In a recently published study in Nature Human Behavior, have made use of the exact location of every registered voter in the United States to measure partisan segregation at both a large scale and a hyperlocal scale.
The result is that a large portion of Democrats live in hypersegregation, with virtually no exposure to Republicans, in their residential environment. In other words: echo chambers not only take place on Twitter and other 2.0 environments.
Measurement with respect to one thousand nearest neighbors
To calculate partisan segregation, data containing information about each of the 180,735,645 voters registered in the United States as of June 2018. The data includes approximately 80% of the voting population, as well as the exact address of almost 75% of the adult population of the United States.
In the study, it was accurately measured the distance of each voter from his or her 1,000 nearest neighbors, something unprecedented until now because sociologists did not have such precise and individualized data, which has allowed the creation of a spatially weighted matrix of approximately 180,000,000,000 cells that takes into account the distance of each voter to their closest neighbors.
In this way, segregation can be measured at any arbitrary scale of geography.
Even Democrats and Republicans who live in the same neighborhoods they separate from each other:
This classification was also observed in a variety of geographies and contexts, not only in very rural or very urban places:
But Why are Democrats and Republicans so segregated? That is the next question that should be addressed beyond this investigation.
However, one thing we can advance, in order to open the way towards fruitful hypotheses, is that there is not simply a reproduction of racial segregation: Taking racial segregation into account and isolating it, you still see a lot of partisan segregation beyond ethnicity or skin color.
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The news
Americans are so segregated that they even live apart in the same neighborhood
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.