While a majority of individuals live in the suburbs in most nations, the suburbs are an understudied political space. Nearly all theorizing about the political behavior and political geography focuses on differences between urban and rural residents, leaving the suburbs as a residual category. Oftentimes suburbs are ignored, or sorted atheoretically depending on arbitrary definitions of urban and rural concepts. Yet living in the suburbs is a choice citizens make that should imply they are a distinct political constituency, not an in-between category of urban and rural residents. We develop theory regarding factors that unite and divide suburbs politically to help understand where suburban political preferences are likely to lie. Suburbs are heterogeneous within and across countries.
Across countries public goods factors and structure of the economy shape the degree of suburbanization.
Within countries, we develop a theory of suburban political identity based on sorting factors: cost of living, proximity to work, religious and ethnolinguistic factors, and preferences for public goods. The result is a roadmap for conceptualizing the suburbs as a political unit that contributes to our understanding of the geographic divides in politics.