Geographic Proximity Dampens Ideological Policy Disagreement in Urban Politics

Abstract Recent research in many countries has found that urban elections and policy debates are consistently structured by left-right ideological disagreement. Yet many urban scholars have long argued the opposite: that municipal politics in cities is characterized non-ideological coalitions of residents and local interests, and that the role of ideology is strictly limited. In this paper, we use a topic sampling experiment incorporating more than 40,000 policy preferences from 4,000 distinct survey respondents to explore the relationship between ideology and geographic proximity across 40 municipal policy issues. We find clear evidence of ideological disagreement across many of these issues. However, our experimental design also reveals that ideological disagreement declines when respondents consider issues in the geographically proximate context of their own neighborhoods. Our results not only help to synthesize contrasting findings in past research, but also advance our understanding of how the "localness" of political settings shapes patterns of policy disagreement in urban contexts.