6
Scene Power
How Scenes Influence Voting, Energize New Social Movements, and Generate Political Resources
With Christopher M. Graziul
Les Frigos is a Parisian artist collective in an abandoned rail yard of a traditional working-class neighborhood. After occupying for decades a building formerly used to cool train cars, the artist community in “the Fridge” became a focal point of the Paris underground art world in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Mitterrand national government and local authorities designated the surrounding area for one of the most ambitious redevelopment projects since Haussmann. Les Frigos did not fit into their plans and was designated for demolition. The artist community rose up, and after years of political struggle, they successfully prevented destruction of their building. Further, they carved out a recognized place for their activities within the city’s official policies as a core part of the evolving neighborhood (Sawyer 2012). Les Frigos activists joined traditional working-class solidarity themes with new issues, like preserving suitable sight lines from their building to the Seine. More generally, they sought to maintain a tone for the neighborhood—an anarcho-punk, transgressive feel—as glass and steel buildings went up around them. They fought, in other words, for a scene.
These refrigerator rebels are far from alone in linking scenes and politics. Successive local and national governments in Seoul, Korea, worked to beautify waterfronts, create cultural meeting points, and establish the city as a center of fashion and design, often meeting bitter resistance on the way. Bogotá’s charismatic and flamboyant (independent) mayor (and Green presidential candidate) Antanas Mockus sent mimes into traffic jams to encourage civility among drivers; he had opera troupes perform in poor neighborhoods to show that culture transcends class differences. Similarly ambitious political programs have emerged around the world, with the character of the scene sometimes taking center stage as a topic of political controversy and target of public policy.
These developments are part of larger transformations in many political cultures. Classical divisions between left and right are being redefined, and the range of politically salient issues and identities is expanding and diversifying. Thus, in the United States, a Republican candidate, George W. Bush, ran in 2000 on a platform of “compassionate conservatism” in which the government would have a significant role to play in improving peoples’ lives. While in office, he expanded Medicare and instituted new social programs such as No Child Left Behind. He left office with a government much larger than when he started. By contrast, Democrat Barack Obama, after a large Keynesian stimulus package in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, reduced the number of government jobs and purchases yet came out in support of gay marriage. Here are elements of the “third way” or “new political culture” tradition from Bill Clinton to Tony Blair, which melds fiscal conservatism and social liberalism.
We live in a highly complex and diverse political culture. No single factor (like affluence or education) can explain who votes for whom or where and why some political movements (like Les Frigos) thrive in some places but elsewhere fall flat. Left and right have assumed many new meanings in different contexts.
Discovering origins of these new patterns is a job for which scenes analysis is well suited. Such analysis encourages a broader view of politics—linked not only to individuals’ wealth, education, ethnicity, and religion, but also to the full range of meaningful experiences they reject or embrace. From tradition to transgression, our scenes dimensions and amenities database can capture and detail specific cultural aspects of the environment salient to national and local political scenes. To understand this landscape, we need to bring new concepts and new data together with the tried and true methods of political analysis.
The chapter proceeds in four major sections. The first discusses how scenes provide resources to mobilize for politics. Scenes grow more politically salient in general with (1) the rise of culture, (2) the rediscovery of the urbane, and (3) the new political culture. The specific dynamics of scenes’ political potency center on what we call “buzz,” the valuable resource that scenes can generate, which may be exchanged for other resources, such as money or trust, used as a political weapon, a mobilizing tool, and more. The second section illustrates how scenes and their buzz can permeate local politics by examining an episode from Toronto local politics, where groups clashed over transforming an abandoned streetcar repair yard into an arts and community center.
The third section compares all US zip codes, identifying the scenes where new social movements (NSMs) thrive. NSMs arose after the 1960s to support human rights, the environment, and social justice. Shifting from analysis of their tactics and rhetoric to the contexts that foster NSMs, we find them strongly linked to distinct local contexts—urbane, self-expressive scenes in dense, lower rent settings, with many nonwhite and educated residents. Walkability is also a major NSM catalyst, as stressed by Jane Jacobs, along with concentrations of artists. Outside these settings, despite their universalist and cosmopolitan agendas, NSM organizations are less often present.
In the fourth section, we shift to national politics. Context is again the keynote here, as we show how presidential voting patterns shift with their scenic context. From 1996 to 2012, Democratic votes were correlated with more urbane dimensions like transgression and self-expression; Republican votes, with more communitarian dimensions, like neighborliness and tradition. The strength of these correlations increased threefold in this short period. The character of the scene became an increasingly reliable indicator of presidential voting. Scenes also shift other political variables. For instance, high rent counties generally vote Republican, but in more transgressive scenes they vote more Democratic—an instance of the “Bohemian bourgeois” or “Bobo” pattern identified by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Turning to Canada, we show how individuals’ political attitudes shift along with their surrounding scenes. Finally, we analyze financial contributions to presidential candidates (in 2000). We construct a “Blue Blood” index of amenities—golf clubs, yacht clubs, private tennis courts, and the like—to illustrate how scenes track zip code contributions, even sometimes in contrast to surrounding counties and states.
What emerges is a complex and wide-ranging account of America’s political cultural fault lines. Joining multiple intellectual traditions while moving from case studies to national statistics, we show how scenes are deeply embedded in our local and national politics. And we provide tools and concepts for understanding how and why this is so.
The Rise of Culture and the Transformation of Urban Politics
In the concluding paragraphs of The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs left her readers with a fanciful piece of science fiction on what she considered “one of the most pressing and least regarded” problems facing cities:
I am not one who believes that flying saucers carry creatures from other solar systems who poke curiously into our earthly affairs. But if such beings were to arrive, with their marvelously advanced contrivances, we may be sure we would be agog to learn how their technology worked. The important question, however, would be something quite different: What kinds of governments had they invented which had succeeded in keeping open the opportunities for economic and technological development instead of closing them off? Without helpful advice from outer space, this remains one of the most pressing and least regarded problems. (Jacobs 1970, 235)
Jacobs’s book barely touched on politics. Instead, she focused on urban economics, arguing that (1) development in general is driven by cities more than the countryside and (2) urban development is driven by innovation more than efficiency. She elaborated these points in rich and detailed ways later popularized and expanded by her followers such as Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida. But she could not even begin to imagine the potential forms of urban politics that would foster what would later be called “creative cities.” Such governments in her mind could only be the stuff of science fiction.
Writing in the late 1960s, Jacobs can be excused for this failure of imagination. Contemporary urban theorists—Jacobs’s followers and others—cannot. The social world has changed since then. Since then, participation in creative activities has increased in general, and especially for middle- and low-status persons, with the strongest growth in the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe (detailed in table 6.1 below). “The creative city” concept features high on political agendas of cities worldwide. Scenes of all sorts, as we have seen, drive local economies and channel residential patterns. The styles of political leaders and urban governance have in some cities dramatically changed, adding new cultural and aesthetic sensitivity to their past repertoires. In addition to the classical conflicts around crime, clean streets, race, and class, neighborhood controversies revolve around the right mix of amenities that captures the local “spirit” and provides the qualitative experiences (some) citizens value. Scenes accordingly become a topic of political contestation and a source of political authority.
| Table 6.1. The rise of culture: Membership in culture-related organizations, World Values Survey |
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Note: Data are from the World Values Survey. Surveys are of national samples of citizens in each country, about 1,500 per country, 3,525 in the United States. The three columns for each year show the percentage of citizens who replied that they participated in cultural and related activities. Change is the difference in percentage from the first to last year. Question A066: “Please look carefully at the following list of voluntary organizations and activities and say . . . which if any do you belong to? Education, Arts, Music or Cultural Activities.” To assess measurement error due to including education, we recomputed the results for parents and nonparents of school-age children. There were minimal differences. Darker shades indicate higher values.
Les Frigos is a dramatic case, near legendary in certain European circles. The process, however, is global, reaching from Paris, Berlin, and New York to Beijing, Bogotà, and Toronto. At least three major trends are driving this global process. Each heightens the others. Earlier chapters have touched on these trends already; reviewing and explicitly joining them here helps highlight how they combine to bring scenes more squarely into the political playing field.
The rise of arts and culture among citizens. Though Robert Putnam’s (2000) Bowling Alone sparked discussion and controversy with the finding that American participation in civic associations has declined since the 1950s, he failed to detail changes in specific types of activities. There may be fewer bowling and Kiwanis Clubs, but other types of belonging are in fact gaining salience. Indeed, as shown in table 6.1, there is overall growth between 1981 and 2000 in cultural organization membership (like museums) by citizens in 27 out of 35 countries surveyed by the World Values Survey (only 35 include over-time data by organizational type). Growth is strongest in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United States, and Canada, where membership in cultural organizations rose over 10 percent and was much higher among younger persons. Figure 1.2 in chapter 1 illustrated the dramatic scale of this process in the particular case of Canada, with steep rises in musical groups, dance companies, independent artists, and performing arts establishments, along with sports facilities and clubs. Chapter 1 (figure 1.3) also showed the steady growth of arts and entertainment as a share of the total US workforce, even through the Great Recession of 2008. This sort of ongoing transformation suggests a potentially major breakthrough of expressive culture and personal creativity into the populace at large.
This “rise of the arts” is also evident in other arenas: household spending on culture, the size of cultural industries, the growth of cultural employment, and government spending. The movement is uneven across localities and not always linear within them yet still large and cross-national.1
Rediscovery of the urbane. If the mid to late twentieth century was an era of suburbanization, the early twenty-first century is rediscovering and reclaiming the urbanity of central cities. Internationally there has been a general rise since the 1980s in young, affluent college graduates and retirees moving into cities and especially their downtown cores, sparking urban cultural tourism and stressing day-to-day urbanist issues such as walking, street life, adaptive reuse, and gardening (from the Paris Plage to the Times Square pedestrian zone to Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works). These new urbanist sensibilities are supported by globally oriented city governments vying for creative residents, tourists, and financial capital (e.g., CEOs for Cities).2
Why is this “rediscovery” occurring? Urban analysts have mapped components of the change yet not formulated a clear interpretation. Gyourko, Mayer, and Sinai (2006), for instance, show that the rise of downtown real estate values and rent in the largest US “superstar” cities is much faster than the national average. Analogously, Cortright and Mayer (2001) presents data for all US metro areas on the dramatic increase of young persons in downtowns. But these authors do not explain why; they stay close to standard census data. Richard Florida’s interpretation stresses preferences of a creative class for tolerant and dynamic cities. Edward Glaeser highlights increases in idea generation that arise from dense concentrations and thick networks of skilled persons. On his account, the rediscovery of the urbane is occurring because idea production has become more economically significant with the decline of manufacturing and the rise of knowledge work. Saskia Sassen suggests the importance of personal relations among global actors who prefer downtowns, and identifies producer services and the globalization of capital as drivers. David Harvey stresses a shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in local governance caused by heightened interurban competition, leading cities to pursue intensive development strategies often oriented less toward local service provision and more toward cultural image and place making on the global stage (Harvey 1989; Brenner and Theodore 2005).
In chapter 5 we discussed how the attractive power of scenes shifts for different subpopulations. Scenes provide cues about the character of a place, which some people find welcoming and others find alien and strange, sorting themselves accordingly. Whatever the precise cause, however, cities themselves have been transformed in the process. Their aesthetic and cultural characteristics have become not so much givens, “just there,” but projects, ideals at issue for citizens and leaders alike. And this means they can be contested.
