Income and Occupation as a Source of Political Diversity and Homogeneity

This chapter examines the relationship between economics and the geographic partisan sort, considering whether the clustering of Americans by class and occupation is a major cause of the clustering by party identification. There is evidence of economic clustering, especially among the wealthiest Americans. The number of households in the one hundred wealthiest zip codes in the United States grew by 7.4 percent between 2000 and 2011 (Wong 2011), suggesting that the wealthy are relocating to live among people of similar income levels. If these wealthy Americans share a common party affiliation, then their increasing propensity to move to the same communities is surely playing a role in the rise of uncompetitive counties.