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Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary U.S. Elections: The Individual Sources of America’s Urban-Rural Divide
Abstract
Drawing on a unique battery of questions fielded on the 2018 CCES and in two separate surveys—one in 2019 and the other during the 2020 election—we study the extent to which Americans feel animus toward communities that are geographically distinct from their own and whether these feelings explain Americans’ attitudes toward the two major political parties and self-reported vote choice. We report results on how place-based resentment predicted vote choice in the 2018 midterm and 2020 general elections and how those feelings relate to other widely studied facets of political behavior such as partisanship and racial resentment. Rural resentment is a powerful predictor of vote choice in both election years examined.
... The rural-urban divide has become a salient and much researched topic in recent years-for example, during the economic protests of the yellow vest movement in France (Brookes and Cappellina 2023;Lem 2020), the British withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) (Brooks 2020;Stoker 2016, 2019;Lee, Morris, and Kemeny 2018;Neal et al. 2021) or the American presidential elections (Jacobs and Munis 2022;Monnat and Brown 2017;Munis 2021;Johnson 2016, 2017), but also with regard to Euroscepticism, political trust or democratic support (McKay, Jennings, and Stoker 2021;Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph Morrow 2021;Schoene 2019;Zumbrunn and Freitag 2023). They all find a ruralurban divide with ruralites being more likely to protest, to vote in favor of Brexit, the Republicans, being more Eurosceptic, less trusting and less supportive of democracy than urbanites are. ...
... First, it contributes to the current literature by adding to the explanation of place-based resentment. Investigating the roots of place-based resentment is very important, as resentment has been shown to influence vote choice, support for Trump, populist, anti-immigration attitudes, and democratic satisfaction (Borwein and Lucas 2023;Huijsmans 2023a;Jacobs and Munis 2022;Trujillo and Crowley 2022). Hence, how place-based resentment is formed might also be interesting to know for policymakers and political strategies. ...
... Rural identity encompasses the first two elements of a social identity: It means self-categorization into a social group, that is, feeling as being a member of the rural population, and identification with one's in-group, that is, identifying as rural resident. However, identity is not inherently rural (Jacobs and Munis 2022;Parker et al. 2018) and place has the potential to become a strong identifier for people living in any area (Daneri, Krasny, and Stedman 2021;. ...
In recent years, the rural-urban divide has not only made its way back into political science, but has also been given an entirely new angle by investigating place of living as its own social identity. However, research is still in its early stages and studies so far focus on linear explanations of place-based resentment. This paper studies place in the light of social identity theory and investigates how place of living and place-based identity interact in shaping place-based resentment. Original survey data on around 4000 respondents from Switzerland from 2022 with a novel measure of place-based identity and resentment is used. A distinction is made not only between rural and urban residents, but also between the suburbanites. Results show that rural residents hold the highest levels of identity and resentment, while suburban residents hold higher levels of resentment than urban ones do. Findings show that there is a moderating effect, whereby the rural-urban divide in resentment increases with place-based identity, while the suburban-urban gap diminishes with increasing place-based identity. These differences in place-based identity and resentment could explain the rural-urban divide in political attitudes and behavior.
... Building on the literature on place-based resentment, our overarching aim is to enhance the understanding of how urban and rural contexts affect the relationship between beliefs about unequal influence and bias among decision-makers and the association of these beliefs with support for anti-establishment political parties. Our study not only addresses calls from prior research to extend the investigation of antiestablishment party support to urban settings but also delves into the effects of individuals' beliefs that there is bias among local decisionmakers against certain groups and districts (Jacobs & Munis, 2023;Trujillo & Crowley, 2022). Two research questions guide our analyses: How does the urban-rural context affect the relationship between beliefs about unequal influence and support for anti-establishment political parties? ...
... Additionally, differences within a local polity may be easier for residents to observe personally and form opinions about. These opinions, in turn, may become reinforced through the exchange of information and experiences with others in one's local context (Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1987;Jacobs & Munis, 2023). ...
... Therefore, differences across contexts may partly be endogenous (de Blok & van der Meer, 2018;Hui, 2013;Maxwell, 2019). However, recent contributions suggest that even when accounting for compositional differences, correlations between urban and rural contexts and political preferences remain (Gimpel et al., 2020;Jacobs & Munis, 2023;Kenny & Luca, 2021). ...