Rise of a new political culture. This is documented by Clark and Hoffmann-Martinot (1998), Clark (2004), and others. Forms of political activism and legitimation are changing. Lifestyle and social issues have been rising in salience relative to party loyalty, class, and material concerns. Fiscal conservatism is increasingly joined with social liberalism; new forms of participation and legitimacy have emerged, driven less by classic class and primordial group characteristics and more by other forms of political identification and mobilization rooted in different answers to the question of what “quality of life” means—fast cars, big houses, tight communities, personal experimentation, natural beauty, individual freedom, amusement parks, physical fitness, open spaces, dense walkability, big-time sports, and much more. Ramirez, Navarro, and Clark (2008) provide a detailed review of the literature in their study of hundreds of North American and European local governments, documenting a striking degree of support by citizens for social and lifestyle issues as well as for new forms of political activism outside of traditional parties.
Our present concern is not to assess the causes or nature of these processes but to highlight their political salience. Typically, they are treated in isolation, or only two out of three are combined.3 However, all three processes generate increasing salience for scenes in neighborhood- and city-level decisions, coalitions, and controversies. Figure 6.2 illustrates their joint operation.
These three factors—the rise of arts and culture, the rediscovery of the urbane, and the rise of a new political culture—join to link culture to local politics through a number of mechanisms. The rise of culture gives generalized importance to expressive concerns across the citizenry—what kind of a person am I? How is this expressed in film, music, clothes, and comportment? What sorts of social audiences are in a position to appreciate and share such expressive performances of self? The goals or functional purposes of products are complemented by their design, their appeal to the personality and meanings valued by consumers, as we articulated in chapter 1.
The rediscovery of the urbane joins quality of life to quality of place. This motivates considerations about what kind of place, neighborhood, or city enables one to pursue a life deemed worthy, interesting, beautiful, or authentic. Scenes become fixtures in the urban landscape and more salient in decisions about where to live and work. These expressive dynamics are enhanced by global processes including the spread of the Internet, wider interurban competition, and increasing geographic mobility, spurring deeper searches for meaning and identity as every city and neighborhood can be compared and evaluated against everywhere else (Sassen 1994; Harvey 1989). Thus “cultural branding” and place identity become increasingly crucial and contested issues among civic leaders and ordinary citizens.
The new political culture redefines these issues of quality, culture, and place in political terms, by emphasizing how nascent leaders and social movements champion specific lifestyle issues and consumption concerns. New questions gain political and policy traction, such as how to create attractive and vibrant scenes that offer amenities (parks, music venues, bike paths, etc.) supportive of citizens’ quality of life demands; how to use these amenities and scenes as levers for economic growth, community development, and social welfare concerns; and how, for elected officials and movement leaders, to mobilize citizens’ emotional allegiance to particular types of scenes for electoral advantage and other policy goals. These three factors have combined in many cities where political and civic leaders create a new vanguard reshaping cities in a more culturally expressive direction (cf. Pasotti 2009; Lees 2003; N. Smith 2002). In the process, scenes become political opportunities for ambitious leaders and objects of contestation among citizens.4
Scenes Politics as Resource Interchange, Boundary Work, and Symbolic Inflation Management
The rise of citizen interest in the arts, combined with the aesthetics of some scenes, adds new elements to politics. We first elaborate a new political resource we call buzz, next we analyze buzz in a Toronto arts neighborhood, and then we consider new social movements and their dynamics.
Classic political resources like money and votes can acquire new import in the hands of active supporters of scenes. In assessing how and why, here as in earlier chapters, we join scene concepts with more established processes to examine how scenes “feed into” other domains. For instance, chapter 4 investigated links between scenes and economic growth, and chapter 5 showed connections between scenes and residential communities. Such “feeding in,” however, does not occur automatically, without controversy, rhetoric, negotiation, pressure, coalition building, and authority—without, in a word, politics. In the process, the excitement and energy projected by the scene—its buzz—becomes a valuable resource that may affect and redefine other valuable resources, such as money, political support, and votes.
“Buzz” refers to the symbols and signals circulating around a scene, the message that something is happening here. Such symbols can be extremely valuable, drawing investment, attention, visitors, migrants, and more. Yet buzz is often produced and spread by cultural actors such as artists who have (relatively) small amounts of other resources like money, political office, or local trust. Accordingly, as the value of buzz has generally increased, conflicts over controlling its production, distribution, and consumption are reshaping city politics, giving new groups access to power and creating potential coalitions between them and older institutional actors.
One avenue through which buzz can become a source of influence is by exchanging it for other resources. For instance, a developer is in the business of extracting economic value from new buildings. This endeavor is not intrinsically aesthetic or cultural, but it can be (1) enhanced if the buzz of the surrounding scene attracts attention and investment, (2) stymied or authorized by political regulations, and (3) legitimated or delegitimated by local residents. Here, scenic buzz, political power, and community influence are inputs into a mainly economic process for the developer. Yet from the perspective of scene participants, the developer’s cash and the politician’s authority may be assessed and engaged in terms of whether they help the scene to enhance the experiences that it cultivates—heighten its glamour, sharpen its self-expressiveness, deepen its local authenticity, renew its ethnic authenticity. Similarly, if political support for politicians depends on meeting citizens’ quality of life demands, and lively scenes provide quality urban living, then buzzing scenes become key inputs for the exercise and maintenance of political power. Further, if a scene enhances neighborhood trust (such as by providing public venues for shared experiences), then local neighborhood leaders, who depend on that trust to wield their influence, will depend on cultivating the artists, cultural groups, and diverse amenities that generate the scene. At the same time, support from influential neighborhood leaders can enhance solidarity among residents who are in turn more likely to treat the scene’s buzz as a neighborhood asset.
Still, since scene activists (artists or otherwise), however defined, are normally small minorities of even aesthetically minded neighborhoods, how they interface with other political logics is essential to assess. The capacity for aesthetic talents—dramatic flair, vivid drawing, poetic speaking, seductive music, sleek design—to enhance “normal” political resources like money makes buzz a potent resource in its own right. The impacts of such aesthetic talents are further enhanced as politics can potentially engage citizens via smartphones, social media, and visual excitement to degrees unimagined just a few decades back. If this is obvious in North American cities, it was also apparent in the Arab Spring uprisings from 2010 onward. Even in Egypt and Syria, villages and political groups competed over the attractiveness of their posters, slogans, and parades, as they sought to engage ambivalent citizens.
These examples illustrate a key point from the resource approach to politics: most citizens spend a tiny portion of their total resources on politics; there is huge “political slack” most everywhere. Winning often means increasing turnout, even just a little bit, not necessarily changing people’s minds. Traditional enticements are cash, patronage jobs, Christmas chickens, and similar material incentives; but as these have been declared immoral and corrupt resources from Chicago to China, activists have sought alternative resources. Enter buzz. Used effectively, the emotional engagement generated by artists and other experts in the ways of buzz encourages average citizens to spend time and money to energize the scene and build a political base for its supporters.
Social interchange does not mean agreement. There is constant opportunity for political struggle, coalition, and creative reinterpretation of business, aesthetic, neighborhood, and political practice. For instance, a community leader who seeks to build trust among neighbors through a public festival stakes her influence on the scene engaging rather than enraging local residents’ sensibilities. Aesthetic disagreements about amenities and culture become intertwined with disagreements about the nature of the community. Political leaders who seek to win elections and mobilize citizen action through local cultural policies stake their political power on the scene enriching citizens’ lives. They must deliver the cultural goods, and failure to do so can be politically damaging. For their part, activists who grow scenes by using buzz to attract money, political clout, and residential community support stake the scene’s ongoing vitality on attracting wealth, power, and local trust. They may thus face charges of co-optation, selling out, and domestication. And conversely, amid rising rents, increasing property values, and new developments, scenes may need to deliver some return on their buzz in the form of financial subsidies, political backing, and residential solidarity to keep the scene solvent and anchored in terms of its characteristic experiences and practices (shining glamorously, transgressing boldly, expressing oneself improvisationally, etc.)
Scenes transform other political dynamics that can be thought of in resource terms. Scene buzz may become “inflated,” decreasing its reliability as a signal of the scene’s experiences. That is, as a scene’s buzz expands and draws more enthusiasts, more people may display external symbols of the scene without a corresponding deep personal commitment. This can reach a point at which possessing formerly clear symbols (T-shirts, music tracks, certain magazines, certain interior décor) may become fuzzier indicators of a person’s engagement in the fundamental emotions and practices that “back” the scene’s buzz, diluting its symbolic potency and expressive energy. Inflated buzz becomes symbolic sizzle without the emotional steak of the scene, akin to a hundred-dollar bill that cannot buy a cup of coffee.
Similarly, the volume of buzz in circulation may be affected by its “interest rates.” Some scenes may exhibit expansionary policies, to extend buzz far and wide with few strings attached (as in “low commitment” pop music or club districts). Others may set high borrowing costs and expand buzz less (as in Goth or heavy metal music, or perhaps fraternal social clubs that require intense commitment to adopt their symbols). Low interest rates in buzz may attract considerable investment in a scene (in monetary and other forms), as many people may decide to give it a try. This can lead to rapid growth but also to unsustainable inflation. High buzz interest rates may drive up the price of participation, making the scene more exclusive (and the rent higher), as in scenes that place limits on expansion to preserve their authenticity, via political zoning or informal mechanisms.
Zukin’s (1989, 2010) discussions of political-economic dilemmas around the desire to preserve authenticity of places like New York City’s Lower East Side is one recent case in point. Authenticity politics generally become more heated in conjunction with buzz inflation, deflation, and other substantial shifts uncoupling the more symbolic from the material practices of the scene. The risk of being labeled “inauthentic” rises if political leaders and others visibly change enduring and deeply embedded dimensions of a scene. We further explore such issues for policy making in chapter 7.
More generally, many city officials have responded to the processes listed in figure 6.2 by crafting policies designed to use their local amenities and scenes as levers for bringing tourists, new businesses, and residents. Archetypical examples are the renovated railroad station with “authentic” stone and steel framing a chic restaurant/bar or housing community arts groups and farmers’ markets (cf. Zukin 1989). At the same time, those who provide key inputs into the production of a buzzing scene may threaten to withhold their services and cut the supply and quality of buzz for a given place. These could include artists, photographers, writers, promoters, designers, and performers, among others. Insofar as the profitability of an area’s businesses, the social cohesion among its residents, and the election of its politicians depend on that buzz continuing, this withdrawal could be a major threat. If presented as such, it would become a buzz strike.5
These sorts of volatile and conflicting negotiations of key scenes resources are more common with rapid growth, inflation, and deflation. These may lead local scenes participants and visitors to raise doubts about the scene’s continuing solvency, and further possible controversy or out-migration. The concern that artists and their friends are just gentrifiers can be invoked. Some places have generated buzz inflation by encouraging rapidly growing tourist and club districts that may come to dominate the locals; fearing this, others have pursued “sustainable” growth in buzz, restricting restaurant and liquor licenses to more slowly integrate an emerging scene into existing residential neighborhoods and industrial areas. These sorts of policy decisions embedded with scenes dynamics, we suggest, offer a critical piece of the interpretation omitted by the more narrowly descriptive studies of rent or migration by Gyourko, Mayer, and Sinai and Cortright and Mayer cited above.
Such interchanges, boundary work, inflationary cycles, and policy decisions create new political opportunities and new problems for policy makers to address. Such processes vary considerably across contexts. It can help to clarify some local cases by considering how they link to broader propositions about scenes and the political dynamics of their buzz.
• Where local politics is more tightly coupled with national politics, participants are more likely to support cultural organizations and amenities capable of creating buzz that extends nationally or internationally. But there is often a potential conflict between distant priorities and local authenticity, which scenes participants must struggle to resolve.
