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Neighbourhood effect


The neighbourhood effect is an economic and social science concept that posits that neighbourhoods have either a direct or indirect effect on individual behaviors. Although the effect of the neighbourhood was already known and studied at the beginning of the 20th century and as early as the mid 19th century, it has become a popular approach after the publication of the book The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson in 1987. Wilson's theory suggests that living in a neighbourhood seriously affected by poverty affects a wide range of individual outcomes, such as economic self-sufficiency, violence, drug use, low birthweight, and cognitive ability.

In more recent years neighbourhood effects have been also studied in epidemiology and psychology. Some research shows that the living conditions of the neighbourhood interact with individual's negative life events. The same event is more likely to trigger depression in disadvantaged neighbourhoods than in neighbourhoods with a good quality of life. This hypothesis is supported by Catherine Ross who shows that socially disordered neighborhoods are associated with depressive symptoms. Gonzalez and colleagues argue that restricted social environments, such as family, interact with a wider definition of the environment, namely the neighbourhood and the community, fostering the perception about future living conditions.

In political science the neighbourhood effect defines the tendency of a person to vote in a certain direction based upon the relational effects of the people living in the neighbourhood. The voting preference of a neighbourhood tends to be formed by consensus, where people tend to vote with the general trend of the neighbourhood. This consensus is formed by the personal connections a person forms in a community. There also seems to be some socio-economic correlation to voting patterns, and this has also been used to predict voting behavior.

The term was coined in the seminal works of Kevin Cox in 'The Voting Decision in a Spatial Context' and later popularized by Ron J. Johnston in 'Political Geography' (1979) and Peter J. Taylor and G. Gudgin in 'Geography of Elections' (1979) It seems, at the time at least, that they were attempting to justify the use of mathematical modelling in the study of voting patterns and the correlations between spatial data. Both seem to have made a case that studying this is only possible with good quantitative data and an understanding of how people in these small spatial areas live, work, and think.

W.L. Miller, however, began work on quantifying the neighbourhood effect in 1977. In his work 'Electoral Dynamics' (1977) he formed the hypothesis that "people who talk together vote together" and began trying to quantify this controversial idea. He found that majority positions are more dominant than the socio-economic statistics of individuals in the area would suggest. He suggested four models by which voting patterns may be explained:


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