Description:

Please join the American Politics Workshop as they host Stephanie Ternullo, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University.

Abstract: The local policies that sustain the “concentration of advantage” in America's suburbs remain a durable feature of political geography. While scholars have explained the historical emergence of these policies, existing research offers less insight into how and why they have persisted over time. As such, this paper asks: What are the contemporary political processes that sustain concentrated advantage in America's suburbs? To answer this question, I draw on a mixed-methods study of residential zoning practices. I argue that there is an important spatial dimension to density preferences, meaning that suburbanites are distinctly opposed to density and therefore frequently mobilized to preserve the restrictive status quo. First, through survey and in-depth interview evidence, I show that contemporary suburbanites hold distinctly anti-density preferences because of both latent opposition - a sense that pro-density policies do not address suburban homeowners’ subjective conceptions of the housing crisis - and active opposition - concerns that pro-density policies represent urban encroachment into historically protected “suburban” ways of life. Second, drawing on an original dataset of residential zoning ballot measures in California and a Regression Discontinuity design, I illustrate the policy consequences of suburban opposition: less housing. Taken together, the findings reveal the importance of this previously overlooked spatial dimension of density preferences: suburbanites continue to oppose density, and when residents with anti-density preferences are concentrated within municipal boundaries, they can mobilize to prevent density, thereby sustaining spatial inequalities between suburbs and cities.

Stephanie Ternullo is an Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University. Her research uses multiple methods to explore how social contexts shape Americans’ political behavior. Her first book, How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics(Princeton University Press, 2024), takes up one piece of this, showing how place informs Americans’ partisan attachments through a comparative study of three White, postindustrial cities during the 2020 presidential election. The book argues that we can best understand the reddening of the American Heartland by examining how local contexts have sped up or slowed down White voters’ turn toward the right. In other research, Stephanie has examined how New Deal social policies reshaped political participation across different local contexts; how place reputation shaped gentrification processes in a Chicago neighborhood; and how redistricting into powerful wards in Chicago affects crime and city service provision. Her current research project explores how changing state policies around land-use are reshaping local political engagement in coastal suburbs.