• When themes like egalitarianism and anticorporatism are shared across multiple scenes, they are more likely to grow into a broader social movement. Conversely, individual self-expression may stress uniqueness and discourage engagement with collective political issues. Scenes that stress creative individuality can thus conflict with the political logic of “compromise and join others on common issues.”
• Certain scene participants such as artists, writers, or media professionals with distinctive buzz-generating resources may be sought out by others who lack these resources.
• In conflicts among residents about integrating a scene (especially a new scene) into their neighborhood, the moral contribution of local artists’ buzz to the local community (e.g., building versus undermining trust) can become an important political controversy. Political controversies can be mapped and negotiated in terms of the 15 separate scenes dimensions. If new activists and others seeking compromise look for common ground as well as areas of conflict across the 15 dimensions, they may be able to reduce the perceived public policy distance between new and old.
• In conflicts over cultural developments’ impacts on the local scene (e.g., building a new museum), residents may be concerned about impacts of heightened buzz on traditional and local neighborhood issues (e.g., traffic and home prices) while arts management professionals (curators, museum directors, etc.) may operate from a more cosmopolitan perspective (e.g., judge local projects in reference to global icons).
• Where conflict revolves around industrial policy to subsidize local scenes, the economic consequences of area artists’ contributions to the scene’s buzz may become central political issues.
• In a patron-client political culture, political leaders will tend to resist generic cultural planning frameworks and instead support specific cultural clients separately to build scenes dependent on and loyal to them personally, rather than generalized policy resources equally accessible to all. Conflict will revolve around access to key patrons as well as movements pushing for “reform” or seeking to develop a generalized “artist class consciousness” rather than particularistic relationships.
• When historically countercultural scenes begin to cooperate with established business interests, political organizations, and residential groups, critiques may arise that the scene’s core values are being, respectively, sold out, co-opted, or domesticated. Internal controversy will revolve around the scene’s capacity to deliver its core cultural experiences and integrate new participants as it grows and becomes more interdependent with other domains.
As the rules of the game shift across political contexts, so do the impacts of resources: money talks in a business-dominant power structure, but votes count more in an egalitarian system, while the arts dazzle the more aesthetically aware. Some hypothetical examples of shifts in resource impact are listed in table 6.2 to illustrate this sort of contextualist logic.6 For instance, it suggests that money counts highly in a business-dominant political system, while buzz is low. But in other political systems in table 6.2, the rules change. These different “ideal” types overlap empirically, however, so that even within the same neighborhood people may fight over whose rules and resources should rule. This illustrates how scenes redefine legitimacy and power through transformations of general rules into specifics.
In sum, scenes are targets and resources for contemporary politics. Fights over the dimensions of the local scene—what it means to be legitimate, theatrical, or authentic, which dimensions to cultivate here and now—may become bound up with existing political cleavages like race, age, or class (e.g., black scenes versus white scenes, worker scenes versus professional scenes, youth scenes versus elderly scenes). Or they may proceed within and across such categories, generating new bedfellows and new enemies. Whatever the specifics, however, the present point is that key dynamics of contemporary politics can be better understood through attending to the power of scenes.
Toronto’s Wychwood Barns: A Case Study Illustrating the Contentious Politics of Local Scenes
We offer these propositions and hypotheses to illustrate the dynamics of several overlapping processes: resources, exchange, issue areas, inflation, buzz strikes, and so on. Many more theories could be formulated and the ones we have listed could be empirically tested. Our main concern here, however, is to suggest that the politics of scenes can be analyzed with concepts that are no more evanescent or intractable than traditional local politics issues like zoning and tax rates. The case of Toronto’s Wychwood Barns and neighborhood controversies over its buzz feature issues found globally in local conflicts involving the arts. The case illustrates how the politics of lifestyle issues in neighborhood scenes can be just as contentious as fights over money or power. And it shows how these various resources can join and do battle.7
The Wychwood Barns are former Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) streetcar repair barns. They were built in the early twentieth century near Wychwood Park, an artist colony with an Arts and Crafts aesthetic of the pristine natural landscape (Berland and Hanke 2002). By the mid-1990s, the Barns were a barely used symbol of industrial age rust in the midst of a dense, now Midtown, residential community.
In the 2000s, what to do with the empty barns became a hotly debated issue as the surrounding neighborhood changed. Amalgamating Toronto with its suburbs had left two incumbent councilors vying for one position. Local political leaders in turn became the symbolic focus of questions about what kind of community the newly created ward would be.
Thus, the victorious Joe Mihevc—a PhD in theology and social ethics, able to casually quote Freud and Jane Jacobs and recite the history of various parks movements—attracted both intense scorn and praise, with opponents chanting “Heil Mihevc” at community meetings and supporters referring to his “Zen-like calm” (Landsberg 2002). Local political leadership became key in the ensuing dispute over the Barns, as Mihevc became a major force in the movement to transform them into a cultural community center. The critical resource question for advocates of turning the Barns into an arts hub concerned presenting their case so as to mobilize citizens and civic leaders to back the project. One answer was to broaden the “arts” beyond private production and passive spectatorship to include shared consumption and active participation by citizens in festivals, art classes, community gardening, farmers’ markets, and more—into a distinctive scene. At the same time, the task was to frame the project in a manner that appealed to family- and community-minded locals.
Underlying the allure of the Barns as a vehicle for buzz creation and circulation were changes in the numbers and types of local residents. Housing values were steeply rising, new residents with young children were moving into the neighborhood, development pressure was increasing, and there were rising percentages of residents reporting “multiple ethnic origins,” working in arts, culture, and recreation, working from home, and walking to work. “Who are we?” was floating in the air.8 While traditional residential and ethnocultural bases of identity and community were in doubt or flux, an arts-oriented, expressive, urbanist, industrial heritage transformation project was ideally situated as an attractive experiment in new forms of community. This proposal stood in stark contrast to the quiet Arts and Crafts colony of its past. “What kind of park do we want?” became a proxy for “what is the nature of our community?” Without any clear or universally shared answer, these questions grew politically divisive.
What lit the fuse was the question, what is a park? Both Mihevc and his opponent campaigned for the car barns to become “100% Park,” which at the time meant “not commercial real estate development.” But when it came time to specify what “100% park” meant, the community split. Artscape—an organization that rehabilitates (and eventually would develop) buildings into arts hubs—had been attending community meetings and, together with Mihevc, began to formulate plans to adaptively reuse rather than demolish some or all of the old buildings. They would house arts groups and farmers’ markets, community nonprofits and community food centers. Local ecologists and natural preservationist groups proposed returning the area to its original natural state.
All these alternatives were plausible “parks.” Which option to pursue became the focal point of heated community meetings as residents debated the sort of scene they wanted to live near. Some residents dubbed themselves Neighbours for 100% Park and started advocating for traditional grass, trees, playground, and sports fields. Others, some tapped by Mihevc, calling themselves Friends of a New Park, organized support for considering multiple uses in general and the Artscape proposals in particular.
The formation of these small, ad hoc organizations creates publically visible organized groups that are at least symbolically collective and represent more than private self-interests. They can join neighbors and claim volunteer time, money, and media attention more easily than a set of individuals, thereby decreasing “resource slack.” They become new mobilizing platforms, which often emerge as political conflicts mount and more participants turn out for meetings, fund-raisers, and more.
The Barns thus became the central occasion for debate and collective mobilization around the type of scene appropriate for the community. Run-down and boarded-up, they symbolized the dirty work and noisy, mechanical intrusion onto what had been a pastoral scene. Turning them into grass, trees, and a children’s play area was for some citizens a welcome way to end that era, to kick the manufacturing age into the dustbin of history. “Artists need space to work, I understand that,” said a leader of Neighbours for 100% Park, film producer, and Wychwood Park resident, “but one of the things that makes city life bearable to me is a park” (Conlogue 2002).
The Artscape proposal, supported by Mihevc and Friends of a New Park, proposed an alternative, treating the industrial past as part of a collective learning process. “The Green Barn will be the meeting place of culture and nature. . . . The community can explore nature while framed by the historical architecture and heritage of the TTC car barns” (Friends 2010). Yes, humans had harmed nature, but we can now work with her rather than on her while attempting to make work fulfilling rather than alienating—ideals that might, they proposed, be promoted by videos of aboriginal ritual dances and realized in food education centers, farmers’ markets, and self-expressing postindustrial artists working within an industrial heritage building, surrounded by photographs of streetcar mechanics.
The potential impact of this emerging scene on community solidarity was also controversial. Friends of a New Park proposed a conception of community based not on privacy but on publicity, interaction, and personal self-expression. The Barns would create a “dynamic and flexible” space for a community whose identity was in flux. “A key aspect of any sustainable project is that it be adaptable and flexible to changing conditions” (Friends 2010). Neighbours for 100% Park, by contrast, had a vision defined primarily by residence; the park was for those who lived nearby, an extension of their backyards. They brought bags of lard to community meetings to graphically show all the fat their kids would fail to burn without ample space. The buzz generated by artists living and working in the park would bring nonresidents and set up a rhetorical division between the cultivated and the uncouth. The Artscape proposal would create an “exclusive space where artists can interface with thespians and activists. Neighbours may intrude if they dare” (Neighbours 2010). The result would be the “Habourfronting” of the neighborhood. That is, the neighborhood would be transformed into a tourist destination, where “the various venues, gallery openings, theatre performances, non-profit activism, food depot transactions & dare we whisper it, the prospect of booze cans . . . promise . . . a very busy venue, hardly in keeping with the quiet residential character of the neighbourhood” (ibid.). A beacon for outsiders and unknowns, the new scene, according to this view, would be less a space for diverse openness and more the occasion for new divisions supported by government largesse: “Can we spell taxpayer subsidised: G-A-T-E-D C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y” (ibid.). These competing visions gave “whose rules rule?” political urgency.
If Friends of a New Park were “dreamy” buzz inflators to their critics, Neighbours for 100% Park erred toward buzz deflation. Neighbours for 100% Park were largely anonymous, rarely granted interviews, and mostly presented themselves as defending private goods rather than building public space. Perhaps the most important media moment for Neighbours for 100% Park was when one member was reported as saying “she doesn’t want anything new to be built nearby because guests at her friend’s dinner party won’t have any place to park” (Barber 2002). Neighbours for 100% Park were framed as fearful of change and outsiders, defending private turf and semiprivate goods.
Friends of a New Park, by contrast, were able to reverse the image of artists as outsiders and deviant elites, while reframing them as upstanding neighbors and public goods. To do so, they used their skills to build professional-looking websites with a clean design, took residents on inspirational walks around the Barns, distributed posters, and held participatory design discussions. They even produced a video connecting the future of the Barns to urban problems writ large (blight, lack of public services), conjuring the history and beauty of the structure (comparing the internal lighting to a cathedral’s), stressing their group’s diverse base of supporters (artists, teachers, performers, environmentalists, landscape designers, urban agriculturalists, and more), and offering images of the sorts of activities (singing, dancing, learning) that would make the Barns exist not only for “pastimes” but for “creating time,” not a passive park but an occasion for a “higher caliber of existence.”
To build local trust, Friends of a New Park sought support from key civic groups. They gathered dozens of letters of support from local school principals. Their website included hundreds of names of local residents, with addresses proudly displayed. They publically argued that a buzzing scene could build community just as well as grass and trees could. More activity would mean more “eyes on the street” and a safer environment. Far from bringing deviants and hedonists into the area, resident artists would provide theater classes, painting classes, and more. They asserted in their video, moreover, that the arts add value that money alone could not. “What makes a city great is not the stockbrokers. We need the money, but we need the art more.” These efforts linked the potential buzz from the scenes that would grow up around the artistic use of the Barns to more open and diverse policies that credited the concerns of a traditional residential community, like trust, safety, and schools, while asserting the independent value of active aesthetic participation in a scene.
