Race, space, and turnout

Abstract Urban politics in St. Louis is driven by race. For several decades the city of St. Louis has been nearly evenly divided between blacks and whites. Other ethnic minorities have accounted for 2% or less of the population over this same period. The geographic distribution of race exhibits a high level of segregation — blacks on the North side, whites on the South side, and a mixture of whites and blacks in the central corridor between north and south. These racial enclaves behave quite differently in city politics and separating them for analysis provides additional purchase on the structure of electoral mobilization. Turnout in a Democratic primary election (1989) and a non-partisan School Board election (1991) are studied here with the same precinct coverage. Demographic covariates used in the analyses are taken from the Census (1990) and several measures were constructed by allocation from block groups, to blocks, and then back to the precinct level by means of a concordance between the blocks and the precincts. Geographic tools (maps and spatial correlograms) are used throughout and extensive use is made of graphic visualization of these data. The end results show that count models utilizing a small number of Census measures as predictors defend themselves well, provided that race is controlled systematically.

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