Regional or parochial? Support for cross-community sharing within city-regions

ABSTRACT

This article explores whether citizens of city-regions hold a particular attitude about collective action. We model individual support for the new regionalist idea that communities sharing the same city-region (i.e., metropolitan area) should share resources across them to solve regional problems. Using data from a random sample survey of adults living in 15 metropolitan areas in the state of Georgia in the United States, we use Bayesian analysis to determine the effects of a set of individual and contextual factors on the attitude. Conventional political cleavages of race, gender, and place of residence produce the strongest effects. We offer a set of theoretical, methodological, and practical implications for future research on political orientations of citizens in city-regions.

Notes

1. It is undetermined how many political orientations citizens of city-regions may possess. We posit that it will depend on the types and multiplicity of issues in city-regions. However, we leave it to another time to identify political orientations that shape the support and opposition for other issues in city-regions (e.g., growth management, environmental sustainability, and siting of nuisance facilities such as wastewater treatment plants). Thus, our study is a partial consideration of political orientations in city-regions.

2. Regional or metropolitan identification could be weak, developed from “shared symbols of metropolitan pride” such as sports teams (Lowery et al., 1992, p. 97). Under the right circumstances (e.g., the presence of institutions for regional participation such as regional legislatures), however, their identity may be a building block for a regional citizenship, one that “would not replace local citizenship but ‘complement’ it [as] one more item in the complex bundle of identities that people assume for themselves” (Frug, 2002, p. 1827).

3. The causal arrow (or the direction of the correlation) may run in the opposite direction, whereby the dominance of the regional perspective or the parochial perspective is highly correlated with and may influence the presence or absence of metropolitan and regional institutions in city-regions.

4. In 2008, the fifteen MSAs (and the number of survey respondents from them) in Georgia included Albany (8); Athens-Clarke County (4); Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta (262); Augusta-Richmond County (35); Brunswick (6); Chattanooga (14); Columbus (8); Dalton (9); Gainesville (9); Hinesville-Fort Stewart (2); Macon (14); Rome (10); Savannah (19); Valdosta (9); and Warner Robins (11).

5. Georgia has had more city-county consolidations than any other state in the United States (Fleischman, 2000). Since 1933 more than three dozen city-county consolidation referendums have occurred in Georgia. The most recent referendum passed in 2012. Also, Georgia is located in the region where 54% of the 39 city-county consolidations in the United States have been adopted (Martin & Hock Schiff, 2011, p. 168).

6. In other models (not shown), we included the log of the population of the county of respondents. Its effect was neither significant nor substantive.

7. Our approach permits random effects to emerge from a common normal distribution, allowing for “shrinkage”— observations at the extremes are drawn closer to the mean (Clark & Linzer, 2015). Because the random effects framework estimates only a mean and standard deviation of the normal distribution, we rescue substantial degrees of freedom for our models.

8. Random effects estimate a mean and standard deviation of a distribution from which the random effects are drawn, rather than a coefficient for each unit. In our case, this means we estimate four parameters (county mean, county standard deviation, MSA mean, and MSA standard deviation) instead of coefficients for each county and MSA.

9. Confidence intervals and credible intervals can be intuitively interpreted in the same way. Technically, they are different. A confidence interval is calculated by calculating the range 1.96 standard deviations away from the coefficient in either direction. Bayesian analysis uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation method, where iterations of the estimation process produce a set of estimates. This set of estimates forms the posterior distribution of each parameter. The mean of that distribution becomes the coefficient estimate. The 95% credible interval is the space in which 95% of those estimates lie.

10. An estimate where 95% of the estimates fall to one side of zero but does not pass the typical significance test of being approximately 1.96 standard deviations from zero probably does not have a normal posterior distribution. In other words, if you were to plot the simulated estimates for any parameter, it would not look like a normal curve. Standard tests of statistical significance assume a normal distribution.

11. Even in the MSAs of Georgia, for instance, there is a difference between attitudes and behaviors related to the regional perspective. For instance, even though most citizens of city-regions in Georgia held high a regional perspective at the time of the 2008 survey, four years later voters in the majority of the state’s city-regions voted against regional one-penny tax increases for transportation and transit projects to reduce traffic congestion (Owens, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Leo Owens

Michael Leo Owens is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University. The core of his research concerns the efforts of marginalized groups to influence subnational policies to better represent and respond to their interests. Author of God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (2007), his current projects include a mixed-methods study of the weakening of Black municipal empowerment in American central cities and a book on the local and state politics of ex-prisoner reentry.

Jane Lawrence Sumner

Jane Lawrence Sumner is a doctoral candidate in the Political Science Department at Emory University and contributor to the “Visions in Methodology” Workshop, which brings together junior and senior women faculty working in the field of political methodology. Her research concerns political methodology and political economy, including the effects of the behaviors of multinational corporations on political and economic outcomes at the subnational level.