The 2006 Congressional elections seemed to be about change, as well as the war in Iraq. The 2008 Presidential election, though only at the primary stage, seems to be about change as well as the war in Iraq and the faltering economy. What is the force behind Americans wanting “change?” Is it simply frustration or is it because of important changes in the economy and the demography of the United States? In his 2002 book, Richard Florida looked at one of those changes and developed a “creativity index” measuring the existence of creative people, economic activity, and cultural tolerance for Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. This study looks at the connection between the rise of the creative class, economic growth and voting patterns. We find that more creative metropolitan areas grow faster on average and creative areas are more likely to have voted Democratic in the past. Even after controlling for union membership, the presence of creative people explains how metropolitan areas voted in the 2004 Presidential election, hinting at one force behind Americans’ desire for political change.

Cassandra DiRienzo

Jayoti Das

Thomas Tiemann

English

Research Papers in Economics

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS WORKING PAPER SERIES
Red Cities, Blue Cities: Creativity, Growth and Politics
Thomas Tiemann
Elon University
Cassandra DiRienzo
Elon University
Jayoti Das
Elon University
Working Paper 2008-02
2075 Campus Box
Elon, NC 27244
Phone: (336) 278-5951
Fax: (336) 278-5952
www.elon.edu/econAbstract
The 2006 Congressional elections seemed to be about change, as well as the war in Iraq. The 2008 Pres-
idential election, though only at the primary stage, seems to be about change as well as the war in Iraq
and the faltering economy. What is the force behind Americans wanting ”change?” Is it simply frus-
tration or is it because of important changes in the economy and the demography of the United States?
In his 2002 book, Richard Florida looked at one of those changes and developed a ”creativity index”
measuring the existence of creative people, economic activity, and cultural tolerance for Metropolitan
Statistical Areas in the U.S. This study looks at the connection between the rise of the creative class,
economic growth and voting patterns. We ﬁnd that more creative metropolitan areas grow faster on
average and creative areas are more likely to have voted Democratic in the past. Even after controlling
for union membership, the presence of creative people explains how metropolitan areas voted in the
2004 Presidential election, hinting at one force behind Americans’ desire for political change.
JEL Codes:
Keywords:  3
Red Cities, Blue Cities 
 
 
In 2002, Richard Florida (2002a) summarized the argument in his then new book, The 
Rise of the Creative Class (2002b):  American cities, now more than ever, depend on 
creative people and their new ideas for growth.  In both the summary and the book, 
Florida updates and extends the idea of Jane Jacobs (1969) that it is the creative 
interactions among people that make cities prosper and grow.  Florida also notes that the 
United States’ economy has become post-industrial (or at least post-Fordist).  This 
change means that business success is now more dependent on new ideas processed with 
new technology than low cost production and leads him to suggest that cities that are 
attractive to creative people will grow more quickly.   
 
In 2005, Florida published a new book, Cities and the Creative Class (2005).  The book 
is partially a prequel to his 2002 work and partially a reflection on the three years of 
debate and controversy it caused.  This reflection has many outcomes, one of which is a 
concern that the increased economic divide between the creative class and the service and 
working classes will contribute to the increasing political polarization of the United 
States (Florida, 2005, 172).   
 
Although Florida develops a measure of the creativity of metropolitan areas (2002b), he 
does not empirically test his prediction of 2002 or concern of 2005, though he does 
conduct some tests on the determinants of the level of per capita income and the growth   4
in per capita income across metro areas.  A metropolitan area’s economic growth can be 
measured by the percentage change in an area’s total personal income, capturing both 
changes in incomes of those employed and changes in the number employed.   
 
The connection between politics and creativity is not often explored empirically.  
Political polarization can be measured by the percentage of voters in a metro area who 
voted for Bush or for Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election.  With these measures, both 
the thesis that more creative metro areas will grow faster and the concern that the rise of 
the creative class is another force for political polarization can be tested empirically.  We 
can test the idea that the change in the economy is one of the reasons behind the change 
in political outcomes by seeing if the metropolitan areas that have participated the most in 
the economic changes vote differently. 
 
The next two sections of this paper present brief theoretical arguments as to why creative 
cities may grow faster and vote differently.  The third section will describe in more detail 
how creativity, growth and polarization are measured.  Then the empirical results will be 
presented, followed by a summary. 
 
Two views of economic development for American cities: Why creative cities may grow 
faster. 
 
