Suburban blues: The clash of local and national politics in America’s suburbs

With Stephanie Ternullo, Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University

In her upcoming book, Suburban Blues, political scientist Stephanie Ternullo explores the tensions within suburban communities that increasingly support liberal policies at the national level but work to sustain exclusionary housing and education policies at the local level. What could change this suburban status quo and convince suburban Democrats to support local politics in line with their national politics, thereby reducing spatial inequalities between suburbs and cities?

In this talk, Ternullo will present case studies of four liberal suburbs with survey and administrative data illustrating how the local-national divergence in suburban Democrats’ behavior persists because they are both deeply invested in the suburban way of life and rarely exposed to national political cues on housing and education policy. She’ll argue that, under certain conditions, local political mobilization can change this dynamic and convince suburban Democrats to give up something that they deeply value.

Co-sponsored by Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, Berkeley Center for American Democracy, Global Metropolitan Studies, and Students for Abundance at Berkeley

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About the speaker

Stephanie Ternullo is an assistant professor in the Government Department at Harvard. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 2022. Her research uses multiple methods to explore the relationship between local contexts and political behavior. More specifically, her work explores how understudied dimensions of local context — including local organizations, the legacies of historic policy decisions, and social discussion — shape political identity and vote choice in both local and national elections.

Her first book, How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politics, takes up one piece of this, showing how place intersects with race, class, and religion in shaping the rightward turn across the industrial Heartland. It draws on a comparative study of three white, postindustrial cities during the 2020 presidential election to argue that we can best understand the reddening of the American Heartland by examining how local organizational contexts — particularly the role of unions and churches — have sped up or slowed down white voters’ turn toward the right. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Sociology, Studies in American Political Development, Social Forces, Perspectives on Politics, and Social Problems, and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council.