Yes, liberal versus conservative environments seem have some bearing on the feasibility of an artist thriving in his or her city, if going by various recent indicators.
Today we’ll start with this:
Yesterday the Economist published a well-researched chart showing how conservative or liberal large cities (pop. more than 250,000) swing in the U.S. In GT’s ongoing soul search for The Truth about art and culture and how it fares across Texas, we scanned the chart for Texas’ listed cities for our own quick comparisons. (Here is the chart.)
To sum it up, the study mostly confirms the notion that, nationally, larger cities skew more liberal. Though there are some discrepancies in Texas itself. Few surprises, but here’s the TL;DR version, from most to least liberal large metropolitan areas of our great state:
Austin is the no-brainer most liberal city in Texas (it’s the 14th most liberal city in the U.S.), followed by Dallas (!). Houston ranks third most liberal in the state.
El Paso is next, followed by the very closely ranked San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Fort Worth is next, and looks pretty conservative on this chart as the 12th most conservative city in the U.S., and lastly, Arlington turns out to be decidedly non-liberal and the sixth most conservative city in the nation.
Hold on to your hats. In conjunction with these stats, tomorrow we look at the number of working artists in parts of Texas by population. It has a lot in common with the aforementioned rankings.
