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The Urban-Rural Gulf in American Political Behavior

DOI:10.1007/s11109-020-09601-w
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James G. Gimpel at University of Maryland, College Park
James G. Gimpel
Nathan Lovin at University of Maryland, College Park
Nathan Lovin
Bryant Moy
Bryant Moy
Bryant Moy
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Andrew Reeves at Washington University in St. Louis
Andrew Reeves
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Urban-rural differences in partisan loyalty are as familiar in the United States as they are in other countries. In this paper, we examine Gallup survey data from the early-2000s through 2018 to understand the urban-rural fissure that has been so noticeable in recent elections. We consider the potential mechanisms of an urban/rural political divide. We suggest that urban and rural dwellers oppose each other because they reside in far apart locations without much interaction and support different political parties because population size structures opinion quite differently in small towns compared with large cities. In particular, we consider the extent to which the compositional characteristics (i.e., race, income, education, etc.) of the individuals living in these locales drives the divide. We find that sizable urban-rural differences persist even after accounting for an array of individual-level characteristics that typically distinguish them.
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... The U.S. has an established urban-rural division in numerous aspects of political behavior and public opinion, including vote choice (Johnson and Scala, 2022;Rodden, 2019;Scala and Johnson, 2017), partisanship (Gimpel et al., 2020), anti-establishment candidate support (Cramer, 2016), racial resentment (Nelsen and Petsko, 2021), and willingness to protest or put up a political sign (Lin and Lunz Trujillo, 2022). Furthermore, the urban-rural political division can be found in other countries, such as Canada, the U.K., Denmark, Germany, and more (Armstrong et al., 2022;Ford and Jennings, 2020;Huijsmans, 2022). ...
... Existing literature on the U.S. public suggests that rural issue attitudes are overwhelmingly Republican and conservative. Much of this assumption stems from election results, where rural areas have increasingly been more supportive of Republican candidates over time (Gimpel et al., 2020;Johnson and Scala, 2022;Rodden, 2019;Scala and Johnson, 2017). This urban-rural split may have stemmed from geographic sorting along partisan lines, where urban centers increasingly attracted either left-leaning individuals or demographic groups that tend to support Democrats (Bishop, 2008). ...
... The first is a null hypothesis based on assumptions about rural attitudes being more like Republicans' in nature. Rural residents have been found to be more conservative and right-leaning (Gimpel et al., 2020), and people's issue preferences often do not align with their partisanship (Ellis and Stimson, 2012;Popp and Rudolph, 2011) despite the increasing ideological homogenization of the two major political parties in the U.S. This points to the urban-rural context having an association with certain issue positions above and beyond partisanship. ...
Are Rural Attitudes Just Republican?
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Feb 2023
Are issue attitudes of rural residents aligned with those of Republicans in the United States? Previous research demonstrates an urban-rural divide in issue attitudes whereby rural residents tend to adopt more conservative policy positions and urban residents tend to adopt more liberal ones in the US. In this paper, we investigate whether this notion holds true, or if rural residents are indeed their own unique constituency that carries interests different from what is traditionally "Republican". We examine canonical issues that are widely discussed in the political discourse and leverage data from the 2020 ANES to compare responses between rural and urban residents, Democrats and Republicans, and the interaction between these factors. In doing so, we find that urban-rural issue differences reflect partisan issue differences-e.g., rural Democrats resemble their urban counterparts and urban Republicans resemble their rural counterparts-rather than rural areas specifically being more Republican. However, we identify certain issues relating to immigration where rural Democrats are more conservative than urban Democrats. These results support the idea that rural America is not always reflective of conservatism and Republicanism. In addition, it points to the role of partisan nationalization in issue stances across the urban-rural spectrum; future scholarship should aim to further illuminate the complexity of this nationalization versus the relevance of place and local considerations in other facets of American politics.
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... This, on average, may promote greater tolerance in urban settings relative to rural areas, where the interactions with 'the different' are scarcer. In these areas, remoteness frequently implies a lack of interaction with different people (Gimpel, Lovin, Moy, & Reeves, 2020). Urban areas also provide a variety of role models who can show, for example, women in nontraditional gender roles and so lead to the quicker adoption of these skills (Evans, 2019). ...
... In the wake of the populist resurgence of the mid-2010s, there have been many studies on urban-rural political division. Most studies have focused on the United States (Cramer, 2016;Gimpel et al., 2020;Rodden, 2019), and Europe (e.g., Ford and Jennings 2020 (2021) show a growing divergence of political trust between urban and rural areas. In a similar study, Kenny & Luca (2020) show political attitudes differ as well. ...
