A paper by Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos is getting a good deal of attention. They find that there is partisan sorting even at the level of individual residences–that Democrats tend to have Democratic neighbors and Republicans tend to have Republican neighbors. Although the study is cross-sectional, they imply that this tendency has been increasing, and this theme is even more prominent in the media coverage of their article. National surveys are obviously not of much use in studying geographical sorting, but they may shed light on the more general issue of partisan sorting. CONTINUED
David Weakliem, U. of Connecticut