In the end, the promise of added buzz and its skillful deployment by activists yielded tangible results.9 Dubbed the Artscape Wychwood Barns, the dilapidated repair yards were rehabilitated, at a price tag of around 20 million Canadian dollars, with funds coming from a variety of sources such as development fees for nearby condominium proposals, provincial and federal grants for subsidized low-income housing (on the novel proposition that below-rent artist space could be eligible for such funds), foundation and private donations, and loans backed by the city, not to mention tax exemptions. They now house several artists and arts groups, various music education programs, a children’s theater, environmental organizations, a community food organization dedicated to social justice, an ongoing slate of festivals and events, and much more. At the year-round weekly farmers’ market, Mihevc is a regular, shaking hands and greeting voters. If the prospect of this sort of scene was able to mobilize resources and forge coalitions, its buzzing reality now feeds into new development, artistic creation, ongoing community gatherings, local business, and political allegiance to the leaders able to take credit for them.
Scenes and New Social Movements
The work of the Wychwood Barns and Les Frigos activists points toward an important, and potentially generalizable, insight implicit in our contextualist approach to politics: that there is an affinity between (1) certain types of political organizations (e.g., environmental groups, social justice advocates, human rights champions) and (2) certain sorts of scenes (e.g., those that support values such as creativity, experimentation, and cosmopolitanism). The success of the first, often termed new social movements (NSMs), may thus depend on their location amid the second.
A brief sketch of the rise of the NSMs suggests not only a general linkage between their politics and their aesthetics, but some specific propositions about the scenes where NSMs should thrive. Testing these propositions using our scenes measures and national comparative data allows us to go beyond the particularities of one or two cases and ask what factors in general favor NSM organizations. This broader analysis gives a window onto how scenes structure the local political landscape, and illustrates the more general sort of contribution that scenes data and concepts can make to understanding the sources of political activism.
The NSMs sought a new relationship to nature, to one’s body, to the opposite sex, to work, and to consumption.10 In so doing, consumption and lifestyle issues were joined with the classic production and workplace concerns championed by unions and parties dominating much of politics in Western Europe and the United States over the twentieth century. Yet even in the 1940s, some political analysts (such as Paul Lazarsfeld) commented that American politics was more like a conversation about what clothes to buy or what music to listen to than obeying a military commander or union boss.11 Lazarsfeld saw these aspects of politics clearly after migrating to the United States from Austria, but this insight later led to a new framing of politics; it was a big step toward scenes.
These new civic groups stressed new agendas—ecology, feminism, peace, gay rights—that the older political parties ignored. Over time, other, more humanistic and aesthetic concerns also arose: suburban sprawl, sports stadiums, urban gardening, museums, walkability, and more. In Europe, the state and political parties were the hierarchical “Establishment” opposed by the NSMs. In the United States, local business and political elites were more often the target.12 Many governments were seen as closed to these citizen activists. For instance, in the 1970s in Italy, even Communist and Socialist parties rejected NSM concerns.
Establishment opposition of this sort encouraged the organization of NSMs and (especially in the founding years) their confrontational tactics. But as some political parties and governments embraced the new social issues, the political opportunity space in which NSMs were operating drastically shifted. Movement leaders then broke from “urban guerrilla warfare” and began participating in elections, lobbying, and advising governments. As their issues were incorporated into the political system, their demands moderated. Yet they added a heightened sensitivity to the emotional, musical, image-driven, and theatrical aspects of political life.13
In a clearly related shift, business actors such as real estate developers and political leaders and candidates often grew more green and artistic. Some refashioned concepts like loft living or self-expression into their rhetoric and policies. National political candidates like Bill Clinton made public appearances in sunglasses, playing the saxophone. In addition to the traditional ethnic music events, Chicago’s Mayor Daley II added alternative and indie music festivals to the city’s calendar. He also marched in a gay rights parade and started turning up at art galleries.
The NSMs, in other words, reshuffled the traditional relationships between class and politics. Their cosmopolitan concerns were too general to fit in any “workers’ party.” Their issue specificity was too particular to focalize an entire social class. And with many activists and supporters from educated backgrounds destined for professional occupations, unions became less potent vehicles for transforming class differences into political activism. Not only a new left but a more general new political culture emerged, in which the traditional alignment of left and right to social and fiscal liberalism began to bend.14
The influence of NSMs has been so strong that what began in the 1960s and 1970s as a radical fringe has often become mainstream. Much research on new social movements focuses on the “successful” cases, where groups are able to effectively organize and sometimes stage dramatic victories. We ourselves do this kind of research, as it permits observations of new types of tactics, rhetoric, and organization at work and the assessment of how these do or do not join with existing channels of influence.
The cost of this approach, however, is that one has difficulties determining where and why the single or few successful cases differ from the many others, where either no movements form or those that do are weak. The NSM rhetoric is often universalistic, concerned with issues like environmental degradation, human rights, personal expression, and social justice. These apply to all human beings, wherever they happen to live and whatever their background. However, these universalistic themes do not resonate universally, and they issue in significantly different styles of organization and political efficacy.
Where and why do local patterns differ? Some analysts began to stress contextual characteristics, like the local political “opportunity structure” (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1996). “Framing” and “organization” were also featured as key variables affecting the likelihood a social movement would flourish.
The specificity of universalism. A less abstract way to add to this focus on the context for NSM success is to lay out some characteristics of the places where they first became energized and grew. Linking scenes and social movements explicitly, Darcy Leach and Sebastian Haunss (2009) have shown how important geographic concentrations of bars, clubs, films, concerts, and parties were in energizing Germany’s “autonomous” movement. Building on the cases of Hamburg and Berlin, they develop a series of propositions about how scenes can support active movements, and how the two—scene and movement—can create tension with each other.
In the American context, the dense, high-crime, multiethnic urban centers were the key scenes of NSM activism. Here, young college graduates, artists, and intellectuals moved into ethnically diverse inner-city neighborhoods. In such places, the underinvestment and degradation of many cities was greatest, and the “white flight” to the suburbs by older and more culturally conservative persons was often most rapid. A vision of an alternative future emerged among (some of) those “left behind”: more humane, more sensitive to the consequences of human actions upon Mother Nature, able to see the beauty not only in symmetry and regularity but also in discord and disorder. Richard Sennett’s (1970) The Uses of Disorder conveys some of this general attitude.
Density alone is not enough to capture what was distinctive about these NSM incubators. To see why, consider Jane Jacobs. Her Death and Life of Great American Cities ([1961] 1992) became a call to arms for urban reformers internationally. Her ideas were inspired and refined in no small part by her experiences as an activist, struggling against urban renewal projects from the likes of Robert Moses in New York City and Fred Gardiner in Toronto, the two cities in which she spent much of her life. Moses and Gardiner proposed building huge freeways to give suburban residents quick and easy access to downtown businesses and amenities. These would cut through existing neighborhoods and, Jacobs and her followers argued, destroy what made them work. Particularly important was their walkability. People out on the streets, she argued, are more likely to bump into one another, encounter others different from themselves, avoid getting stuck in stultifying routines, and keep their eyes out for criminal activity. Car culture threatened the very basis of urban community, and with it the spirit of cosmopolitan diversity crucial to the progressive new social movements.
Just as important as walking were the arts. Artists themselves were of course often politically aligned with the NSM agenda, and they did tend to live in the sorts of neighborhoods Jacobs and others were fighting to protect and extend. But their significance goes deeper. The artist himself could be a catalyst for urban change and the agent of a new vision for what an urban neighborhood could be. Not only a scene of depravity, despair, and dirt, the city itself could become a source of beauty, an aesthetic phenomenon.
The artist, in other words, would be a vehicle for turning inner-city filth into a space for cultivating the self, a source of expression rather than anxiety. Aesthetic experience itself, that deepest and most humane of qualities, could be a human right, and the new social movements would have to create a space for all persons to develop those qualities in themselves. And insofar as this aspiration went against the types of culture and the vision of society favored by the organs of the state and the corporation, it would naturally tend to take on a more transgressive, countercultural flavor. A different world was in the making in avant-garde paintings and poetry, and it would of course be hard for the people benefiting from the current system to accept what was to come.
It was in the wake of these experiences, well before the current vogue of treating artists as urban development agents, that some of the first and most visionary urban cultural documents were formulated. And these documents carried forward themes going even further back, all the way to the first stirrings of European urbanization, as the selection from The Wealth of Nations in box 6.2 illustrates.
New Social Movements Are Typically Located in Dense, Walkable Areas with Self-Expressive Scenes and Many Artists
We can take these general observations and translate them into testable empirical claims. NSMs should thrive in dense, diverse, places where high crime coexists with college graduates and artists. They should be in urbane, self-expressive, and transgressive scenes. And NSMs should be strong where more people spend more time walking. To take on these issues empirically, we made an NSM index, which sums for every US zip code human rights groups, environmental groups, and social advocacy groups.
Table 6.3 lists the 30 zip codes with the most NSM organizations in the country (as of 2000). Naturally, many state capital and Washington, DC, neighborhoods are at the top of the charts. But it also suggests that NSM activity is driven by more than access and proximity to political leaders. The San Francisco Bay Area, for example, has five of the top 30, with zip codes of the Mission and Tenderloin districts having the highest totals. Portland’s historic Goosehollow, whose neighborhood association explicitly places walkability, parks, and cultural opportunities among its main goals (Goosehollow.org 2015), and Seattle’s dense, hip Belltown have the most NSM organizations in Oregon and Washington.
Figure 6.3 moves beyond these few dozen zip codes and evaluates the variables typically associated with NSM organizations nationally. Because most zip codes have no NSMs, we divide all US zip codes into two categories: those without NSMs and those with at least one NSM. We then ask two related but distinct questions: (1) What conditions are associated with the presence of any NSMs? And (2) given the presence of at least one NSM, what conditions are associated with the presence of many or few NSMs? The left column addresses the first question while the right column addresses the second.
This figure depicts results from what is called a hurdle model. These models are used in situations where the outcome is relatively rare but can take on multiple values (e.g., major sports teams in US counties). The purpose is to simultaneously learn something about the conditions that give rise to the presence of any NSMs and the conditions that give rise to more NSMs (e.g., any major sports teams versus five major sports teams in Chicago’s Cook County). It is not immediately clear that the same factors come into play, as our results show. Note that, due to how a hurdle model is estimated, the two columns represent two distinct submodels whose bubble sizes cannot be compared across each independent variable but can be compared within each model. Variables have been standardized to have mean equal 0 and standard deviation equal 1 at their respective levels of analysis (zip code or county). Unless otherwise noted, non-scenes variables represent zip code–level values for 1990. Cultural employment clusters and other scenes variables are identical to those used in previous chapters. N is all US zip codes. More on variables and methods of analysis is in chapter 8 and the online appendix (press.uchicago.edu/sites/scenescapes).
Where do NSMs thrive? They are usually present in high rent, high crime counties, and there are more of them in Democratic counties. Neighborhoods with any (and many) NSMs are usually in dense, lower rent zip codes with strong cultural employment concentrations, nonwhite residents, and college graduates. Moreover, walking, as Jacobs’s ideas would lead us to expect, is a crucially important element of an NSM-friendly scene.
But cultivating an openness to personal expression and a general feeling of Urbanity is important as well. Our (YP) self-expression and Urbanity measures are both strongly linked with NSM presence. Urbanity in particular is linked with not only the presence of any NSMs but also many of them.
