CAREER: Study of the Suburban Citizenry

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Over the past fifty years, the suburban portion of the population has nearly doubled and today one in two Americans calls a suburb home. Sub urbanization has changed fundamentally the types of political communities where most Americans live: rather than being crowded in diverse central cities or isolated in rural towns, they now live in specialized municipalities that are often highly singular in their economic and racial composition and land-use. Despite the enormity of this change, we have little understanding of how these suburban social contexts are influencing citizens' perceptions of community or their attitudes towards government. Many critics bemoan the alienation and hostility to government that suburbs putatively foster, but little research has either adequately defined suburbs or tested their effects. Consequently, there is little systematic theory to explain whether or why suburbanites may be different, not just from residents of large cities but also from other people who live across the vast diversity of suburban locales. This CAREER project fills this information gap with the first-ever comprehensive Study of the Suburban Citizenry (SSC). It has three interrelated components. First, by collecting survey data from more than 2,400 respondents from 40 locales across six states and doing intensive field studies of suburban election campaigns, this project advances and tests a "conflict theory" of local democracy. This theory promises to link disparate areas of research on local political attitudes and provide a systematic explanation for how social contexts influence citizens' views on local government and community. This research focuses on how social diversity and conflict in suburbs (or the lack thereof) structures people's political beliefs, the nature of campaigns, and voting behavior. Utilizing computer assisted survey technologies, the study contains both questions specifically tailored to each locality and standard items asked of all respondents. Using data from the 2000 Census, other sources, and field research, information is appended to the survey about each locality's social composition, political institutions, media sources, and other important contextual factors. Second, this project provides a valuable resource for scholars both within American political science and social studies at large. Using these data, scholars can examine many questions such as whether suburban citizens act as "consumers" of public services, how voters make decisions in low information, non-partisan elections, and how social environments influence political attitudes. The availability of good, geo-coded data that measure community attachments and attitudes helps further multi-level analysis. Finally, as a CAREER investigation this project contains a strong educational component. It develops a community based learning curriculum for undergraduate teaching at Princeton. As part of their coursework, undergraduates will conduct intensive studies of the municipalities chosen in the survey instrument, particularly in the week before their elections. Their research will be utilized in the creation of contextual variables and their reports will be collected and published in an edited volume on suburban political campaigns. This project allows for advances in graduate student research, linking the study of local politics with that of survey research, two areas,