Political Segregation of the Metropolis: Spatial Sorting by Partisan Voting in Metropolitan Minneapolis–St Paul
Keyword(s):
Recent electoral research has claimed that individuals in the United States are self–segregating along political lines. In this paper, I use the Twin Cities, Minnesota, metropolitan area as a case study to test for the presence of political segregation through statistical and spatial analyses of electoral data from 1992 to 2012. I find that while segregation by partisan voting at the individual level is comparatively low, it has increased during the study period, and there exists substantial spatial clustering in voting patterns at aggregate levels. These distinct electoral divides between central city and exurb suggest spatial sorting of the electorate in the metropolitan area.