The left graphic in figure 6.4 shows, all other things equal, a moderately positive relationship between our Urbanity factor score and any NSM presence. In our model, there is a roughly 15 percent chance that there are any NSMs in the most Urbane scenes. The right graphic shows that, however, among the zip codes with at least one NSM, there are likely to be dramatically more NSMs where the sense of Urbanity is strong. Less Urbane scenes tend to have only a few NSMs (the model predicts under 2 per 1,000 amenities); average Urbane scenes have a handful (about 5 predicted per 1,000 amenities); while the most Urbane scenes have many more (18 predicted per 1,000 amenities). Urbanity, in other words, while important in NSM formation, seems to be a key driver of NSM expansion beyond our other standard variables.15
This figure shows the marginal effects of Urbanity on new social movement organizations. The figure is read left to right, where the y-axis indicates the predicted probability of having any NSMs and the predicted total number of NSMs (given that any exist) for an average US zip code (defined using the covariates listed in figure 6.3), respectively. The x-axis indicates an increase in the average Urbanity of the zip code from very low (highly Communitarian) to very high (highly Urbane).
Self-expressive, urbane, walkable, dense, diverse, low rent neighborhoods—these are indeed places that very much resemble Jane Jacobs’s Greenwich Village and Annex neighborhoods. Where these factors conjoin, they create an experience that is apparently conducive to NSM activity; elsewhere, such activity is more rare.
The Ambiguity of Transgression
One somewhat unexpected result in figure 6.3 concerns transgression. The degree to which a place has amenities that support a spirit of transgression is unrelated to whether it is home to new social movement organizations. This is the case whether we are talking about places with any NSMs or those with many NSMs.
This may seem surprising if we think of “transgression” in the revolutionary sense. But it is consistent with a strong tension within historically Bohemian culture. On the one side, there is the activist strand, which says that rejecting the present world also means reforming it economically and politically. But there has always been another side of Bohemia, one more suspicious of political activism.
This less activist strand is more concerned with transgressing norms of style and culture. Bohemians of this variety tend to retreat from public political engagement rather than attempting to overturn the existing order, much to the chagrin of anticapitalists, including Marx himself. And even when this element becomes political, it does so in a more aesthetic way. For instance, when Baudelaire commented on his participation in the 1848 revolutions, he said he did so for the rush of tearing something down and being carried away by a passion larger than himself—not to spread the rights of man. Moreover, he could and did find similar experiences in the oldest of Old Regime institutions, the Catholic Church. While it is of course only circumstantial, and we should not overinterpret a finding of statistical insignificance, this result may suggest indirect evidence of the persistence of this political ambivalence built into antiestablishment culture.16
Self-Expressive Scenes Heighten the Political Salience of Walkability
Figure 6.5 shows that walkability is one of the most widespread characteristics of neighborhoods in which NSMs are located. Zip codes whose walkability is high (i.e., one standard deviation higher than average) have in our model about 60 percent more NSMs than zip codes with average walkability, when controlling for our other variables. Ambulatory experience may indeed create a natural sensitivity to classic NSM issues like zoning, the environment, diversity, urban planning, and aesthetics.
The above analysis, however, treats walkability and the scenic features of the neighborhood (like self-expression) independently, asking how much an increase of one is associated with an increase of NSMs net of changes in the other. But, of course, they do not operate independently. One of the main aspects of movements from Jacobs on was that they should not: the urban experience itself should become an uplifting opportunity, and that means taking the time to wander through it and listen to what it says. This ethos suggests a tractable hypothesis: where this conjunction of walking and self-expression occurs, we should be more likely to find those organizations dedicated to preserving and expanding the vision of life it suggests: cosmopolitan, open, ready to learn from the experiences of chance encounters and diverse others, out to make the world more beautiful and sustainable than it currently is. That is, it is in those places where walking and self-expression come together that we would expect some of the largest current concentrations of NSM activity to be found.
Figure 6.5 shows how important this interplay between walking and self-expression can be in fostering new social movement political activity by exploring how varying each affects their joint relationship to NSMs. The left graphic shows again that, ceteris paribus, more-walkable places are in general more likely to have any NSMs than less-walkable places are. But it also shows that this difference is greater in more self-expressive scenes: in the country’s least self-expressive zip codes, the most walkable places have about an 8 percent higher predicted probability of having some NSMs than the least walkable places do. But in the country’s most self-expressive scenes, the most walkable zip codes exhibit a 13 percent higher predicted probability of having at least one NSM than do the least walkable zip codes.
This figure shows how walkability and self-expression interact to predict greater numbers of NSMs. The figure is read left to right, where the y-axis indicates the predicted probability of having any NSMs and the predicted number of NSMs (given that any exist) for an average US zip code (defined using the covariates listed in figure 6.3), respectively. The x-axis indicates an increase in the average (YP) self-expressive scene within each zip code from very low to very high.
In the right graphic, we can see that the “walkability premium” for not only any but for many NSMs is much greater in more self-expressive scenes. The difference between walkable/less walkable increases dramatically in highly self-expressive scenes. In less self-expressive scenes, a highly walkable zip code has on average about 4 more NSMs per 1,000 amenities than a less walkable zip code. But in the most self-expressive zip codes, a more walkable zip code has on average about 20 more NSMs per 1,000 amenities than a low walkability zip code.
That is, when walking and self-expression come together, the result is quite likely to be organizations advocating for human rights, social justice, and the environment.17 The one supports the other, as Jacobs held. A neighborhood with people walking about is one with an audience, one that holds opportunities to see and be seen. A scene that prizes self-expression is one that legitimizes efforts to put one’s ideas, insights, and imagination forward before others as an opportunity for experience and interaction. These sorts of places where public sociability and personal self-expression push each other to higher levels seem to cultivate the environments in which the new social movements have found energy, inspiration, members, and supporters most in tune with their aims and ambitions.
These analyses thus show just how much new social movement organizations depend on the specific character of the situations in which they work. However universal and cosmopolitan the content of NSM goals, they appear to get much of their energy and support from the qualities that inhere in concrete local contexts. Such qualities animate a distinct style of life, give it urgency and importance, but they are not found everywhere or even in many places. Dense, walkable, self-expressive, urbane, diverse, intellectual—while each of these characteristics is important separately, when they come together they provide powerful catalysts for new social movement activism to grow. But where they are weak or absent, NSM styles and goals may seem alien and unwelcome, and they may face difficulties in taking root. Jacobs-esque settings, that is, provide critical cultural meaning and emotional energy to the more abstract environmental characteristics more often featured in the NSM literature’s trinity of opportunity structure, framing, and organization. Beyond these specifics, the general point again is that certain forms of politics thrive in certain scenes but fall flat elsewhere.
Scenes and National Politics
Scenes can set the stage in which new social movement groups thrive, and define the terms in which local political controversies are engaged. But the links between scenes and politics clearly go beyond small organizations and neighborhood politics, to national party identifications, and to more general political ideologies of left and right. A simple insight as new as Aristotle, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Hegel tells us why this should be so: distinct morals, manners, and habits bring with them distinct sets of political ideas; as the former vary, so should the latter. As scenes manifest and crystallize different visions of the good life across localities—embedded in and affirmed by their day-to-day practices and amenities—differences in scenes should correspond to differences in their overall political orientations. A candidate, party, or policy proposal resonates in some scenes that embody some shared visions or values and falls flat in others.
As simple as it is, this general idea may not seem so visible in current political analyses, which tend to treat voters in isolation from their social contexts. Still if one considers major trends in postwar political science, some point toward a potential convergence with scenes concepts and analysis.
Politics is not an island. Professional political analysis has shifted away from a relatively narrow focus on constitutional and legal structures and the process of legislation. It now situates politics within a broader context. Only after World War II did many US academic departments of “public law” and “government” adopt the name “political science.” The change in names marked a shift to incorporate the social and cultural environment, in the work of authors like Gabriel Almond, Seymour Martin Lipset, Philip Converse, and David Easton.
Another challenge to the field was the penetration of ideas from economics, as “public” or “rational choice” models entered political science after the 1970s. While the public choice tradition had a strong individualistic cast, the processes it stressed also pushed analytical attention toward the importance of broader contexts. Thus rational choice authors (such as James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Mancur Olson) introduced a range of contextualizing concepts, such as public goods and free riders. That is, rather than simply analyzing individual interests, such as supporting a public park, public choice analysts stressed incorporating interactional dynamics about how decisions are made. These new concepts led to the insight that it could be “rational” not to reveal your support for the park, but to ride free on others with a similar interest. Examining general “equilibria conditions” within which specific local policies (such as property taxes) are embedded also pushed analyses in a more contextual direction. Accordingly, the nature of rational decision making was seen to depend on the decisions of others, as developed with baroque complexity in applying game theory to politics.
Storming the bastille of elite-centric analysis. The individualistic focus of public choice authors had another surprisingly contextualizing effect. It shifted attention from princes, presidents, and party bosses to ordinary citizens. Democratic leaders depend on citizen support; such leaders ignore citizen preferences at their peril and adjust their programs to reflect those preferences. This idea was central to the writings of economists-cum-political-analysts like Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson. Analogously, Anthony Downs stressed that political parties and leaders were not autonomously dominant. In a systemic context, candidates become servants of citizens by choosing popular issues for campaigns. Tocqueville was a further inspiration for authors (such as Robert Putnam) by stressing how people build “social capital” (e.g., trust). Tocqueville stressed not the strong state or the landed gentry, but small towns and their plurality of organizations, from farm associations to churches, which articulate local political cultures.18
Think small. “Context” can be large, in the grand tradition of civilizational analysis of Samuel Huntington, Schmuel Eisenstadt, or Francis Fukuyama, stressing massive entities like the West or Asia, and how these civilizational “contexts” operate.
“Context” can also lead one to think small. Small units become hugely important when we focus analytical attention on ordinary citizens and processes such as migration. As folks move around, cities and neighborhoods acquire distinct local political histories, cultures, and institutions, which can differ markedly from one another and from the larger units of which they are a part. Think about San Francisco and Austin Bohemians versus San Diego and Houston country clubs, for instance. To see these differences, we need to consider “context” as “local context.”
Daniel Elazar is perhaps the leading recent theorist of local context. He developed his account of American politics in some 50 books in which he elaborated a global interpretation of local context. Elazar’s (e.g., 1975) central idea was that America’s political subcultures trace back to the deep value commitments of the original immigrants who settled the country. In New England, the source of these values was not geography, but the theology of Calvin, carried from Swiss communes as well as Dutch and English nonconformist churches. These were “covenant societies,” whose founding documents explicitly linked the new government to God and his people. The archetype was the Ten Commandments brought down from Sinai by Moses to guide the ancient Jews. This was no contract between individuals; it was a God-given covenant that all must follow as a moralistic guide in life as well as in politics.
The New England town meeting, in requiring attendance of all adult citizens, enshrined egalitarianism among its population. Collective action was based not on majority rule by individuals but on consensual support among all through reasoned discussion and compromise. Elazar contrasts this New England political culture with the cultures of the mid-Atlantic and South. These had no covenants with God in their founding constitutions. Mid-Atlantic settlers were more individualistic and suspicious of government intervention into the free market. They favored majority rule by individuals, not consensus arising out of deliberation. The South, by contrast, was more traditionalist-hierarchical. The Southern gentleman—slave owner living in his plantation house—was the American social type closest to the European aristocrat with his “blue blood.” Government was accordingly seen more as a vehicle for securing hereditary privilege than for regulating the market or reforming the world.
Over two centuries, migration and national integration via a growing federal government and mass media have still not erased these patterns. They have been carried to cities and neighborhoods outside their original settlements. Elazar traced these migrations in microdetail, for instance, showing Scots-Irish moving from Appalachia into Southern California towns like Bakersfield, bringing their “culture of honor” with them (Nisbett and Cohen 1996). Multiple surveys and case studies still indicate such differences (e.g., Clark 2004).
