Study: white boys who had black neighbors more likely to become dems

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Scientists studying U.S. census rolls from the 1940s have discovered a surprising pattern: White men who grew up one door down from a Black neighbor were more likely to register as Democrats 70 years later — even when compared to other whites from the same neighborhood.

The findings, described in the journal Science Advances, suggest that young boys exposed to people of different backgrounds may grow up to be more liberal-minded adults.

"White men who had a Black neighbor in 1940, compared to white men who did not, are more likely to be associated with racially liberal politics, as indicated by their registration with the Democratic Party even as late as 2017," the authors wrote.

It’s an idea supported by converging lines of evidence from economics, political science, psychology and sociology, said Linda Tropp, a social psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was not involved in the study.

every person living in the country that year, likely reached roughly 99% of the population. Workers went door-to-door collecting personal information for residents, including name, age, gender, race, place of birth, years of education, labor earnings and employment status. (These individual records only recently became available: They aren’t made public for 72 years in order to protect the privacy of the people who respond.)

The scientists then used an algorithm to match as many people from the census as they could with voter file data from California in 2005, North Carolina in 2009 and both states plus Nebraska in 2017. These three were the only states where citizens provide their place of birth when registering to vote, making it easier to match files. But in 1940, these same folks were living all over the U.S., providing the scientists with near-blanket coverage of the country.

The scientists used the registered voters’ declared political party as a proxy for political leanings. They focused on men, who typically kept the same name throughout their lives. Women, who often changed their surnames after marriage, were harder to track.

Because census workers went door-to-door, residents’ names would appear right by their next-door neighbors on the list, two names away from their neighbor who lived two homes down, and so on. This meant that the scientists could get an extremely fine-grained look at which individuals had an immediate neighbor of another race.

After examining the records for more than 650,000 white men, the researchers found that those who lived next door to Black neighbors in their youth were 1.5 to 4.2 percentage points more likely be registered Democrats in the 2005/2009 data, and 2.8 to 5.3 percentage points more likely to be Democrats than their peers in the 2017 data. They were also less likely to be registered Republicans by about the same amount.

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