Bill Harris writes:
Could it be that liberals / Democrats are more likely found in regions of high population density and that conservatives are more likely found in regions of low population density?
Is it credible that low population density encourages people to think they control their own destiny (there are fewer around to help them) and that there are few limits to their growth (those in Alaska probably run up against fewer obvious limits to growth than those in Connecticut)? Or does the causality work the other way? Are conservatives generally attracted to areas of lower population density?
Is it credible that high population density encourages people to think of the limits to growth and the need to get along with others in ways that seem liberal or even socialistic to their low-density fellow citizens?
Could that explain why Europe, for example, tends to be more liberal than the US and more likely to support environmental concerns? Could that explain why the coasts of the US (at least in the cities) seem more liberal than the middle of the country?
My reply:
Yes, I think there may be something to this. You might want to look at the work of Jonathan Rodden, who has been looking into the persistent liberalism of city-dwellers.
It seems common sense that living in a high-density environment (basically, an urbanised environment) brings you into contact with a wider range of people. Exposed to a wider variety of preferences and prejudices, selection pressure then comes into play – the individual either needs to become more "liberal" (in the classical sense) or to remove themselves from the high-density environment.
If true, this would imply that urbanisation has an inherent liberalizing effect – indeed, that urbanisation is essential for liberal attitudes to form. Commonsense of course is a poor substitute for actual research – I looked at Rodden's online papers but didn't see anything immediately obvious – do you have any titles I can reference?
Here's some purely speculative food for thought to help focus on some useful data.
Living in a high-density environment basically brings you into casual contact with strangers more often, and more intimately than low density environments. I don't think there is a need to model the attributes or the relative varieties of people in order to come up with interesting data.
I also think that liberal and conservative are too loaded, and should be avoided. I prefer tolerant and intolerant. I think in the most useful cases conservatism is really an idealization of some kind of intolerance. For instance, I would consider vegans a kind of conservatism, though they usually self-identify with liberal socio-political groups.
I think that the relative amount of structure in the day to day interactions also matters. Are the people strangers, or familiar (structure provided by expectations based on past behavior). Is the interaction governed by strict parameters (waiting in line, obeying traffic rules, or under the direction of an authoritative third party?) or free?
I think people build up their tolerant or intolerant wolrdviews based on a brittle and fragile coral of social expectations. The expectations are the calcified skeletons of past interactions. Liberals can become conservative through a gradual but rapid period of calcification, and conservatives can become liberal if their egos are systematically worn down by a string of overwhelmingly contrary experiences.
My hypothesis is that intolerance erupts in a "sweet spot" between unchallenging and overwhelming adversity where idealized strategies are very likely to adequately defend an individual against those mild to moderate challenges. I also surmise that intolerance and thus conservatism are issue/environment specific. Tolerance (and thus liberalism), I believe also comes in two flavors: naive (characterized by lack of ideological defenses) and pragmatic (characterized by repeated past destruction of built up defenses).
This provides a way to resolve conundrums like Dutch society, which is both conservative, and tolerant, and is considered to be one of the most (if not the most) liberal society in the world, and the indistinct behavior patterns of extreme right and extreme left wing political movements.
However Bill Harris' findings do not necessarily explain why low density countries like Australia, Canada or Norway, all of which are substantially more liberal than the US. Moreover in Canada for instance, some of the most liberal provinces, like Manitoba with its NDP (semi-socialist) provincial government, tend to have the lowest population densities of the nation.
(No one else replied to this, so I will, despite this being 2 years old…still others may still find the page as I have)
Larry,
Population density figures calculated by dividing a country's size by its population are misleading for the purposes of this discussion. Canada has vast areas where virtually no one lives, and its population is more clustered into urban areas than is that of the U.S.
It is more meaningful to compare what percentage of the population lives in high-density areas than in low density area. Under such a measure (I'm not clear if there is a single widely accepted measure like this) Canada falls to the more dence side of the scale than the U.S.
I expect the same is true for other far-north countries like Norway, and also Australia with its large areas of uninhabitable dessert.