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Title: The Road to Conflict: How the American Highway System Divides Communities and Polarizes Politics

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2011

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Abstract: What explains the partisan divide between Democratic urban areas and their Republican peripheries? This project develops one explanation: that spatial policies --those that shape geographic space--change politics by manipulating the geographic distribution of citizens. This argument is developed by focusing on the impact of the Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in American history, on American political geography. Drawing upon qualitative and quantitative historical data, I show that transportation networks like the Interstate Highway System catalyze processes by which Democrats and Republicans sort into separate communities. This partisan geographic divergence culminates in a growing partisan gap in place-based policy interests. Highways' contribution to geographic partisan sorting is tested through two empirical analyses that apply matching, regression, and other methods of causal inference to GIS data. Exploiting a database containing project histories from every segment of the Interstate Highway System, the first analysis shows that suburban counties in which Interstate highways were built became more Republican than they would have been otherwise. The second analysis shows that these suburban changes gave rise to a larger urban-suburban partisan gap in metropolitan areas with dense Interstate highway networks. Survey data from the 1970s and 1980s suggest that highways operated through an individual mechanism in which partisan differences in preference for suburban residence were facilitated by the new transportation infrastructure. The final chapters build upon these key findings to examine highways' additional social and policy implications. The first of these chapters shows that highways affected a range of socioeconomic correlates of partisanship, both in suburban areas and across the urban-suburban divide. A final chapter explores whether this partisan divide extends to attitudes towards highways and their alternatives. Contrary to the bipartisan adage that "there are no Republican roads or Democratic roads," national and local opinion surveys reveal that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to favor spending on highways over their alternatives, and this partisan gap is larger when respondents are forced to make a tradeoff between different transportation options. Changes in the geographic distribution of partisans thus have coincided with a partisan gap around the very policies that contributed to partisan geographic polarization.

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Authors: Nall, Clayton

Institution: Harvard University

Department: Political Science

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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Cambridge, MA

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Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS

Topics: Housing and Segregation, Migration and Immigration

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