CAREER: Study of the Suburban Citizenry

在过去的五十年里，郊区的人口几乎翻了一番，今天每两个美国人中就有一个把郊区称为家。郊区化从根本上改变了大多数美国人生活的政治社区的类型：他们不再拥挤在不同的中心城市，也不是孤立在农村城镇，而是生活在专门的市政当局，这些市政当局在经济、种族构成和土地使用方面往往非常单一。尽管这种变化是巨大的，但我们对这些郊区社会背景如何影响公民对社区的看法或他们对政府的态度知之甚少。许多批评人士哀叹郊区被认为助长了对政府的疏远和敌意，但很少有研究充分定义郊区或测试其影响。因此，几乎没有系统的理论来解释郊区居民是否或为什么会不同，不仅不同于大城市的居民，也不同于生活在巨大多样性的郊区当地的其他人。这个职业项目填补了这一信息空白，首次对郊区公民(SSC)进行了全面研究。它有三个相互关联的组成部分。首先，通过收集来自6个州40个地区的2400多名受访者的调查数据，并对郊区竞选活动进行深入的实地研究，该项目提出并测试了地方民主的“冲突理论”。这一理论有望将有关地方政治态度的不同研究领域联系起来，并为社会背景如何影响公民对地方政府和社区的看法提供一个系统的解释。这项研究集中于郊区的社会多样性和冲突如何(或缺乏)构成人们的政治信仰、竞选活动的性质和投票行为。利用计算机辅助调查技术，这项研究既包含了专门针对每个地区的问题，也包含了向所有受访者提出的标准问题。利用2000年人口普查的数据、其他来源和实地调查，有关每个地区的社会构成、政治机构、媒体来源和其他重要背景因素的信息被附加到调查中。第二，该项目为美国政治学和整个社会研究领域的学者提供了宝贵的资源。利用这些数据，学者们可以研究许多问题，如郊区公民是否充当公共服务的“消费者”，选民如何在低信息、无党派选举中做出决定，以及社会环境如何影响政治态度。测量社区依恋和态度的良好的地理编码数据的可用性有助于进一步的多层次分析。最后，作为职业调查，这个项目包含了强大的教育成分。它为普林斯顿大学的本科教学开发了一门基于社区的学习课程。作为课程的一部分，本科生将对调查工具中选择的城市进行深入研究，特别是在选举前一周。他们的研究将被用来创造背景变量，他们的报告将被收集并以编辑过的关于郊区政治运动的卷出版。这个项目允许研究生研究的进步，将地方政治研究与调查研究联系起来，两个领域，

Over the past fifty years, the suburban portion of the population has nearly doubled and today one in two Americans calls a suburb home. Sub urbanization has changed fundamentally the types of political communities where most Americans live: rather than being crowded in diverse central cities or isolated in rural towns, they now live in specialized municipalities that are often highly singular in their economic and racial composition and land-use. Despite the enormity of this change, we have little understanding of how these suburban social contexts are influencing citizens' perceptions of community or their attitudes towards government. Many critics bemoan the alienation and hostility to government that suburbs putatively foster, but little research has either adequately defined suburbs or tested their effects. Consequently, there is little systematic theory to explain whether or why suburbanites may be different, not just from residents of large cities but also from other people who live across the vast diversity of suburban locales.This CAREER project fills this information gap with the first-ever comprehensive Study of the Suburban Citizenry (SSC). It has three interrelated components. First, by collecting survey data from more than 2,400 respondents from 40 locales across six states and doing intensive field studies of suburban election campaigns, this project advances and tests a "conflict theory" of local democracy. This theory promises to link disparate areas of research on local political attitudes and provide a systematic explanation for how social contexts influence citizens' views on local government and community. This research focuses on how social diversity and conflict in suburbs (or the lack thereof) structures people's political beliefs, the nature of campaigns, and voting behavior. Utilizing computer assisted survey technologies, the study contains both questions specifically tailored to each locality and standard items asked of all respondents. Using data from the 2000 Census, other sources, and field research, information is appended to the survey about each locality's social composition, political institutions, media sources, and other important contextual factors.Second, this project provides a valuable resource for scholars both within American political science and social studies at large. Using these data, scholars can examine many questions such as whether suburban citizens act as "consumers" of public services, how voters make decisions in low information, non-partisan elections, and how social environments influence political attitudes. The availability of good, geo-coded data that measure community attachments and attitudes helps further multi-level analysis.Finally, as a CAREER investigation this project contains a strong educational component. It develops a community based learning curriculum for undergraduate teaching at Princeton. As part of their coursework, undergraduates will conduct intensive studies of the municipalities chosen in the survey instrument, particularly in the week before their elections. Their research will be utilized in the creation of contextual variables and their reports will be collected and published in an edited volume on suburban political campaigns. This project allows for advances in graduate student research, linking the study of local politics with that of survey research, two areas,