Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Country Club Vs. Coffee House, By Party

From the Centre College Alumni Survey.

I asked "Is there a place, besides home or work, where you regularly spend time socializing?" This is a test of the "third place" idea, derived from the work of Ray Oldenberg.

I have noticed that coffee houses have a strong tendency to be left of center and Democratic. I don't think there is a distinctly Republican third place, but my guess is that the country club comes closest.

In the alumni survey, 138 said they socialized at the country club, while 164 socialized at the coffee house, out of about 1400 respondents. There was a 10% overlap between the two groups. The party ratio between the two third places:

Country club: Republican 54%, Democrat 30%
Coffee house: Republican 17%, Democrat 65%

(By the way, of the overlap group, 2/3rds are Democrats.)

7 comments:

D- said...

Does Church not qualify as a 3rd place?

Gruntled said...

It can be. Both parties go to church, though, and sometimes to the same one.

Anonymous said...

Of course,you are talking about where the upper middle class socializes. I think if you asked middle to lower class Repubs and Dems you'd get very different responses...like the bowling alley, softball field, gym, etc...

Gruntled said...

Yes, this is a college alumni survey. Do you think any of those more proletarian third places are partisan?

Kelly said...

Places like bowling alleys, softball fields, and gyms are places where you don't generally interact with people you didn't come with, if that makes sense. Country clubs and coffee houses are different in that you could end up talking to people you don't know, which is probably why the partisan thing matters, and maybe why it exists as well. Other than those places- the corner bar would be a third place for a lot of people, but I don't know that politics come into that so much as location.

Gruntled said...

My rule of thumb for a third place is where strangers can become acquaintances. Pubs can do that, and Oldenberg includes them. Country clubs are likely to have members who do not know one another, but the sheer fact that it is a membership organization makes it hard to be an excellent third place. The golden age of the coffee house in Restoration London came to an end when the clubs replaced to open-to-all coffee houses.

Anonymous said...

After thinking about this post, I realized that I really don't mix with people I don't know, except at work. We generally don't discuss politics at work...must be very careful about work discussions these days. The only place where I meet a lot of people I don't know is at the dog park. We don't discuss politics there either, just our dogs.