... -Tucker Carlson (2019) 1 The politics of place have become an increasingly prominent feature of American politics over the last decade, especially as we have seen a widening gulf between rural and urban political attitudes and behavior. Place-based identities are a dominant cleavage dividing the two parties and a major driver of polarization, a phenomenon of out-size importance owing to the disproportionate influence that rural communities enjoy at both the state and federal levels (Gimpel et al., 2020;Jacobs & Munis, 2022;Rodden, 2019;Scala & Johnson, 2017). Both scholarly and journalistic attention turned to the politics of place in earnest following the 2016 presidential election, during which Donald Trump's brand of grievance politics drew rural voters to the Republican party at an accelerated rate. ...
... This explanation provides a more nuanced picture of the connection between race and place-based identities in American politics. This enhanced understanding sheds new light on the asymmetric role that place plays in the urban-rural divide, wherein place-based identity and attitudes are much more politically potent among rural voters than among non-rural voters (e.g., Jacobs & Munis, 2022). Why doesn't place motivate White non-rural voters as much? ...
... This enhanced understanding of both place-based attitudes and White racial attitudes has two additional substantive implications. First, it sheds new light on the asymmetric role that place plays in the urban-rural divide, wherein place-based identity and attitudes are much more politically potent among rural voters than among non-rural voters (e.g., Jacobs & Munis, 2022). One reason why place doesn't motivate White non-rural identifying voters as much may be because racial and place-based attitudes are not aligned in the same way they are for rural identifying Americans. ...
Rural resentment is a form of place-based grievance politics that scholars have used to explain the growing urban-rural divide in American politics. However, whereas extant theory assumes that rural resentment stems from rural identification, recently available data shows that beliefs about geographic inequity, which are central to rural resentment, are not held exclusively by those who embrace a rural identity. If geography is not the sole source of rural resentment, then what else explains this ostensibly place-based phenomenon? Among White Americans who do not identify as rural, we posit that belief in the existence of deliberate rural deprivation by government and media elites can be conceived as ‘place-based empathy’ toward rural Americans. Further, we argue that place empathy toward rural areas is partially an expression of White grievance politics stemming from the belief that the stereotypical rural resident is a White American suffering from relative deprivation at the hands of government officials who privilege non-white (and non-rural) constituents over them. Using the 2020 American National Election Time Series, as well as novel mTurk data, we show that White consciousness predicts beliefs about geographic inequity among non-rural identifiers but not rural identifiers. Instead, consistent with previous research, we show that racial prejudice is a better predictor of geographic attitudes for rural identifiers and White consciousness has little independent association. These findings provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of the ways race and place intersect to explain the grievance politics of White Americans in the Trump era.
... Scholars have pointed out that this divide and the widening chasm between rural and urban residents could be detrimental to American democracy. This is largely because this divide is not based on a consistent set of values but on an "us versus them" mentality and animosity toward the other group (Jacobs & Munis, 2023;Kaufman, 2021;Munis, 2022;Wuthnow, 2018). In many ways, politics has become a "team sport" rather than a clash of competing ideas or values. ...
... Similarly, suburbanites may feel ignored by the government's spending on urban infrastructure rather than on serving suburban commuters (Munis, 2022). This "place-based resentment" appears to have a significant effect on many political attitudes, including an individual's vote choice (Jacobs & Munis, 2023). ...
While political scientists have long studied citizens' political efficacy as an important indicator of attitudes toward government, less attention has been devoted to the efficacy of rural or urban residents, which is important given the intensifying rural–urban divide in American society. This study fills this gap by analyzing the 2020 American National Election Studies. Using ordered logistic regression, this study finds that (1) city residents tend to believe that small towns and rural areas have too much influence on government; (2) residents of small towns and rural areas demonstrate lower levels of external efficacy than city residents; and (3) people who believe that small towns and rural areas have too much influence tend to demonstrate high external and internal efficacies, a tendency that is clearer in cities than in other community types. These findings reflect mutual in‐group bias and place‐based resentment between rural and urban residents in American society.
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... Thus, potentially fueling feelings of rural residents that they are being looked down upon by the so-called urban elites that are perceived to dictate the public discourse (Holdo, 2020). Political parties that politicize and message rural resentment will likely gain voters from disgruntled rural voters (Jacobs and Munis, 2022;Munis, 2020). Therefore, the following hypothesis can be formulated. ...