Many cities put significant effort into economic development.  Most of this effort is 
aimed at attracting large employers to build a plant or office in the city—a sort of 
trickledown theory of city growth.  Other cities, following Jane Jacobs (1969) and   5
Richard Florida (2002a, 2002b) have tried a bubble up approach to encouraging growth. 
Jacobs and Florida argue that cities grow from the creative ideas and interactions of the 
residents, not from large firms moving in from the outside. Florida states his thesis this 
way: 
The creative centers tend to be the economic winners of our age.  Not only do 
they have high concentrations of creative-class people, they have high 
concentrations of creative economic outcomes, in the form of innovations and 
high-tech growth.  They also show strong signs of overall regional vitality, such 
as increases in regional employment and population.  (Florida, 2002a, 8) 
 
The traditional trickle down approach is to recruit major employers to a city, often with 
tax incentives, and assume that each of these new jobs will result in more jobs through an 
economic multiplier process through which one new, recruited job results in additional 
new jobs.  The focus is on recruiting existing firms, usually large firms, to choose this 
city for relocation of old work or for the location of a new office or factory that the firm 
has already decided to build.  The appeal is made to top managers to make a textbook-
like business decision to choose one city over another, choosing the city with the lowest 
costs.  
 
The Florida/Jacobs approach depends on the energy and creativity of people in the city to 
create new work, so that economic growth can be encouraged by having a variety of 
businesses and people finding new ways to make money.  Rather than being tied to one 
firm or industry, being the home of creative people working in many different firms and 
industries will result in a constant flow of new work and economic growth.  If there is a 
policy that should be followed, it is to make the city attractive to a variety of creative 
people and businesses so that there is a steady stream of new ideas and new work that   6
bubbles up into new jobs.  Florida argues that cities that want to continue to grow, 
especially as America switches to a knowledge-based, post-industrial economy, need to 
take steps to attract creative people rather than trying to attract firms per se.  He argues 
that economic development has more to do with creating openness to difference, 
diversity, and change than it has to do with tax breaks for major employers or new sports 
venues. Rather than appeal to firms, the appeal is made to individuals to choose one city 
over another because it is an exciting place to live; a non-business reason (Florida 2005, 
49-50).   
 
Others have studied individual cities, linking creativity to economic health, giving 
examples of the kind of growth Jacobs and Florida predict.  Krätke (2004) found that 
Berlin’s economic strength is due to its concentration of creative talent.  Lloyd (2004) 
argued that Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood recovered from decline and became an 
economically healthy part of the city after it became a contemporary artists’ 
neighborhood and a place for the creative production of culture. 
 
Red States, Blues States/Red Cities, Blue Cities. 
 
John Sperling, in The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America (2004), written before the 
2004 election and aimed largely at Democrats, argued that the red states and the blue 
states can be divided from each other by characteristics other than how they voted in 
2000.  According to Sperling, red “Retro” America depends on stagnant industry and low 
wage jobs for growth. Blue “Metro” America has higher income levels, higher   7
productivity and ranks higher on attitudes associated with economic modernity and 
innovation (Sperling, 2004, 36-42).  “Retro” America depends on federal subsidies and 
tax breaks and is focused on low costs. “Metro” America depends on ideas and is focused 
on new products and innovation.  In addition, Sperling asserted that the blues states fit 
Florida’s model of creative places, the red states do not (Sperling, 2004, 165-7).  Richard 
Florida also noticed that America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the 
culturally more traditional, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country 
increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban 
"blue" areas going ever more Democratic (Florida, 2002c).
   Brown-Saracino (2004) 
studied social preservationists, a group very similar to the creative class.  She found that 
social preservationists also desire to live in “authentic” places, and that they are “often 
left-wing (151).”  The question is whether this division reflects a growing economic 
division with "blue" representing the talent-laden, tolerant, creative centers with high 
levels of economic growth, and the "red" representing the economically lagging 
hinterlands and culturally conservative states.    
 
In the 2004 Presidential election, the Democratic platform was friendlier to the bubble up 
theory of local development.  The Democrats recognized that growth can be spurred by 
encouraging diversity, investing in the power of education to energize individuals and 
change society, while promoting equal opportunity.  The idea is that this bubble up 
approach can create cities and regions that are hothouses of innovation, the modern-day 
equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, 
financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs feed off each other's knowledge, energy,   8
and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries. Alternatively, 
the Republican platform supported a more traditional trickle down approach to growth 
and development, where hierarchical decision-making concentrated in the hands of a few 
is more likely. The Republican economic and fiscal policies were designed to provide life 
support for aging industries such as subsidies for farmers; tariffs for steel; subsidies, tax 
breaks, and regulatory relief for logging, mining, coal, and natural gas. Reducing costs 
was paramount and investment decisions were thought to hinge on the marginal tax rate. 
The Republican platform also included planks that can be viewed as promoting 
mainstream values over diversity. 
 
