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Geographic Boundaries and Local Economic Conditions Matter for Views of the Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2022

James Bisbee Open the ORCID record for James Bisbee [Opens in a new window]  and
Jan Zilinsky Open the ORCID record for Jan Zilinsky [Opens in a new window]
James Bisbee*
Affiliation:
Center for Social Media and Politics, New York University, New York, NY, USA
Jan Zilinsky
Affiliation:
Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
*
Corresponding author James Bisbee
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Abstract

The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geographic units—influences the strength of the relationship between economic evaluations and local economic conditions. Finding that unemployment claims are the best predictor of economic evaluations, especially when aggregated at the commuting zone or media market level, we underscore the importance of the modifiable areal unit problem. Our methods provide an example of how applied scholars might investigate the importance of geography in their own research going forward.

Keywords

modifiable areal unit problempolitical geographyspatial politicseconomic evaluationspartisanshiprandom forestmodel selectionmachine learningecological inference
Type
Letter
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 288 - 294
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology

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Footnotes

Edited by Jeff Gill

References

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