Sociology Seminar Series: Stephanie Ternullo

Suburban Blues: The Clash of Local and National Politics in America’s Suburbs Suburban Blues explores the tensions within suburban communities that are increasingly supporting liberal policies at the national level but still working to sustain exclusionary housing and education policies at the local-level. It asks: What explains why suburbanites continue to fight for the policies that sustain suburban advantage, despite the fact that an increasing number of them are now Democrats? And what could change this suburban status quo, convincing suburban Democrats to support local politics that are more in line with their national politics, thereby reducing spatial inequalities between suburbs and cities? To answer these questions, the book pairs in-depth case studies of four liberal suburbs with survey and administrative data to argue that this “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. I argue that local political mobilization can change this dynamic under certain conditions, ultimately convincing suburban Democrats to give up something they deeply value. Stephanie Ternullo is an Assistant Professor in the Government Department at Harvard. She received my PhD 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 (order from Princeton University Press), 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.