During the 2004 election, news reports used the red state/blue state divide to explain how 
the campaigns were progressing.  Immediately after the election, reporters and pundits 
divided America into red and blue states. Soon it was the red interior vs. the blue coasts, 
and soon after that urban, blue vs. rural and suburban red.  Is there a division within 
urban America as well, a division that can be measured with Florida’s creativity index?  
Are there red cities and blue cities?  Are the cities that have low scores on the Creativity 
Index the red cities that vote Republican and depend on trickledown economics to grow?  
Are cities with high creativity scores the blue cities, voting Democratic and hope to grow 
on the strength of new ideas bubbling up from a creative workforce?  Are creative cities 
moving away from other cities, increasing political polarization in the United States? 
 
Measuring Creativity, growth and red/blue. 
   9
Florida has developed a "creativity index” which combines the existence of creative 
people, creative economic activity, and the cultural tolerance for 276 United States’ 
Metropolitan Statistical Areas.  His index is “a composite measure that is based on four 
indices for the most current year available: the Innovation Index (1999), High-Tech Index 
(2000), Gay Index (2000) and the Creative Class (1999)” (Florida, 2002b, 334).   The 
Innovation Index is based on patented inventions per capita.  High-Tech Index is taken 
from the Milken Institute’s study, America’s High Tech Economy,
 (DeVol and Wong, 
1999) and combines the metropolitan area’s high-tech output as a portion of the nation’s 
high-tech output and the portion of the area’s output which is high-tech.  The Gay Index 
measures the relative representation of homosexuals in a metro area, a proxy for tolerance 
of different life-styles.  The final component, the Creative Class is the ratio of the number 
of workers Florida considers creative to the total workforce in the area, a measure of 
creative talent.  Florida’s Creativity Index will be used to measure the creativity of a 
metropolitan area here
1.   
 
Economic growth can have two sources.  If the number of jobs grows, there is economic 
growth.  If the number of jobs is constant, but the income of those holding them rises, 
there can also be economic growth.  Measuring economic growth by the change in a 
metropolitan area’s total personal income captures growth from either source.  Here, the 
percentage change in total personal income from 1998 to 2002 is used to measure the 
economic growth of a Metropolitan Statistical Area.  The data is available from the 
Bureau of Economic Analysis (2005). 
   10
Because Florida’s Creativity Index is for metropolitan areas, a city’s “blueness” score is 
the percent of the voters in a Metropolitan Statistical Area who voted for Kerry/Edwards 
in the 2004 election.   “Blueness” was computed from county election returns available 
from a CNN website (2004), summing county data together into Metropolitan Statistical 
Area measures.  Matching counties with Metropolitan Statistical Areas was done with 
data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2005). 
 
Florida has published his index for 276 United States Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and 
data for the other variables could be found or computed for all but two of these, so the 
testing was done using a sample of 274 United States Metropolitan Statistical Areas.  
 
Empirical results  
 
Two questions were asked.  First, Florida’s 2002 question is asked: “Do creative cities 
grow faster?”   Second, it is asked if Florida’s is right in 2005 to be concerned: “Are 
creative cities blue?”    
 
 The first question can be tested empirically by measuring the correlation between 
creativity and economic growth, between Florida’s Creativity Index and the percentage 
change in personal income from 1998 to 2002.  Formally, the hypotheses tested are: 
 
Ho:  ρc,g ≤ 0 
   11
Ha:  ρc,g  > 0 
 
Where ρc,g   is the Spearman rank correlation between creativity and growth in the 
metropolitan area.  Rank correlation was used because the Creativity Index is not 
normally distributed.  The Spearman rank correlation between growth and the Creativity 
Index is .4335.  This is statistically significant from zero at the .0001 level, so that Ho can 
be rejected.   This suggests that more creative cities have grown more quickly in recent 
years. 
 