Scenes and Presidential Voting Patterns
These diverse intellectual trajectories within multiple traditions of political research converge on the simple yet important idea that national voting patterns provide a window into the links between scenes and political ideology. Even within a single nation, there are many and diverse local cultures, bound up with distinct political orientations and styles of decision making. A “rational choice” differs in a traditional versus transgressive scene.19 Given its decentralized national system, moreover, such local political-cultural variation is especially salient in the United States.
A straightforward way to reveal the nexus of scenes and politics is to correlate them. Figure 6.6 shows a strong overlap between county scenes and voting, highlighting voting trends in counties with key dimensions of scenes, from the more urbane (self-expression, transgression, rationalism) to the more communitarian (tradition, neighborliness, formality). Most strikingly, the more urbane areas grew increasingly Democratic from 1996 to 2012. These are scenes marked by art galleries, yoga studios, coffeehouses, environmental organizations, civic and social organizations, health food stores, travel agencies, research and development organizations, scientific and technical consulting firms, ethnic restaurants, and tattoo studios. By contrast, the more communitarian scenes of tradition, neighborliness, and formality grew more Republican. These scenes are built on fewer urbane amenities and more amenities such as churches, cemeteries, and hunting lodges.20
This figure shows Pearson correlations between six (YP) dimensions of scenes and US presidential county voting from 1996 to 2012. County voting data come from the Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (http://uselectionatlas.org).
These results suggest intuitive affinities between these particular scene dimensions and political orientations. A self-expressive scene, for instance, likely indicates a broadly culturally liberal environment, open to mixing and pluralism, and tolerant of new and different ideas and practices. Inglehart and Welzel (2005) argue that such self-expressive values foster liberal ideologies at the cross-national level, and our results suggest that similar processes occur within nations as well. Likewise, the small-town community feel indicated by the communitarian dimensions seems strongly culturally resonant to a conservative worldview. Simmel’s (1971) classic contrast of metropolis and village, for instance, associated the latter with a slower pace of life, discomfort with change, and rootedness in ways of life conserved through generations. The small town continues to hold a significant place in the conservative imagination. For example, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that 76 percent of consistent conservatives chose small towns or rural areas as their ideal place to live, compared to just 31 percent of consistent liberals.21 Our results are consistent with these survey results, and indicate that residents of areas with scenes that embody the idea of local small-town community do indeed tend to vote more Republican. Figure 6.6 also suggests that scenes and politics grew increasingly aligned between 1996 and 2012.
Figure 6.7 throws the growing overlap between scenes and presidential voting patterns into sharp relief. It shows the average (absolute value) correlation between the 15 scene dimensions and Republican vote share across the five election years. The trend is unmistakable. In the 1996 Clinton-Dole contest, the average correlation of the 15 dimensions with Republican voting was around 0.04; by the time of the Obama-McCain and Obama-Romney races, it had grown by about a factor of three, to around 0.12. The American political landscape increasingly corresponds to its cultural landscape.22
Figure 6.7
Figure 6.7 shows the average absolute value Pearson correlation of the 15 (YP) scene dimensions with county Republican vote share from 1996 to 2012. County voting data come from the Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (http://uselectionatlas.org).
A natural question arises when examining correlations like those in figure 6.6. Does the overlap between scenes and national politics simply map onto and reflect ostensibly more fundamental cleavages, such as a county’s size, affluence, or racial and religious makeup? Evaluation of this question requires models that assess these and other politically salient characteristics of counties. This is, to be sure, a first step. As we have stressed throughout this book, neighborhoods within the same city can vary tremendously, and individuals even more. A full assessment of potential scene effects on political life needs to join scenes analysis with individual and neighborhood data, especially because the former has been central in the bulk of current voting research. This is extremely challenging in the US context, where the country’s vast size makes it difficult to assemble surveys of individuals that are large enough to be meaningfully matched to local areas. However, we have been able to analyze individuals and their surrounding scenes in Canada, with some striking results, summarized below. Still, a first step is an important step, and the county-level US results are highly intriguing.
Figure 6.8 illustrates the general strength of the scene-politics linkage by examining specifically the degree to which the relationship between transgressive scenes and Democratic voting depends on other salient county characteristics. The model includes our main Core variables: population, rent, the nonwhite and college graduate percentage of the population, and our cultural industry cluster variable. To these we add other possible determinants of political differences: the 20- to 34-year-old and 60-and-over percentages of the population, the overall religious adherence rate, the evangelical and Catholic adherence rates,23 the number of unions per zip code,24 turnout,25 and whether the county was in a red or blue state (defined as the states won by each party for a given election year).
This figure shows results of multilevel regressions analyzing Republican county vote share from 1996 to 2012, where counties are the level 1 units of analysis and states are level 2. Points correspond to fixed effect estimates, and lines show the 95 percent confidence interval. If the line crosses 0, the variable is not statistically significant at that level. Transgression × Rent is the multiplicative interaction term of county transgression and county median gross rent, which is mapped in figure 6.9. N is all US counties. County voting data come from the Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections (http://uselectionatlas.org).
The first point to take away from figure 6.8 is that it confirms an idea we repeatedly stress, that no single variable dominates. Many characteristics of counties relate significantly to their partisan makeup. Republicans are often more likely than Democrats to be in smaller, higher rent, more homogeneously white counties, with fewer younger (20–34) and older (60+) citizens. Republican counties also tend to be home to more religious adherents and evangelicals, but fewer labor unions; they are typically in red rather than blue states. High turnout tends to favor Democrats. These results are consistent with what political scientists typically find in surveys of individuals, and thus provide a useful baseline of traditional factors against which to evaluate our scenes results.
Figure 6.8 also indicates both how durable America’s major geographic partisan patterns are and how those patterns also show tectonic shifts. Rent, age, race, unions, and religion are steady sources of political cleavage, and racial composition remained the single strongest variable throughout. Yet there were some shifts over this period: for instance, less homogeneously white areas, always more Democratic, shifted further in this direction, especially in Obama’s elections; big cities also became less Republican.
But perhaps the most interesting shift concerns the interplay between religion and education. Indeed, the evangelical makeup of a county changed in its political significance, shifting steadily rightward. Catholic counties also shifted to the right over the same period. At the same time, counties with more college graduates grew more Democratic. In 1996, education was positively correlated with Republican voting. However, this connection between college graduates and Republican voting progressively shifted, until educated counties voted more Democratic in 2008 and 2012.
The shifting politics of education and religion are indeed major changes. Not only are these changes likely bound up with the increasing alignment of scenes and voting (seen in figures 6.6 and 6.7); they illustrate a point stressed by Robert Fogel (2000). The politicization of American evangelicals—in one or another direction—is not constant, but appears and recedes in waves, typically around big moral issues of the day.26 Robert Putnam and David Campbell add specificity, showing how the recent wave of evangelical political activism emerged in reaction to the mainstreaming of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, and grew out of decades of grassroots efforts, before bursting onto the presidential scene with the election of George W. Bush in 2000. This politicization of evangelical religion, they suggest, generated its own counterreaction, especially among highly educated college graduates, who became both increasingly secular and politically liberal in response. Figure 6.8 shows how deeply these shifts are reflected not only in individual attitudes and survey responses but also in the very fabric of American partisan geography. At the same time, as Fogel and Putnam suggest, what goes up can also come down, and the current alignment is by no means natural or permanent.27
Against this backdrop, the results for our scenes measures in figure 6.8 take on added salience. They show the correlation of the scene with the partisan makeup of counties, independent of these deep and documented fissures (county size; racial, educational, and age composition; religion; unions; and even red versus blue state location). While new to political models, scenes, as figure 6.8 shows, are also a durable part of the American political landscape. Indeed, in all five elections, counties with higher scores on our transgression performance score were more Democratic and less Republican. And we know from relations among scenes dimensions that less transgression implies more tradition, neighborliness, and localism, which typically means more Republican votes. Figure 6.8 suggests that the connection between liberal politics and liberal culture is not just a by-product of more traditional political characteristics, such as education and union concentration.
That the overlap between transgressive scenes and voting is “independent” from the other variables in our model does not mean, however, that the scene does not interact with these other variables. The results for “transgression × rent” in figure 6.8 indicate that they do, in fact, interact. This variable (transgression × rent) picks out political impacts in counties with both more transgressive scenes and higher rent. We call this pattern a “Bobo” effect, and graph it in figure 6.9.
This figure maps the Bobo scores of all US counties. Boboness here is measured as county’s rent multiplied by its transgression performance score. The map uses Jenks natural breaks to group counties into five bins. Positive values and darker shades indicate counties with both above average median rents and above average transgression scores. Our regression models include as a Bobo measure the product of the z-scores of county median gross rent and county average transgression score. For mapping, we reversed the sign of this product term for all counties with both below average rent and transgression. This makes the mapped value for such counties negative.
“Bobo” is short for bourgeois Bohemian, a term coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks: the combination of Bohemian values and bourgeois budgets produces Bobos, bourgeois Bohemians. As the children of the 1960s aged, Brooks argues, their wallets grew but their Bohemian tastes persisted. They lived out classical themes from nineteenth-century Romanticism, formerly limited to small circles of authors, poets, and artists. Backpacking rather than polo; authentic peasant and ethnic food rather than Michelin stars; drum circles, reading groups, and rock ’n’ roll rather than Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms; Edutourism rather than cruises; and so on. Now armed with expense accounts, these tastes could define a new lifestyle—as seen in high-end camping and outdoor gear suppliers (like REI) in Bobo strongholds like the SF Bay Area or Seattle, $200 ticket prices for a Rolling Stones concert, and the mixing of exoticism and authenticity in the recipes of gourmet cooking magazines.28
For Bobos, fatter wallets thus need not imply conservative politics, but rather an opportunity to more effectively champion the Bohemian cultural and political ideals that had in the past been more strongly associated with marginality and poverty. Multiplying transgression by rent is a straightforward way to discriminate high rent/high transgression from high rent/low transgression. This “Bobo” index, rather than making Bobos a dichotomous type, generates a continuous spectrum, so we can analyze how locations across the country which vary in their degree of “Boboness” differ in their politics. While other measures of Boboness are possible, this one proves surprisingly powerful and has strong face validity, as the map in figure 6.9 shows.
The map shows higher Bobo scores in the San Francisco Bay Area and around Boulder, Colorado; New York; and Washington, DC. Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland are relatively dark. Conversely, scores in the Midwest and South are generally low, as expected. Bobo counties are especially concentrated in San Francisco and south of the Bay Area into Silicon Valley. They extend north into Marin County and Sonoma County. These areas have some of the highest housing prices in the United States and are replete with Whole Foods stores, hiking trails, crafts fairs, and late-night drum circles on the beach. Many Colorado counties also rank high on the Bobo scale. Pitkin County, Colorado, home to Aspen, is in the top five nationally, and several strongly Bobo counties cluster around Boulder. Another Bobo cluster runs along the Atlantic Seaboard and includes several counties in the New York metropolitan area, Boston’s Suffolk County, and Fairfax and Arlington Counties (suburbs of Washington, DC).
How closely do voting patterns line up with Bobo patterns? Republicans tend to fare worse electorally in high rent counties with strong transgressive scenes, compared to similar counties with weak transgressive scenes. Figure 6.10 shows this clearly. Look first at the left side of the figure, that is, at counties with strongly untransgressive scenes. The top dotted line stands high on the y-axis: high rent counties without transgressive scenes had a Republican vote share well above the national average. As the dotted line moves to the right, it descends sharply. At the far right are counties with the highest transgression scores; here, high rent counties had Republican vote shares below the national average.29 Not all affluent counties are politically equal. High rent/high transgression counties tend to be more Democratic; high rent/low transgression counties tend to be more Republican: a neat illustration of how an ostensibly simple and clear basic variable for political analysis—affluence, as indicated by high median rent—is more chameleonlike if we look closely. Transgression is a political transformer: moving across scenes, money changes political color from blue to red.
