Patterns Real and Imagined

In this chapter, we confront the stereotype of the “yard sign war” in which the politically engaged respond to their neighbors’ displays by displaying signs of their own. Another possibility, one that is more consistent with our understanding of social interaction, is that households feel empowered by the presence of same-party signs and deterred by the presence of other-party signs. Focusing on the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, we look for evidence of these patterns in our geo-coded observational data of sign display. To assess these competing characterizations, we introduce two measures: a clustering measure that describes the distribution of a single sign across a sample space and a joint clustering measure that captures the similarity of two signs’ spatial patterns. Overall, we find little evidence of yard sign wars and consistent evidence that Democratic and Republican signs inhabit distinct spaces in neighborhoods.