Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from Migration Patterns of 212 Million Voters

Jacob R. Brown; Enrico Cantoni; Ryan Enos; Vincent Pons; Emilie Sartre

doi:10.3386/w33422

Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from Migration Patterns of 212 Million Voters

Jacob R. Brown, Enrico Cantoni, Ryan Enos, Vincent Pons & Emilie Sartre

Working Paper 33422

DOI 10.3386/w33422

Issue Date January 2025

Using data on the residential location and migration for every voter in U.S. states recording partisan registration between 2008–2020, we find that residential segregation between Democrats and Republicans has increased year over year at all geographic levels, from neighborhoods to Congressional Districts. Individual demographic information reveals that segregation increases for voters of most demographic backgrounds, but that Democratic and Republican trending places have starkly different demographic profiles, thus contributing to the growing confluence of demographics, partisanship, and geography in the United States. We further decompose the change in segregation into different sources. Increases in segregation have not been driven primarily by migration but rather by generational change, as young voters enter the electorate, causing some places to become more homogeneously Democratic, and by existing voters leaving the Democratic party and causing other places to become more Republican.

For suggestions that have improved this paper, we are particularly grateful to Carolina Arteaga, Ceren Baysan, Pierre Boyer, Pedro Dal Bo, Rafael Di Tella, Olivier Gossner, Brian Knight, Yukio Koriyama, Stelios Michalopoulos, Massimo Morelli, Torsten Persson, Alessandro Riboni, Jesse Shapiro, Arthur Silve, Stefanie Stantcheva, Cecilia Testa, Matthew Weinzierl, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. We thank Catalist and TargetSmart for providing the U.S. individual-level panel data and responding to our queries about them, as well as Paul DiBello and Robert Freeman for invaluable help managing the data acquisition and setting up the data work. We further thank Sahil Chinoy and Martin Koenen for collaboration on the code to clean and construct the TargetSmart voter panel. We gratefully acknowledge generous funding from the Eric M. Mindich Research Fund on the Foundations of Human Behavior. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Causes and Extent of Increasing Partisan Segregation in the U.S. – Evidence from Migration Patterns of 212 Million Voters

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