The Rental Building Next Door

Greg Staples has done an admirable job, using very pretty graphs, in plotting population density with voter preference, in response to the debate about Tory urban/rural support.
It reminds me of a piece written (in 1992) by Thomas Sowell;

There is a story. . .that the French police were chasing a criminal who fled into a building in Paris. Their first thought was that they would surround the building. But then they realized that the building was so large, and had so many exits, that they didn�t have enough policemen on the scene to do that. So they surrounded the building next door, which was smaller and had fewer exits.
Much of the academic research in the social sciences follows exactly this pattern of reasoning.
Often we don�t have information on the variables that matter, so we surround other variables, using statistics that the Census Bureau, or the Congressional Budget Office, or someone else has supplied to us. Last year, for example, both the media and the politicians seized upon statistics which showed that blacks received less prenatal care, and had higher infant mortality rates, than whites. The obvious answer was more government spending on prenatal care. Yet the very same study showed that Mexican Americans received even less prenatal care than blacks and had slightly lower infant mortality rates than whites.
Prenatal care was the building next door.

The inference that is most commonly drawn from correlations that show a rise in support for the liberal-left in high population density areas, is that somehow, when you have many people living together in close quarters, they become more tolerant and “progressive” in their societal views. This was certainly one of the media themes during the election campaign – that “progressive” urban Canadians were not receptive to the social conservativism associated with the “rural western based” Harper Conservatives.
Yet, even the most stubborn adherent of this theory will admit that in the densely populated, low-income immigrant communities, issues like same-sex marriage and abortion on demand don’t get much traction – if anything, some of our imported “cultural communities” are so dangerously homophobic and misogynistic that they make any caricature of “western rednecks” pale by comparison.
Is population density just the “building next door” ?
For there is another correlation that exists in communities of high population density – and that is the inverse ratio in home ownership. By and large, those who dwell in urban, high-rise zoning don’t collect much more than furniture. Many aren’t even responsible for basic chores involving maintainance and upkeep – they just call someone.
And for further evidence that rate of property ownership is a more reliable indicator of likely conservative support than population density, one only needs to consider the most obvious exception to the rule; the sparcely populated, highly rural First Nations reserves where support for the Liberals is virtually unanimous.
When one moves into the suburbs and rural areas, however, the reverse is true – the average voter is more likely to own their own home and/or business. They gain first hand experience with the actual costs and consequences of intrusive “tax and spend” nannystate government policies so popular with the urban left. Home owners feel the direct impact in rising property taxes, and dimished private sector investment. They’re also far more sensitive to issues of crime and punishment, for they see rising crime rates reflected in lowered property values, and increased costs in security.
So, as Sowell suggests – lacking information on the many variables that do matter, perhaps the media and punditry have chosen instead to surround the ones that don’t.
(If you didn’t already click on the link provided – Sowell’s piece is a must read)