The Political Economy of the Vanishing Marginals: Tiebout Sorting and the American Political System

An overview of our methodology and results suggests that there does exist a trend stationary pattern of increasing vote margins driven by traditional and expanded Tiebout Sorting. First, we have found a long-term trend stationary pattern of increasing vote margins. This was followed by the discovery that within a subset of the trend, 1942 to 1992, a blunt measurement of Tiebout Sorting through the application of urban-rural differences, soliciting information regarding age, class, gender, income, occupation, and race while measuring preferences for public goods through an individual's vote, was statistically significant. Finally, we identified evidence of Tiebout Sorting of both the traditional variety (sorting based on public goods provided) and the economic, but not ideological, portion of the expanded variety (spatial sorting by ideological and economic factors)