Neighborhoods That Matter: How Place and People Affect Political Participation

Abstract

Well established in the literature is that social context, like the racial or partisan composition of neighborhoods, affects individual political behavior. Less understood is how the design of neighborhoods may also influence these behaviors. This article seeks to improve how physical context is measured and to examine how the built environment subsequently affects individual political participation. Using a nationally representative survey with measures of the frequency of neighbor interaction and individual voter turnout and to which I merged respondents’ census tract information and then used Google Maps images to code respondents’ neighborhood design features, I show how the physical structure of residential places—whether homes have porches, streets are tree-lined, neighborhoods have natural gathering places—promotes neighborly exchanges that subsequently affect individual voter turnout.