The second question can be tested by measuring the correlation between “blueness,” the 
percentage of voters who voted for Kerry in 2004, and creativity, Florida’s Index. The 
formal hypotheses are: 
 
Ho:  ρc,b ≤ 0 
 
Ha:  ρc,b  > 0 
 
Spearman rank correlation is again used because the Creativity Index is non-normal.  The 
Spearman rank correlation coefficient between the Creativity Index and “blueness” is 
.3997.  Again this is statistically significant at the .0001 level, again allowing Ho to be 
rejected
2.  This suggests that creative cities are more likely to be “blue” cities, and 
Florida is right to be concerned. 
   12
 
 
Summary 
 
There do seem to be blue cities and red cities, as there are blue states and red states.  The 
divide in America is not simply between urban areas and suburban/rural areas; even 
among cities there is polarization.  The cities that would seem to have the best chance for 
bubble up economic development, those with high scores on Florida’s Creativity Index, 
are bluer than the cities that have a less creative workforce, less high-tech output, fewer 
patents, and are less open to diversity.  The divide extends beyond voting patterns to 
underlying differences in the creativity of cities.   
 
Finally, it pays to be more creative.  The cities with higher scores on creativity are 
growing faster, at least as measured by changes in total personal income.  The faster 
growth rate in cities with these attributes may well result in a wider divide among 
American cities if the creative places leave the more traditional places farther and farther 
behind economically.   
 
Florida’s 2002 prediction that creative cities will grow faster is supported empirically.  
His 2005 concern that the concentration of creative people in certain cities will 
sharpening the political polarization of the United States also seems to be well founded. 
 
 
 
   13
 
 
 
 
 
References 
 
Briggs, X deS.  2004.  “Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City in Three Millennia,” 
City & Community.  3(4), 311-342. 
 
Brown-Saracino, J.  2004.  “Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic 
Community,” City & Community. 3(2), 135-56. 
 
Bureau of Economic Analysis. 2005. http://www.bea.doc.gov/bea/regional/reis/.  
Accessed April 1, 2005. 
 
Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2005. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/msa_def.htm.  Accessed 
March 15, 2005. 
 
CNN, 2004. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/president/.  Accessed 
March 15, 2005. 
 
DeVol, R. and P. Wong. 1999. America’s High-Tech Economy: Growth, Development 
and Risks for Metropolitan Areas,  Santa Monica: Milken Institute.  
   14
Florida, R. 2002a. “Cities and the Creative Class,”  City & Community.  2(1), 3 – 19. 
 
_________. 2002b. The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books. 
 
_________. 2002c. “The Rise of the Creative Class,” The Washington Monthly, May,  
15-25. 
 
_________. 2005. Cities and the Creative Class, New York and London: Routledge. 
 
Jacobs, J. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House. 
 
Krätke, S.  2004.  “City of Talents? Berlin’s Regional Economy, Socio-Spatial Fabric and 
‘Worst Practice’ Urban Governance,” International Journal of Urban and Regional 
Research. 28(3), 511-529. 
 
Lloyd, R.  2004.  “The Neighborhood in Cultural Production: Material and Symbolic 
Resources in the New Bohemia,” City & Community 3(4), 343-372. 
 
Molotch, H., W. Freudenberg and K. E. Paulsen.  2000. “History Repeats Itself, But 
How?  City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place,” American 
Sociological Review 65(6), 791-823. 
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Paulsen, K. E. 2004. “Making Character Concrete: Empirical Strategies for Studying 
Place Distinction,”  City & Community, 3(3), 243-262. 
 
Sperling, J., S. Helburn, S. George, J. Morris and C. Hunt. 2004. 
The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,. [Sausalito, CA:] Polipoint Press.   
 
Footnotes 
 
 
1.  The exact method used to compute the index is not explained, but there is more 
information in the appendix to The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002b, 327-
34). 
 
2.  The Spearman Rank Correlation between Florida’s Creativity Index and “redness,” 
the percent voting for Bush, is -.3996. 
 
 
 

America’s High-Tech Economy: Growth, Development and Risks for Metropolitan Areas,

Cities and the Creative Class,

City of Talents? Berlin’s Regional Economy, Socio-Spatial Fabric and ‘Worst Practice’

Civilization in Color: The Multicultural City

Economic Analysis.

History Repeats Itself, But How? City Character,

Making Character Concrete: Empirical Strategies for

Social Preservationists and the Quest for

The Economy of Cities.

The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,. [Sausalito, CA:] Polipoint Press. Footnotes 1. The exact method used to compute the index is not explained, but there is more information in the appendix to The Rise of the Creative Class

Red Cities, Blue Cities: Creativity, Growth and Politics

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