This figure shows how transgression and rent interact to predict lower Republican vote shares. The figure is read left to right, where the x-axis indicates county average (YP) transgression performance scores, and the y-axis indicates the predicted Republican vote share (in 2000). All variables have been standardized. Predicted values are based on multilevel models with counties as the level 1 units of analysis and states as the level 2 units of analysis. Covariates include all variables in figure 6.7. N is all US counties.
Context and Composition30
These results indicate the power of place in politics. Indeed, place-based ideological differences and voting patterns are well established (Bishop 2008; Blake 1972; Gelman 2008; R. J. Johnston 1983). Yet there is little close analysis of specific social dynamics generating these spatial patterns. Two major ways in which space matters for voting and political ideology are through “compositional effects” and “contextual effects” (R. J. Johnston and Pattie 1998; Cochrane and Perrella 2012; Gidengil et al. 1999), central in recent work modeling local effects (Sampson et al. 2005; Wodtke, Harding, and Elwert 2011).
Compositional effects are driven by characteristics of individuals, commonly demographic, which matter for a given outcome (e.g., voting). Importantly, compositional effects trace regional political variation to the clustering of particular types of people in particular places. They do not depend on any specific type of spatial context; regardless of where, exactly, highly educated people cluster, the compositional effect of education will be roughly the same. In contrast, contextual effects operate when local area characteristics influence individuals’ behaviors, such as when demographically similar individuals who reside in qualitatively different communities have divergent community-specific experiences and life chances (Kirk and Papachristos 2011; Sampson 2012; Wodtke, Harding, and Elwert 2011).
In past research on spatial differences in politics, contextual effects were often identified simply by controlling individual-level variables. Any remaining unexplained variation was attributed to regionalism, or the effect of place (Elkins and Simeon 1979; R. J. Johnston and Pattie 1998). This leaves regions as empty vessels, a residual left unaccounted for otherwise. Without some meaningful account of why living in a certain place should inform a person’s politics, “context” resembles a placeholder waiting for an explanation (Cutler 2007).
Scenes analysis is a way to fill up such local area vessels with substantive content and identify mechanisms through which contextual effects operate.31 One pathway is through shaping residential patterns and location decisions. To the extent that taste for certain scenes is correlated with distinct political attitudes, scenes can help explain why certain individuals cluster in one place rather than another. A second process is by defining local norms of political sense making. Scenes can embody shared styles of attention and judgment that influence which types of candidates and parties “feel right” to voters (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2004).
This point extends into politics the Kantian insight from chapter 1: our subjective judgments are validated when we observe others responding as we do (R. J. Johnston 1983). Such reasoning led Hannah Arendt to make the aesthetics of The Critique of Judgment the basis of her political theory (Arendt 1992). Scenes may analogously help individuals observe others’ subjective political judgments and have their own political judgments validated or invalidated (Millie 2008). A neighborhood filled with art galleries, women’s organizations, and farmers’ markets communicates and validates different political values than a neighborhood filled with truck dealers and business associations. The values communicated by the local scenescape set the local context, which mediates national political events.
Aggregates and Individuals
Our US analyses already indicate strong links between scenes and politics by aggregating votes to the county level. These county aggregate results are important in their own right, especially for voting. We often want to know which party in an area received the most votes, since these local aggregates determine the makeup of national legislative bodies. Individuals come and go, yet these local aggregate patterns are often remarkably stable. For instance, in Canada the 2001 and 2011 Liberal Party electoral vote shares correlated 0.65. In the United States, the 1996 and 2012 Republican vote shares correlated 0.72.
Yet aggregate relationships are only one type of local area process. Also crucial are relationships between aggregate area characteristics and individual behavior.32 Unfortunately, direct tests of how local spatial context affects individuals’ politics are difficult and rarely done because of methodological challenges. Most national surveys of citizens are too small to permit local area analysis.33
However, we found that we could break some new ground by using an individual-level exit poll from the 2011 Canadian federal election.34 These data are extremely valuable for our purposes because every respondent is associated with an electoral district (ED). This allows us to link respondents to our Canadian scenes data set and Statistics Canada sociodemographic characteristics of each district.35
To measure individual political attitudes, we created a summary measure of the conservatism or liberalism of each respondent’s overall political ideology. Our analysis focuses on relating political ideology to two scenes dimensions: self-expressive legitimacy and local authenticity. Highly “self-expressive” scenes include arts districts of large cities (West Toronto, East Vancouver, Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal) while “locality” is strong in small towns and rural areas (Saskatchewan, the Atlantic Provinces).
We evaluated the impact of the scene on individual politics against a battery of individual- and election district–level control variables similar to those used in much past research. Individual controls include gender, age, household income, education, visible minority status, number of children, religiosity, political engagement on social media, and place of residence (urban versus rural). ED-level controls are average rent, percent of the ED population identifying as a visible minority population, percent of the ED population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, percent of the ED population reporting no religious affiliation, and the percent of dwellings in an ED that are rented (not owned).
Findings
A first major result is that 11 percent of the variation in individual politics is explained by differences between election districts, and the remaining 89 percent by differences between individual voters. Second, individual voters’ political sensibilities are associated with the distinct scenes in which they live. Being surrounded by amenities that promote self-expression (e.g., art galleries, live theaters, music studios) is associated with liberal political attitudes, while amenities that emphasize locality (e.g., monuments, campgrounds) are associated with conservative attitudes. As these effects remain consistent when individual-level controls are added, these associations are not reducible to individual demographic characteristics.
These findings take on further interest, since other scenes dimensions were insignificant. Scenes of equality and the state—rooted in amenities such as immigrant resource centers, welfare services, public hospitals, public libraries, and public schools—show clear positive relations with Liberal voting using aggregate ED data (Silver and Miller 2014), but were unrelated to liberal individual attitudes. This nonfinding was surprising given that a cornerstone of modern liberal attitudes is support for government intervention to promote social and economic equality between people and groups. Yet these historically powerful dimensions of state and equality emerge as less politically salient in contemporary Canada, while personal self-expression and local authenticity are more salient. These national election results mirror our discussion of buzz, indicating how in many locations the arts and expressive activities galvanized politics.
Contrasting contexts specifies distinct political dynamics. Traditional left-right voting by class (stressing state and equality) often declined when new party programs like the Third Way of New Labour and candidates like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton emerged (Clark and Lipset 2001). Still our French scenes study of turnout in presidential elections found that the key drivers were still mainly the traditional ones—income, occupation, and percent immigrants. Local scenes were insignificant. By contrast, in European Union (EU) elections, scenes measures, especially those defined by strong cultural organization concentrations, increased turnout among the same French voters. EU elections featured lifestyle parties and issues like the environment more prominently than French presidential elections, and arts activity was also a more salient factor (DellaPosta et al. 2014).
Integration, Autonomy, and Polarization
How much are people swayed by scenes, politically? One common pattern emerges: more-educated people seem less swayed by their local scenes. This holds where we could analyze local citizen and scenes data, in Canada and Spain. We detail this for Canada.
Figure 6.11 shows how people with more education seem less responsive to their scenic context. More education and living in a self-expressive scene both predict lower (i.e., more liberal) scores, and local authenticity predicts more conservative attitudes: in the left graphic, all three lines slope down as they move to the right; in the right graphic, all three lines slope upward; the dotted (high education) line is always lower (showing more liberal citizen responses) than the other two lines.
This figure visualizes how the relationship between education and politics shifts across scenes in Canada. It shows how associations between political ideology (on a left-right scale) and high (90th percentile), medium (median), and less (10th percentile) educated individuals shift across self-expressive and localist Canadian electoral districts. The base shows standard deviations; the vertical axis is the left-right index score. The left-right index combines five items from the IPSOS poll, a question about what party the respondent voted for in the 2011 federal election, and four general questions about the respondent’s political attitudes: “On most political issues, do you consider yourself to be on the ‘left,’ ‘right,’ or ‘centre’?”; “Do you favour or oppose the death penalty for people convicted of murder?”; “What is your view on same-sex marriage?”; “Which comes closer to your view? ‘Government is doing too many things that should be left to business.’ ‘Government should do more to solve problems.’” Cronbach’s alpha for this scale is 0.733. Analysis of vote choice alone yields similar results to those reported in the text. See the online appendix for more details.
However, the slopes of the lines vary. Less-educated individuals show the sharpest shift across scenes, becoming about 1.5 units less conservative between the least and most self-expressive scenes. In the right graphic, as the environment becomes more localist (and culturally liberal), the political views of less-educated individuals shift accordingly, becoming nearly as liberal as the most educated. The slope for highly educated persons is shallower, moving down about 1 unit across self-expressive scenes and barely increasing across localist scenes. As the environment becomes more localist (and culturally conservative), the least educated do too, but the most educated do so less—accordingly, the political distance between the most and least educated grows. The result is that Canada’s more self-expressive scenes are less polarized by education than its most localist scenes—in the former the three lines draw closer together and in the latter they spread apart. Thus the relative cultural autonomy and cosmopolitanism that education plausibly produces may also lead, indirectly, to heightened political polarization between the most and least educated in certain circumstances.
We report these finding to suggest that political individuation itself may be a contextually variable dimension of social life, with potentially major consequences for political polarization. That is, rather than presume a priori that political decisions are autonomously individualistic or holistically collectivistic, we can analyze these two interdependent processes and assess their relative impacts. Navarro Yáñez and Rodríguez-García (2014) found similar scenes-individual convergence results for Spain.
Scenes and Political Contributions
Voting is a central political act in democratic societies. Yet elections are the final moment of campaigns, and campaigns run on cash to get there. Thus, one of the most potent forms of citizen engagement is through direct financial contributions to electoral campaigns. With the expansion of the Internet, this form of political action has become more easily accessible to more citizens.
Digitization has also made it easier to track where political contributions come from. The Federal Election Commission reports information about every contribution over $200, including the name, gender, occupation, industry, and (crucial for our purposes) zip code for each donor. The Center for Responsive Politics has gathered all this information into electronic files, accessible at its website, opensecrets.org. Social scientists have only just begun to tap into it.
The analytical value of these data is potentially huge. Crucial is that they can take us below the county to zip codes. Throughout this book, we have stressed how county aggregates can mask neighborhood differences. Zip codes can differ markedly from their surrounding counties politically. Fairfield, Connecticut, cast only about 43 percent of its votes for George W. Bush in 2000. But zip code 06830 in Greenwich gave 76 percent of the $685,000 it contributed in 2000 to Republican candidates. This was the fifth-highest total Republican contribution from any zip code in the country, and it came from a county where a solid majority voted for Al Gore. By contrast, Manhattan overwhelmingly voted Democratic, but Manhattan’s 10021 gave more to Republican candidates than any other zip code in 2000 (even if it gave slightly more to Democratic candidates). Analyzing county voting dynamics alone ignores the political activism of fund-raising in places like Greenwich or Manhattan.
Moreover, the dynamics of contributions may be strongly related to the local scene. It is easier to write a check or directly deposit funds from your bank account than to change how your neighbors vote. Lifestyle preferences encoded in scenes thus might appear in contributions even more clearly than in voting, especially since the contributions are listed separately according to candidates and parties, as well as political action committees, the National Rifle Association, Greenpeace, and so on. Such value-laden contributions are potentially rich indicators of politicized scenes, permitting us to diagnose more finely and deeply the expressive content of local political scenes.
