Sorting: an unintended consequence of EU free movement?

Allowing people to choose where to live can lead to social fragmentation, creating clusters of the like-minded, writes Gareth Davies

 
Charles Tiebout’s theory of sorting drew on the idea that if jurisdictions vary in the policies they adopt, and individuals are free to move, then people with similar policy preferences will end up clustering together – which he called sorting. In some contexts that could be efficient and desirable, but suppose the sorting were to take place according to political views? It would then be a threat to the cohesion of society.

Bill Bishop explored this idea in the United States in his book The Big Sort. The economic and linguistic barriers to movement in the US are pretty low, making it possible for Americans to take ideology – views on things such as sexuality, religion, and redistribution – seriously as a factor in deciding where to live. He suggested that Democrats and Republicans have, over recent decades, increasingly sorted themselves into homogenous communities, so that the US has become a series of adjacent monocultures, with mutual alienation and political polarisation as a result. His work has been widely discussed, with considerable methodological nuances and challenges put forward, but with the underlying phenomenon of sorting pretty widely accepted.

For some reason, EU scholarship and policy has paid no attention to the idea that this could happen in Europe. The Union encompasses significant ideological variation both between and within member states, creating the potential conditions for an ideological exodus of the dissatisfied to their personal promised land, and a resulting sort. Yet the fact that Europe is so economically unequal, and so culturally and linguistically diverse, perhaps makes it seem unlikely that significant ideological migration will ever take place. Europeans just go where the jobs are.

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Πηγή: blogs.lse.ac.uk