... 4 Alas, however, data availability is a key limitation in empirical research, particularly when broadening the scope of analysis to the global scale. Overall, in our approach we follow the recent literature exploring the geographies of urban/rural sociocultural polarisation (Cramer, 2016;Gimpel & Karnes, 2006;Gimpel et al., 2020;Huijsmans et al., 2021;Maxwell, 2019;Scala & Johnson, 2017;Scala, Johnson, & Rogers, 2015). ...
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... By contrast, MPs from the smaller villages still seemed to be either less aware of, or care less about, such broadcasting. Research has shown that social life is 'uniquely robust at the smaller scales found in rural settings' (Gimpel et al., 2020(Gimpel et al., , p. 1349; that voters traditionally 'displayed a high degree of party loyalty' in small towns in Britain (Jaggard, 2004, p. 26); and that, internationally, the more rural a political constituency is, the lower its degree of swing voting (Wahman and Boone, 2018, p. 205). Thus presumably small-village MPs still did not need media as much, as their constituents remained more loyal than voters in larger and more anonymous urban areas. ...
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Why was the British Parliament so late in broadcasting its debates? Scholars have made recommendations on parliamentary communication, analysed its effects, and described the debates and arguments on broadcasting parliament. But who was making these arguments, and what role did parliamentarians’ identities play in these debates? We show the crucial role that partisanship—but also the distinctions between government and opposition, senior and junior, and urban and rural MPs—played in Westminster’s debates on broadcasting itself. We do so by applying our new method of ‘structural collocation analysis’ to all 3965 debate utterances on broadcasting parliament between 1935 and 2014—rather than merely the eleven official debates on broadcasting parliament studied thus far—comparing utterances by subgroups of MPs using metadata that we added to the digitised proceedings. We focus on issue ownership, discursive differences and MPs’ reflections on broadcasting parliament.
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... For instance, during the time window covered in this study, urban users viewed Andrew Cuomo more favorably than Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis, while the opposite could be said for rural users. These findings are also consistent with studies on political polarization [55]. All of these findings provide evidence that, with our proposed model, social media data can be effectively leveraged to gain timely insight into the public understanding of and sentiment toward hot social events. ...
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Article
Full-text available
Background: By the end of 2022, more than 100 million people were infected with COVID-19 in the United States, and the cumulative death rate in rural areas (383.5/100,000) was much higher than in urban areas (280.1/100,000). As the pandemic spread, people used social media platforms to express their opinions and concerns about COVID-19-related topics. Objective: This study aimed to (1) identify the primary COVID-19-related topics in the contiguous United States communicated over Twitter and (2) compare the sentiments urban and rural users expressed about these topics. Methods: We collected tweets containing geolocation data from May 2020 to January 2022 in the contiguous United States. We relied on the tweets' geolocations to determine if their authors were in an urban or rural setting. We trained multiple word2vec models with several corpora of tweets based on geospatial and timing information. Using a word2vec model built on all tweets, we identified hashtags relevant to COVID-19 and performed hashtag clustering to obtain related topics. We then ran an inference analysis for urban and rural sentiments with respect to the topics based on the similarity between topic hashtags and opinion adjectives in the corresponding urban and rural word2vec models. Finally, we analyzed the temporal trend in sentiments using monthly word2vec models. Results: We created a corpus of 407 million tweets, 350 million (86%) of which were posted by users in urban areas, while 18 million (4.4%) were posted by users in rural areas. There were 2666 hashtags related to COVID-19, which clustered into 20 topics. Rural users expressed stronger negative sentiments than urban users about COVID-19 prevention strategies and vaccination (P<.001). Moreover, there was a clear political divide in the perception of politicians by urban and rural users; these users communicated stronger negative sentiments about Republican and Democratic politicians, respectively (P<.001). Regarding misinformation and conspiracy theories, urban users exhibited stronger negative sentiments about the "covidiots" and "China virus" topics, while rural users exhibited stronger negative sentiments about the "Dr. Fauci" and "plandemic" topics. Finally, we observed that urban users' sentiments about the economy appeared to transition from negative to positive in late 2021, which was in line with the US economic recovery. Conclusions: This study demonstrates there is a statistically significant difference in the sentiments of urban and rural Twitter users regarding a wide range of COVID-19-related topics. This suggests that social media can be relied upon to monitor public sentiment during pandemics in disparate types of regions. This may assist in the geographically targeted deployment of epidemic prevention and management efforts.
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... Concerning political party adherence, and comparing American voters with the same social characteristics (age, sex, race, educational level, religion and religious practice, income, marital status), Gimpel et al. find a relevant urban-rural gap favouring the Democrat vote amongst urban dwellers, as opposed to the Republican vote amongst those who live in areas that are less densely populated and away from urban centres (Gimpel et al. 2020). Other studies using geographical measures of distance from urban centres and density of areas identify a similar pattern with regard to the Brexit and Trump vote (Matti and Zhou 2017;Obschonka et al. 2018). ...
