Keep Looking

In his New York Times column Thomas Edsall directs me to a study that attempts to find the reason for our political polarization by measuring the “tightness” and “looseness” of the states:

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a PhD. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

Appropriately titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina. With two exceptions — Nevada and Hawaii — states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.

In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.

The study itself is here.

While I think that what they’re doing is worthwhile, I would suggest that the authors of the study continue to refine their criteria on the grounds that “looseness” and “tightness” are only predictive for the loosest and tightest states. Otherwise by their criteria either Illinois would be a Republican state or Montana and Idaho would be Democratic ones because Illinois sits right in between Montana and Idaho in the index they’ve created.

Quite to the contrary I think there is a simple even commonsensical explanation for the phenomena they’re trying to nail down. Once the percentage of a state’s population living in a single metro area reaches a certain percentage, the state tends to be Democratic. I would further suggest that percentage is around 20%. That would explain why California, New York, and Illinois are all Blue states while Montana, Idaho, and Indiana aren’t.