A paper by Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos is getting a good deal of attention. They find that there is partisan sorting even at the level of individual residences--that Democrats tend to have Democratic neighbors and Republicans tend to have Republican neighbors. Although the study is cross-sectional, they imply that this tendency has been increasing, and this theme is even more prominent in the media coverage of their article. National surveys are obviously not of much use in studying geographical sorting, but they may shed light on the more general issue of partisan sorting. Just after the election, a Monmouth Poll asked "And thinking of your friends and family who voted this year, do you think most of them voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden?" Among people who voted for Trump, 89% said that most voted for Trump and 6% said that most voted for Biden; among people who voted for Biden, 80% said most of their friends and family voted for Biden and 8% said most voted for Trump. That is, an overwhelming majority of people thought that most of their friends and family voted the same way they did.
The Gallup Poll asked similar questions in 1944, 1952, and 1956, specifically "what's your best guess about your friends, will most of them vote for Dewey this fall, or for Roosevelt" (in 1952 and 1956, they asked about voting Democratic or Republican). I looked at the 1944 survey: of the people who said they intended to vote for Dewey, 82% said most of their friends would vote for Dewey, 6% for Roosevelt, and 13% they they were evenly divided; among those who said they would vote for Roosevelt, 79% thought most would vote for Roosevelt, 8% that most would vote for Dewey, and 13% that they were evenly divided. If we just look at the people who answered on one side or the other, the degree of "sorting" was very similar in both years: people who thought their friends voted the same way they did outnumbered those who thought they voted the opposite way by a ratio of about 11 to 1.* This is remarkable considering the difference between the elections: 1944 was probably a low point for partisan polarization in modern history, since news was dominated by the war and Dewey was a moderate who wasn't associated with the Republican Party's previous opposition to the New Deal.
I looked for variation in the strength of "bubbles." There was some, but in every group I looked at, even people who voted against the majority of the group thought that most of their friends voted the same way they did. For example, about 70% of people who were classified as business executives or professionals said they intended to vote for Dewey, but 75% of the executives and professionals who voted for Roosevelt thought most of their friends would vote the same way, and only 14% thought that most would vote for Dewey.
This illustrates a point that is often overlooked in discussion of "bubbles"--the importance of the bubble inside our heads. Most people seem to think that most intelligent and fair-minded people will vote the same way they do, and that their friends are intelligent and fair-minded people, which leads to the conclusion that of course most of them agree with you. Also, if you get a sense that a friend may not agree with you on politics, most people will steer clear of politics, while if you get a sense that a friend does agree with you, you'll be more likely to talk about it. So my general feeling is that most people have always lived in pretty thick "bubbles," and that changes in sorting aren't the main factor behind increasing polarization.
*The 2020 survey didn't report an "evenly divided" category--about 5% said they didn't know. For the Gallup Poll, the figures I gave excluded "don't knows," who were about 17% of the sample. You could say that the lower number of "don't knows" in 2020 indicates increased partisan sorting. However, my impression is that the number of don't know responses was substantially higher in early surveys--people, at least the people who answer surveys, have become used to giving opinions on all sorts of things. Also, my guess is that if people volunteered that their friends were about evenly divided, the interviewers on the Monmouth poll were instructed to encourage them to make a choice--"well, if you had to say...." rather than count them as don't know.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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