CAREER: Study of the Suburban Citizenry

在过去的50年里，郊区人口几乎翻了一番，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居住的政治社区的类型：他们不再拥挤在多样化的中心城市或孤立的农村城镇，而是生活在经济、种族构成和土地利用往往非常单一的专门城市。尽管这种变化是巨大的，但我们对这些郊区社会环境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助长了人们对政府的疏远和敌意，但很少有研究对郊区进行了充分的定义，也很少有研究对郊区的影响进行了测试。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，不仅与大城市的居民不同，而且与其他生活在郊区地区的人也不同。这个CAREER项目通过对郊区居民（SSC）的首次全面研究填补了这一信息空白。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，该项目推进并检验了地方民主的“冲突理论”。这一理论有望将不同领域的地方政治态度研究联系起来，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系统的解释。这项研究的重点是郊区的社会多样性和冲突（或缺乏）如何结构人们的政治信仰，竞选的性质和投票行为。利用计算机辅助调查技术，该研究既包含针对每个地方的专门问题，也包含向所有受访者询问的标准项目。利用2000年人口普查、其他来源和实地调查的数据，调查中附加了关于每个地方的社会构成、政治制度、媒体来源和其他重要背景因素的信息。其次，这个项目为美国政治科学和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，如郊区居民是否作为公共服务的“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。衡量社区依恋和态度的良好地理编码数据的可用性有助于进一步进行多层次分析。最后，作为一个职业调查，这个项目包含了很强的教育成分。它为普林斯顿大学的本科教学开发了一个基于社区的学习课程。作为课程作业的一部分，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。他们的研究将用于创造上下文变量，他们的报告将被收集和出版在关于郊区政治运动的编辑卷中。这个项目允许研究生研究取得进展，将地方政治研究与调查研究这两个领域联系起来，

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,