between social and service providing professional.
It’s simple in the city – pay for the service you want, and get it good enough or pay somebody else. The realities of actually doing the service are less visible in the city than in the country. This mindset, when applied to gov’t, means any time a city person wants “more service”, the reaction is “higher taxes”.
That logic might explain why very rural or very small town are different from everyone else, but it doesn’t explain why the cities are so different from their own suburbs, where the impersonal experience of ordinary, routine commercial transactions is mostly the same.
The census says at least 80% of the country lives in proximity to “urban” areas, with denser populations and closer to big metropolitan cities. But we don’t see that 80% tending to vote the same way; the residents inside big city limits are really different.
I think there are two other possible factors:
– The Kuznets Curve: Cities tend to be richer overall leading to a general willingness to accept a larger social welfare state.
– Visible inequality: Cities tend to have less homogeneity in social class than suburbs. Seeing big differences in wealth might encourage redistribution