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The debate on the existence and relevance of a rural–urban divide in France has been revived in recent years. This article reviews studies showing France as a peculiar case of strong geographical divides in political behaviour, such as support for the EU or vote for the radical right. Various explanations of this divide have been advanced by French scholars to account for differences between urban, peri-urban and rural dwellers. Some of them stress the local specificities of the socio-economic composition of the territory and are reluctant to consider the rural–urban divide as a determinant of political behaviour in itself. Others stress the systematic gap between urbans and inhabitants from other territories and propose these gaps as valuable reasons for differences in political behaviour. We review several sets of explanations of this divide centered on social class, economic or cultural insecurity. We then connect the French literature with the international one and thereby identify several blind spots and areas on which scholars in France and in comparative studies could focus on in the future.
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... 8 Sex is, like age group, treated as a time-invariant indicator in the panel regression models reported throughout. Since urban citizens might be more likely to turn out to vote and switch party preferences (Gimpel et al. 2020;McKee 2008), we also control for the urban-rural cleavage through a 1-5 scale that best describes the area in which the respondent lives (1 = 'big city'; 2 = 'suburbs or outskirts of a big city'; 3 = 'town or small city'; 4 = 'country village'; 5 = 'farm or home in the countryside'). The experience of economic strain is captured through perceived relative deprivation, specifically if the respondent acknowledges that they have 'experienced real financial difficulties (e.g. could not afford food, rent, electricity) in the past 12 months' or not. ...
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Political participation and party attachment in Western democracies have become more and more volatile. In turn, political campaigns seem increasingly dependent on short-term discursive windows of opportunity opened by dynamic debates on issues such as migration, climate, employment and economic policies. Based on panel data from nine European countries, we investigate how patterns and changes in the materialist and postmaterialist concerns of respondents affect electoral turnout and party switching. By relating these variables, we aim to uncover whether and to what extent underlying concerns – and thus short-term politicization – account for short-term patterns of electoral volatility. We pay special attention to young respondents, who are often framed as being particularly dynamic and less bound to traditional political loyalties. Our findings offer insights into short-term change in discursive opportunities for political mobilization and broader democratic engagement.
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... Navedeni učinek prostora oziroma »učinek soseščine« se torej morebiti kaže v prilagajanju volivca težnjam okolice ne glede na njegov osebni položaj, pri čemer okolico zaznamuje določena oblika »kulturnega kapitala« (Bourdieu, 1986: 248) ali »struktura občutij« (Williams, 2020: 166). Naraščajočo vlogo, ki jo ima pri volilnem vedenju specifična prostorska umeščenost vrednotnega sistema, so v zadnjem času razkrile tudi druge študije (McKee, 2008;Enos, 2017;Rodden, 2019;Gimpel et al., 2020;Huijsmans et al., 2021). Ob tem pa seveda ne smemo pozabiti na vpliv angažiranosti političnih strank, zlasti skozi njihove aktivnosti v volilnih kampanjah in politične diskurze, ki so pogosto vezani na določen kraj, pokrajino ali tip območja, npr. ...
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... Furthermore, the geographical variance in public attitudes towards various sociopolitical processes has been continually analysed and mapped by geographers and other social scientists. Examples of such lines of research include Huddart-Kennedy et al. (2009), who analysed urban-rural differences in environmental attitudes, and a recent analysis by Gimpel et al. (2020) which enquired into the 'urban-rural gulf' in political party identification in the US context. However, as described by earlier studies, human values are defined as the ultimate end that intermediate attitudes, norms, or opinions depend upon or contribute to (Rokeach, 1973;Schwartz, 2012). ...
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This analysis makes an empirical enquiry into urban-rural and regional value differences in Europe. In this task we use the 7th Round of the European Social Survey (ESS) and Eurostat's NUTS-level data and focus on four value orientations derived from the Human Values Scale: Self-enhancement, Self-transcendence, Openness to change and Conservation. Results show that the most distinct urban-rural differences lie in the Conservation versus Openness to change axis. Additionally, Conservation is associated with lower regional gross domestic product (GDP), whereas Self-enhancement, emphasizing a motivation for self-interest and interpersonal rivalry and hence behavioural dimension of capitalism, is positively associated with population density. KEYWORDS human values; behavioural economic geography; urban-rural relations; urban theory; behavioural capitalism JEL D1, D63, D90, D91, R1, R11 HISTORY
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... Out of the four cleavages discussed in Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) seminal volume, 'the gap between rural and urban society is perhaps the most intriguing and the least understood' (Kriesi, 2003;Tarrow, 1971: 341). Nonetheless, most recent empirical evidence shows that sizable urban-rural differences persist even after accounting for an array of individual-level characteristics, such as race, income and education (Gimpel et al., 2020). This has an impact, we argue throughout, on motivations and opportunities for engaging in protest politics. ...
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