Social ties, community events, and civic engagement in urban settings
Tanika Raychaudhuri (Rice University), Joshua H. Davidson (Oberlin College), and Michael Jones-Correa (University of Pennsylvania)
Political parties and civic organizations are focused on increasing voter participation ahead of the 2024 presidential elections. The Pew Research Center estimates that about 63% of voting age adults voted in 2020 (DeSilver 2022). Although this reflects a peak in turnout in recent U.S. elections, American voting participation rates lag far behind those in many other countries (DeSilver 2022). While candidates and organizations often turn to expensive voter mobilization efforts, including phone banking and in-person canvassing, we find that non-political local events that generate social ties between community members have the power to increase voter turnout in urban settings.
Our research focuses on the role of social ties in the development of civic norms within urban communities. Previous political science research finds that socioeconomic resources and “strong” social connections to friends and family members increase political participation. However, most interactions in urban settings occur between “weak” social ties who include neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and even strangers. Despite their potential importance, little is known about the political consequences of informal social interactions with neighborhood-based ties in shared urban spaces. How do these casual interactions with weak social ties shape political participation?
We answer this question by exploring the relationship between block parties, one-off neighborhood events that require city permits in Philadelphia, and voter turnout in the 2012 presidential election. We argue that local events like block parties foster the development of weak social ties, which in turn increase political engagement by expanding individual’s access to information about local politics. Some examples might include information about public goods provisions, community activities, the locations of polling places, and the dynamics of local elections. Once neighbors get to know each other at local events like block parties, they are more likely to share these pieces of information with each other and become civically engaged.
Although block parties are just one example of local events that allow neighbors to meet and develop social connections, they are useful for our study because they occur in diverse neighborhoods across Philadelphia and require government approval. As such, we can measure their incidence, namely their locations and change over time. Data on block party permits issued between 2006 and 2016 indicate that over 100,000 events occurred throughout the city during that ten-year period (Karkun Sen 2018). We geo-coded the locations of these parties, merged this information with voter files for a random sample of nearly 100,000 registered voters in Philadelphia, and enriched the voter-level data with information about their local neighborhoods. We used these data to explore the relationship between living on blocks which held block parties in the summer of 2012 and voter turnout several months later in the presidential election.
We find that registered Philadelphia voters who lived on blocks that held at least one party in 2012 were about 2 percentage points more likely to vote in the presidential election than those who lived on blocks without parties. This finding holds when accounting for an individual’s age, gender, and the demographics of their local community. Next, we leverage over-time variation in the incidence of parties across sequential years to explore whether turnout changes with the strength of neighborhood-based weak social ties. Most notably, we find that the incidence of parties where they did not occur in the previous year is associated with an increase in voter turnout of almost 3 percentage points.
Finally, while block parties provide a participatory boost in neighborhoods throughout the city, their strongest impact is among residents of neighborhoods with large African American populations. This aligns with a rich line of research which finds that community institutions, including churches, barbershops, and social organizations build strong norms of civic engagement in African American neighborhoods (Calhoun-Brown 1996; Harris Lacewell 2004; McDaniel 2008; Tate 1991; White and Laird 2020). This suggests that the racial dynamics of urban centers have implications for the link between social ties and political participation. In particular, local social ties may serve as an important civic resource in minority communities.
Taken together, this research shows that one-off community events that bring neighbors together can increase civic engagement in urban settings. Local events that are not explicitly political but encourage people to form social connections are politically mobilizing. This is an important finding, which has implications for civic engagement in urban settings. Most notably, occasional interactions among neighbors, acquaintances, and even strangers can have lasting consequences for political participation, comparable to that of expensive voter mobilization campaigns. Therefore, political organizations and campaigns should invest in community building efforts at the local level to increase civic engagement.
Read the full UAR article here.
References
Calhoun-Brown, Allison. 1996. “African American Churches and Political Mobilization: The Psychological Impact of Organizational Resources.” The Journal of Politics 58(4): 935–53.
DeSilver, Drew. 2022. “Turnout in U.S. Has Soared in Recent Elections but by Some Measures Still Trails That of Many Other Countries.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/01/turnout-in-u-s-has-soared-in-recent-elections-but-by-some-measures-still-trails-that-of-many-other-countries/ (July 2, 2024).
Harris Lacewell, Melissa. 2004. Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton University Press.
Karkun Sen, Shrobona. 2018. “Block Party Permit Dataset” https://shrobona.carto.com/tables/blkparty_points1_copy/public
McDaniel, Eric. 2008. Politics in the Pews. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://press.umich.edu/Books/P/Politics-in-the-Pews2 (April 12, 2024).
Tate, Katherine. 1991. “Black Political Participation in the 1984 and 1988 Presidential Elections.” The American Political Science Review 85(4): 1159–76. doi:10.2307/1963940.
White, Ismail K., and Chryl N. Laird. 2020. Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Tanika Raychaudhuri is an assistant professor of Political Science at Rice University. Her research focuses on race, immigration, and political behavior in the United States.
Joshua Davidson is an assistant professor of Statistics and Data Science at Oberlin College. His research focuses on transportation equity, the geography of urban transportation, and spatial/statistical methods.
Michael Jones-Correa is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on race, urban politics, and immigrant civic participation.