The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics

What would you think if someone told you that you could become exclusionary toward a different group of people after just a few interactions with them? If newcomers moved into your neighborhood, would you have any prejudices toward them? For Ryan D. Enos, the answer is yes, no matter what your ideological beliefs are. This idea is indeed problematic, as it might disturb the way we think about ourselves in diverse, multicultural societies. The 2016 U.S. presidential election, however, showed that the political mobilization of stereotypes to attack groups of people, like Mexican immigrants, is a successful electoral move, equivalent to Enos’s central theoretical claim in The Space Between Us. In this book, Enos draws on a combination of field and laboratory experiments in neighborhoods of cities across the globe, as well as on big data analysis, to explore how social geography shapes our perceptions of the different racial, religious, and ethnic groups with whom we interact in our daily lives and how this in turn affects voting decisions.

Situating his book at the intersection of politics, psychology, and geography, Enos provides a theory of social-geographic impact to claim that space is not only geographic, but also simultaneously psychological, social, and political. For the author, geographic space structures the ways in which we think about other people and subsequently affects our political attitudes and behaviors, such as voting for one candidate or party versus another. We are affected more than we realize by the characteristics of the social geography in which we live: Specifically, the size of another group, its proximity, and the level of segregation between “our” group and “the other” group are geographical conditions that penetrate our psychology and then profoundly influence our political decisions.

The book starts with an explanation of this argument, some key terminology, and an exploration of the effects of space on people’s perceptions. Enos’s analytical depth increases throughout the book, in which he explores selected cases of how geography affects political behavior in laboratory-type settings he arranges and in drawing on data about segregation from cities such as Chicago, Boston, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The author argues that group-based biases, as well as the dichotomy of “us versus them,” coincide with the dichotomy “here versus there.” To prove this claim, Enos uses human psychology as the foundation of this theory, and provides readers with multiple examples and experiments. One of his various insightful and creative experiments consists of making white Anglo residents think that their neighborhood in suburban Boston is experiencing rapid demographic change due to immigration, with the purpose of studying whether their attitudes about immigration politics change after being exposed to Latino immigrants. By increasing the size and proximity of this immigrant group on commuter train platforms—that is, by increasing the intergroup contact—Enos’s experiment demonstrates that even what he calls the “good liberals” (who would identify themselves as “pro-immigration”) become exclusionary in a matter of just a few days of temporary contact with Latino immigrants. As the author argues, “the psychological space between us increases when the geographic space between us decreases” (p. 114).

In a similar vein, Enos asserts that in Chicago the physical distance that separates the northern and southern parts of the city is also a racial and psychological distance. Because of Chicago’s history of racial segregation, blacks and whites never share the same space, except for when they use the “L” train to commute to the other side of the city. Even then, the two groups predominate on different sections of the route. Their geographical separation increases the hostility and levels of suspicion toward the other group. Seemingly not interested in the origins of racial segregation, but rather in the ways in which space separates us and influences our perception, Enos poses this question: “given that segregation exists, what does it do?” (p. 17).

Enos suggests that space is the “mental shortcut” that we use when thinking about other groups. When people are segregated in space, the level of interpersonal contact decreases and group-based biases increase (p. 49). Our lives are thus unconsciously influenced by the spatial arrangements in which we live—arrangements that have unique and invisible psychological consequences on our perceptions. Enos’s evidence suggests that close contact with groups perceived as different, along with existing spatial segregation, operates to the detriment of inclusionary public policies. Thus, according to Enos, geography directly works through our perceptions, and its effects are “large and consequential,” because it creates a space in our heads before creating a space in our social relationships. A similar argument has been made by other political scientists such as Brown (2010), author of Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, for whom “the walls in our heads” are powerful fantasies that respond to a political mobilization of the emotion of fear and sustain exclusionary political decisions, such as building physical barricades to “protect” the national territory. For Enos, space functions as a heuristic technique to evaluate and categorize people and things, and therefore, our perception about stereotyped groups in our mental maps becomes intimately related to the spatial locations of these groups. By not taking into account the effects of segregation on our behavior, we are missing a “crucial part of the puzzle” (p. 77).

Enos could have also considered, like Brown, the effects of explicit mobilizing of the emotion of fear in sustaining and reproducing group-based biases. This would have provided another insight into the ways in which the boundary between the ingroup and the outgroup is redefined in line with specific political goals. In his book Shopping Our Way to Safety, sociologist Szasz (2007) made such an argument to explain why the wealthy move to gated communities. Afraid of the “dangerous classes” represented by the city, the wealthy respond through an individualistic response that entails erecting a barrier between the self and the perceived threat in what he called “inverted quarantines.” The perception of insecurity and the fear of downward mobility—and not a real risk—serve to establish a fictitious boundary between two different worlds and to motivate this exurbia process of the rich. In a similar manner, class—and not merely race—is a competing hypothesis that Enos’s argument could have benefited from taking into consideration: What if the increased psychological space between groups is not only motivated by different identities, but also by different material needs and concerns?

When discussing voting patterns during the 2008 elections, Enos argues that the turnout of white Anglo voters increased in segregated areas in which a higher proportion of the population was black. Moreover, white voters were less likely to vote for Barack Obama in highly segregated areas. On the contrary, white voters in less segregated areas were ten percentage points more likely to vote for Obama (p. 41). Understandably, Enos points to race as the main causal factor for changes in voting behavior and in the traditional party loyalties during the 2008 elections. Nevertheless, another rival hypothesis to the “race question”—or what he calls “the Arizona question” (relating to different perceptions of Latinos in different parts of Arizona because of their relative class status)—could be the preeminent relevance of homeownership in neighborhood politics in the United States, which translates into an electoral battle between homeowners and tenants. Group-based bias could emerge not only as an effect of diversity on behavior, but also from a perception of material and economic insecurity caused by the increased proximity of an outgroup, no matter what type of group. As Enos recognizes when citing the “Stanford Prison Experiment,” subjects’ decisions become biased in favor of their ingroup even when groups are randomly created and people are ephemerally categorized. Ingroup bias need not be simply a function of bifurcated racial or other social identities.

The evidence presented in this book targets not only researchers, but also policymakers, with the aim of bringing to their attention the important effects of social geography when crafting public policies in diverse societies. This book offers an innovative perspective on geography to both political scientists and geographers, and satisfyingly accompanies recent studies on U.S. electoral politics written from geographical perspectives, such as Maxwell and Shields’s (2019) The Long Southern Strategy, in which the authors sagaciously explained the dynamics of “southernization” of the Republican Party to hunt for white votes since the 1950s. The arguments presented in Enos’s book would amplify Maxwell and Shields’s claims (as well as those of other books on electoral politics) by emphasizing that one’s specific spatial location in “the South” or “southernized” is of great political importance.

Overall, Enos’s book, which received the Best Book Award of the American Political Science Association’s Experimental Research Section, is a valuable contribution to the literature on electoral geography. Although the author misses a close reading of the history of geography—especially of the 1960s theories of spatial analysis—and frequently treats space as a fixed thing that overdetermines people’s behavior, it must be acknowledged that studying geography and psychology together is not an easy task. Enos’s geographical extension of Allport’s social psychology and Key’s political sociology represents an interesting route to take in future studies on electoral politics and provides a clever methodological amalgam to animate debate about new inclusionary public policies about housing and social exclusion in the United States and abroad.