Combined with other scenes concepts and data, this information offers distinctly rich ore for analytical mining that can sharpen our understanding of where and why political contributions occur.36 Here we offer a simple illustration of the power of scenes for understanding contribution patterns. We examine connections between “Blue Blood” amenities (such as yacht clubs, private golf courses, and country clubs, defined more precisely below) and the ratio of Republican to Democratic contributions in a zip code.
“Blue bloods” figure prominently in accounts of American political culture. Robert Dahl’s classic New Haven study Who Governs? featured “social notables,” heirs of the old “patricians” who had “founded and governed town and colony, city and state for nearly two centuries, and who, besides, embodied the highest achievements of a Congregational society” (1974, 17). Over time, with influxes of Catholic immigrants and the rise of “the new men” of industrial capitalism, these patricians lost political power.
Membership in informal clubs became key markers of social standing. “One symbol—probably the best—of membership in upper-class New Haven society today is an invitation to the annual Assemblies held in the New Haven Law Club. . . . The Assemblies exist to provide the attenuated version of primitive puberty rites, the social debuts of the daughters of the elect” (Dahl 1974, 64). In the late nineteenth century, these earlier immigrants created private schools, suburban homes, and other exclusionary institutions like country clubs that were more blue blood than egalitarian. Paul DiMaggio (1982a, 1982b) details how the Boston “Brahmins” transformed cultural institutions like the symphony, theater, and museum from raucous, cross-class affairs into more narrowly genteel and elite institutions. Generally, “as new European migrants flooded into cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, as industrialization exploded and as class tensions rose, elites began to construct institutions that could protect their families from the threats of a modernizing nation” (Khan 2010, 6).37
The political meaning of “blue-bloodedness,” however, is complex. Harvard—a historic Brahmin bastion—already in the late nineteenth century expanded admissions beyond New England elites.38 In the early twentieth century, creation of the house system explicitly mixed rich and poor. Harvard thus outpaced other Ivy League institutions in reducing WASP exclusivity. At the same time, some leading Cambridge lights brought new cultural themes into play. For instance, William James hosted séances and lectured on self-transformation and self-expression—ideas that fueled the “consciousness raising” of the 1960s New Age movements. Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy mixed with blue bloods and married former “debutante of the year” Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island, home to many New England patricians. Yet Kennedy was an iconic liberal Democratic president. The Bobo pattern emerged from roots like these, to spread across the United States and other parts of the world.
Newport by 2000 combined Blue Blood amenities and weak electoral support for George W. Bush. Our analysis (not shown) of links between Blue Blood amenities and county voting patterns reveals such Blue Blood political complexity. Counties with numerous Blue Blood amenities generally vote Republican. Yet when Blue Blood amenities combine with strong self-expression and local authenticity, the Blue Blood–Republican connection is reduced to the point that Blue-Bloodedness does not predict voting in any meaningful way. Like the Bobo analyses, this illustrates the contingency of the seemingly foundational variable, income, when one or two scenes indicators are added to standard voting models.39
Methodologically, the Blue Blood index illustrates another way (beyond the performance scores and interactions discussed above) we can use amenities to measure important sociopolitical concepts. We can go back to our basic amenities for more conceptually pure components than the more general scenes dimensions like glamour, and construct new measures that join with powerful models used by many others. Our Blue Blood index illustrates one way to do this. It is a simple sum of the number of skiing facilities, boat and yacht clubs, cigar shops, Episcopal churches, equestrian clubs, golf courses, private golf clubs, Presbyterian churches, private tennis clubs, private clubs, and ballroom and social dance instruction services. Table 6.4 shows the 25 US zip codes with the most Blue Blood amenities, their total contributions to each major party, and the 2000 Republican vote share for their surrounding counties.
| Table 6.4. Top 25 Blue Blood zip codes | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Presidential campaign contributions ($) | |||||
| Zip code | Place-name | Blue Blood amenities | Democratic candidates | Republican candidates | Republican vote share (%) |
|
33040 |
Key West, FL |
140 |
17,325 |
14,900 |
49 |
|
32541 |
Destin, FL |
102 |
3,000 |
28,860 |
75 |
|
34102 |
Naples, FL |
96 |
7,300 |
111,375 |
67 |
|
40383 |
Versailles, KY |
94 |
2,000 |
11,150 |
60 |
|
40511 |
Lexington, KY |
82 |
1,000 |
15,000 |
54 |
|
10001 |
New York, NY |
69 |
18,300 |
10,750 |
15 |
|
96761 |
Lahaina, HI |
65 |
2,000 |
2,300 |
33 |
|
34231 |
Sarasota, FL |
60 |
2,750 |
8,200 |
53 |
|
19102 |
Philadelphia, PA |
59 |
19,000 |
26,500 |
18 |
|
30303 |
Atlanta, GA |
57 |
10,000 |
26,900 |
41 |
|
34482 |
Ocala, FL |
54 |
0 |
2,350 |
55 |
|
29926 |
Hilton Head Island, SC |
50 |
4,200 |
25,900 |
59 |
|
92663 |
Newport Beach, CA |
50 |
10,500 |
68,526 |
58 |
|
33125 |
Miami, FL |
49 |
0 |
2,250 |
46 |
|
34134 |
Bonita Springs, FL |
49 |
3,950 |
40,000 |
59 |
|
89101 |
Las Vegas, NV |
48 |
9,200 |
8,500 |
47 |
|
02840 |
Newport, RI |
47 |
6,500 |
6,050 |
41 |
|
33301 |
Fort Lauderdale, FL |
46 |
21,700 |
72,225 |
31 |
|
96753 |
Kihei, HI |
45 |
702 |
5,050 |
33 |
|
33602 |
Tampa, FL |
45 |
16,000 |
29,350 |
52 |
|
40507 |
Lexington, KY |
45 |
1,500 |
12,400 |
54 |
|
33401 |
West Palm Beach, FL |
45 |
13,400 |
34,925 |
36 |
|
36561 |
Orange Beach, AL |
44 |
250 |
2,750 |
74 |
|
96740 |
Kailua Kona, HI |
43 |
0 |
3,950 |
34 |
|
34145 |
Goodland, FL |
42 |
1,000 |
16,350 |
67 |
|
92660 |
Newport Beach, CA |
42 |
2,1950 |
252,844 |
58 |
|
Note: This table shows the US zip codes with the most Blue Blood amenities, together with the zip code’s total contributions to Republican and Democratic presidential candidates in 2000 and their surrounding county’s Republican vote share in the 2000 presidential election. The Blue Blood amenities index sums: skiing facilities, boat and yacht clubs, cigar shops, Episcopal churches, equestrian clubs, golf courses, private golf clubs, Presbyterian churches, private tennis clubs, private clubs, and ballroom and social dance instruction services. Contributions data come from the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org). |
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Many top Blue Blood zip codes are in the South, especially Florida but also Hilton Head, South Carolina; Lexington, Kentucky; Orange Beach, Alabama; and Atlanta, Georgia. These zip codes are joined by some big-city downtown areas (in Philadelphia and New York) and Hawaii vacation spots. These top Blue Blood zip codes provided far more financial support to Republicans, about 77 percent, although Republicans won only 49 percent of the votes in these counties. Golf mecca Pebble Beach, California, is a good example: only 37 percent of its county (Monterey, home to ex-hippies, farmers, dot.commies, and more) voted for Bush, yet Pebble Beach gave 91 percent of its $63,600 in presidential contributions in 2000 to Republicans. Newport, Rhode Island, again stands out among the top Blue Blood zip codes in contributing more to Democrats than Republicans, along with Key West, Florida, Manhattan’s 10001, and zip codes in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, and San Francisco.
To control for multiple causes of political contributions, we used our Core zip code model in figure 6.12. To this we added the Blue Blood index at three levels: the zip code total number of Blue Blood amenities, the average number per zip code in the county, and the average number per state. We then used a three-level multilevel model, which registers how zip codes and partisan contributions may cluster by counties and states.
In this figure, the line represents results from a single multilevel model where variables measuring the presence of Blue Blood amenities have been constructed based on different areal units. The model utilizes the Core, using census 2000 variables where possible, and includes Republican vote share in 2000. To compare results, all variables (including outcomes) have been standardized. The y-axis shows regression coefficients indicating the association between Blue Blood amenities and partisan presidential contributions at the zip code, county, and state levels. Partisan contributions are measured as the ratio of Republican to Democratic contributions during the 2000 election cycle. Presidential contributions data come from the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org).
Figure 6.12 focuses on the ratio between Blue Blood amenities and partisan contributions at the zip code, county, and state levels while controlling for the other variables in the model. The pattern is clear: the line starts high on the left, but then declines as it moves to the right. County Blue Blood amenities provide less information about zip code presidential contributions, and states provide nearly none.40 Clearly, analyzing counties and states leaves out important zip code attributes that cut across both levels and are often quite strong—a nice illustration of the potential of adding small local-area data for scenes and amenities to clarify cultural sources of political activism. We are accordingly exploring political contributions to PACs, such as the National Rifle Association, human rights groups, environmental groups, and more, to better understand how they join in the political dynamics of scenes.
Conclusion
This chapter shows clear connections between the cultural and political character of places, and that the strength of these relationships tripled for presidential elections from 1996 to 2012 (cf. figure 6.7). For politicians and political activists, these results document the importance of targeting messages to more than red and blue states or rich and poor voters. Political messages may be interpreted quite differently in counties with different scenes, even when counties are similar in wealth and many other standard political correlates.
For political analysts, these results suggest the need to elaborate political cultural specifics below regional and state levels to include county and zip code variations. They also show the value of employing a wider set of cultural indicators, beyond church attendance or single amenities such as Starbucks and Walmart. Including hundreds of amenities permits us to measure subtle but important cultural differences and to gauge their political impacts with a precision and sensitivity surpassing much past work on political culture.
Many familiar ways of discerning political tendencies retain their importance in our results. Republicans do well among the affluent; Democrats, in ethnically diverse big cities. Evangelicals have mobilized politically in recent decades, with important but complex impacts, while college graduate concentrations increasingly have aligned with Democratic voting.
Yet there is more to the American political landscape than these classic variables. Republicans do well where the scene is less transgressive and more traditional, local, and neighborly, regardless of the local population, rent, racial and religious makeup, and the other standard political variables in our models. New social movements emerged in the 1970s, and their bases of support remain distinctively narrow, even four decades later. They are concentrated in areas with dense, urbane, educated, artistic, diverse, self-expressive, walkable scenes—and even more so when walkability and self-expression coexist. Yet some NSM values have spread more broadly. We capture them with scenes measures like our Bobo index of rent × transgression. Counties that are more Bobo are less likely to vote Republican than are other affluent counties—bourgeois budgets are shifted by Bohemian sensibilities. Counties where Blue Blood amenities are plentiful tend to vote Republican, but the Republican–Blue Blood connection weakens in more self-expressive scenes. Our analysis of impacts on political contributions by Blue Bloods, measured at state, county, and zip code levels, documents that zip code impacts surpass impacts of the same Blue Blood items measured using state and county averages. Smaller is often bigger, for political analysis.
Finally, our analysis of the interplay between individuals and their environments in Canada is one of the only direct empirical tests of the qualitative dimensions of local cultural context on individual political attitudes of which we are aware. Our findings are therefore important, even though the effect of cultural context is small relative to the effect of individual characteristics. A corollary for contextual analysts (like geographers) using primarily place-based data follows: include data about individual characteristics as well as context; conceptualize and analyze autonomy and integration, holism and individualism, as interdependent processes.