Red Cities, Blue Cities: Creativity, Growth and Politics

Thomas Tiemann (), Cassandra DiRienzo () and Jayoti Das ()
Additional contact information
Cassandra DiRienzo: Department of Economics, Elon University

No 2008-02, Working Papers from Elon University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The 2006 Congressional elections seemed to be about change, as well as the war in Iraq. The 2008 Presidential election, though only at the primary stage, seems to be about change as well as the war in Iraq and the faltering economy. What is the force behind Americans wanting “change?” Is it simply frustration or is it because of important changes in the economy and the demography of the United States? In his 2002 book, Richard Florida looked at one of those changes and developed a “creativity index” measuring the existence of creative people, economic activity, and cultural tolerance for Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. This study looks at the connection between the rise of the creative class, economic growth and voting patterns. We find that more creative metropolitan areas grow faster on average and creative areas are more likely to have voted Democratic in the past. Even after controlling for union membership, the presence of creative people explains how metropolitan areas voted in the 2004 Presidential election, hinting at one force behind Americans’ desire for political change.

Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2008-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-pol and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://org.elon.edu/econ/WPS/wp2008-02.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Server closed connection without sending any data back (http://org.elon.edu/econ/WPS/wp2008-02.pdf [302 Found]--> https://org.elon.edu/econ/WPS/wp2008-02.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elo:wpaper:2008-02

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Elon University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jim Barbour ().