Why density changes political preferences — and what that means for Michigan’s politics
When you step outside and see people nearby, your political preferences shift. The idea is so simple it retains surprising durability. Living in close proximity to your neighbors significantly changes your own political affiliation — the more neighbors you have within a smaller radius, the more liberal your political positions. The key number that this trend pivots sharply on is 800. If there are 800 people or less within one square mile, there’s a 66% chance individuals in that area vote Republican. With more than 800 people, that number flips, favoring Democrats. The liberal or conservative leans become more extreme depending on the number of people you add or take away from this hypothetical neighborhood or city. As an example, the bluest American counties have 1500 people per square mile.
Over the past two decades, national and state voting maps consistently reveal this trend that it’s become obvious to political nerds. Residents in the largest cities overwhelmingly vote for Democrats in presidential elections. In Michigan, like in all other states, the results are the same: residents in large and even small cities — including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Traverse City, Flint and Saginaw — vote for Democrats, as long as city residents are clustered together. The trend seems to be growing more true, not less.
But this begs the question of why? What compels people to be more liberal the more people they see and interact with? What is going on in their heads to compel them to vote for more liberal policies? And, what are the ways this could unveil itself in Michigan?
More density, more openness
One theory is that exposing oneself to many different people — many different narratives and experiences and beliefs — opens the self to many possibilities and therefore many novel solutions to old problems. This is antithetical to conservative ideology. If conservatives meet fewer people, it’s almost guaranteed that they will meet less people from different backgrounds than their own. They, in turn, could believe their worldview is more likely to reflect the only worldview. It may explain why conservatives have a much harder time adjusting to America’s demographic shifts — especially as they are occurring in cities — and the subsequent changes in media representation. Cities are often hubs of change. They historically encourage people from all over the world to engage in commerce and nuanced forms of dance, food, language and narratives. This model suggests it’s not just the amount of people that changes voting patterns, it’s also the differences people carry altering political behavior.
Thus, open values, ones that are much more prone to change and adapt to the political climate, are more amenable to city life than more closed, established beliefs. While conservatives want to enshrine their values — and the values of others — in stone, our changing cities and demographic shifts — in addition to active policymaking — could, nonetheless, lead to significant political and social changes. If people were highly encouraged to live in more dense areas, surrounded by people in parks and apartment buildings, small homes and schools, their political preferences are likely to change. By maintaining different culture and ethnic touchstones but becoming cozier in relationship to others, people tend to like those nearer them and are more likely to adopt their political preferences. In psychology, this phenomenon is called the “mere exposure effect,” meaning the more we see the same people, the more familiar those people become to us, the more we tend to like them.
The problem with this argument is that it falls into a directionality problem, a chicken-or-egg trap. More than a decade ago, journalist Bill Bishop argued that like-minded people are moving to spaces to live closer to other like-minded people, so liberals are more likely to live near liberals and vice-versa. But even if that’s true, what about the inverse — do cities transform people to be more open-minded as well? Is the people-based chicken or the place-based egg driving the narrative?
In a Cambridge University Press paper, researchers Gregory J. Martin and Steven W. Webster found it to be the latter. While Democrats are more likely than their Republican-voting counterparts to move to denser places (thus proving the chicken argument), that argument is limited. In fact, most people — both liberal-and- conservative-minded people — move based on similar things, including the desire to be closer to their job, higher-quality schools, and affordable housing. Rather, the researchers found the egg-based narrative to be much more compelling. As Webster and Gregory state, voters who move to neighborhoods that carry different political orientations from their own are “much more likely to change their party affiliation to match that of their new neighbors.”
People are always trying to get by and get ahead. It’s impossible to do that if you disagree fundamentally with your neighbors. Instead, people adapt to the situation, and become a bit more like their neighbors, clustered more closely to them and the previous ones.
Michigan’s cities and suburbs
This argument aligns with what we see on the ground in Michigan. Detroit aside, the denser southeast Michigan suburbs, including Royal Oak, Ferndale, and Oak Park, vote more consistently liberal than their least dense suburban and exurban peers in Auburn Hills, Commerce Township and Livonia. The same phenomenon may be clearest in Grand Rapids, where a growing population has increased Democratic turnout, especially in the past five years.
This means that increasing density would turn those Democratic-leaning cities bluer, but it also leaves an interesting conundrum for the red-leaning exurbs. If more people are enabled to move to Auburn Hills or Commerce Township, will they adapt to the voting patterns of their new neighbors, or will the increased density create more liberal voters?
It’s hard to know, but it probably comes back to that special number of 800. The more people living in one square mile, the more likely voting habits will shift left. As population declines or people leave, the inverse is likely to occur.
Regardless, for the already-over-800-people-per-square-mile cities, like the suburban ring around Detroit, will only become more liberal the more the housing stock, good schools and good job opportunities in that area increase. If the area becomes particularly denser, that trend will become all the more apparent. But outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan is losing more and more of its population, having to forfeit a Congressional seat because of that trend. Keep pulling on that thread, and the electorate moves in quite a different direction.
