Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Reilly, Jack

Area of Concentration

Human Geography and Political Science

Abstract

Highways are ubiquitous in the context of the United States, shaping much of American environmental, economic, and social geography. While urban planners have long heralded highways as the lifelines of American society, research has shown that highways have also enabled the segregation and displacement of resources from cities. Additionally, recent scholarship has connected such highway-induced processes to the polarization of American political geography. In this paper, I expand this connection by arguing that highways negatively impact voter turnout. Highways segregate, displace, and divide existing neighborhoods, producing contexts less conducive to the development of social capital. With less social capital, individuals near highways have fewer informal resources to help them overcome the costs of voting. Hence, residents living closer to highways are less likely to vote than those living further away. I test this hypothesis with an individual level analysis using the 14.5 million voters registered in the FloridaVoter File combined with additional data from the United States Census and GIS shapefiles of all of Florida’s major highways. My findings contribute to a broader theoretical debate on highways, by asserting that their “dividing” effects have ultimately outweighed their “uniting” effects on American society. This paper also supports the case for critically assessingthe role of infrastructure on context and political behavior.

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