... The analyses showed that living in a rural district significantly increased the likelihood of voting for the Sweden Democrats even in local elections. These findings are in line with previous studies from different political contexts that have shown that places matter for values and political preferences (e.g., Gimpel et al., 2020;Harteveld et al., 2022;Jacobs and Munis, 2022;Luca et al., 2023;Rickardsson, 2021) and that controlling for individual and context-level characteristics does not eliminate the association between living in a rural district and an increased likelihood of supporting the Sweden Democrats in local elections. Further analyses showed that the increased likelihood of supporting the Sweden Democrats was mostly due to voters in rural districts in non-rural municipalities. ...
... membership in terms of residency, multiple studies suggest an asymmetry in the political potency of geographic social identities and associated attitudes. Rural group membership and identity appears more central to rural Americans than urban group membership and identity is to urban Americans (Jacobs & Munis, 2019Lyons & Utych, 2021), and geographic attitudes also appear to be more explanatorily powerful among ruralites (Jacobs & Munis, 2022). ...
... Perhaps the most politically significant geographic attitude is "rural resentment," or the belief that rural areas are routinely disadvantaged and disrespected by government and other influential actors (e.g., Cramer, 2016;Munis, 2022). Rural resentment has been linked to support for the Republican Party in recent elections and is an important driver of the urban-rural divide (Jacobs & Munis, 2022). In addition, those high in rural resentment tend to be favorably disposed toward populism as well as opposed to policies that favor undocumented immigrants (Lunz-Trujillo 2021). ...
The January 6, 2021 Insurrection at the United States Capitol has renewed concerns that American citizens are becoming more tolerant of political violence, a phenomenon that fits within broader fears that partisan-induced motivated reasoning is driving democratic backsliding within the U.S. and across the Western world. Given the rural origins of many right-wing militia groups, and the widespread set of grievances circulating in rural America, questions and fear abound as to whether rural America is more supportive of political violence. In this paper, we investigate whether there is a substantial geographic component to support for violence against the state or ordinary citizens. Drawing on original survey data collected in the fall of 2021, we present two studies that explore the association between rural geography, rural resentment, and support for political violence. We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals – namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment – are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state. The same result is not replicated when looking at support for violence against ordinary citizens. These results provide important insight into the relationship between geographic attitudes and political violence and have noteworthy implications for American national security in our contemporary age of hyper-polarization.
... For example, the persisting even if diminishing historical experiences of past political economies in different places can live on and influence electoral participation and choices to this day (e.g., on slavery and its political legacy see Acharya et al., 2018;Epperly et al., 2020;Morris, 2022). The local sense of being left behind as a result of disinvestment in local industries and loss of familiar jobs can lead to resentments of other places that are flourishing, plausibly at their expense (e.g., Jacobs & Munis, 2022). When these are nearby and seen as culturally different, as with Atlanta, the fact that it is large cities that currently drive much economic growth is seen not so much as a fact (Romei & Smith, 2022) but as a threat. ...
In electoral studies, geographical scale is analogous to the unit or level of analysis studied. The national scale is typically the one most privileged. Regional and local variations are entirely determined by the relative geographical distribution of, for instance, national demographic categories such as age, ethnicity, or levels of education and income around national means. Such categories are also considered to be identical across a polity, and deviations from the national average are the focus of many electoral analyses. We contend that the processes that produce electoral outcomes are funneled across and between scales. Such inter-scale exchanges can range from different political parties emphasizing local, regional, and national identities and interests to local livelihoods feeling threatened by global economic forces or illegal immigration. It is this inter-scale exchange of social, economic, political, and cultural processes, identities and attitudes that produce substantively different electoral outcomes in different places, and not mere deviations from the determinate national average. Results from the 2022 Georgia senate runoff election between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are examined with exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and multi-level regression modeling (MLM) to illustrate how a more complete conception of geographic scale is implicated in electoral outcomes.
... In this work, however, it is important to clarify that such place-based identities are measured in a national, "pan-rural" or "pan-urban" American sense. People who are rural identifiers, for instance, might feel a shared sense of grievance against centers of power in the US (which typically align with urban areas) even regardless of where they currently live (Cramer 2016;Jacobs and Munis 2023;. ...
Differences in values theoretically underlie urban-rural political division. However, it is unclear whether this division is real or perceived. This distinction matters because politically discordant groups can more easily reconcile if they share common goals and values, whereas highly divergent value systems can make compromise more difficult. Using data from original surveys of US adults, we examine whether urban versus rural residents vary in how important they rate seven core political values. We find no consistent differences between metropolitan and rural/small-town residents, suggesting urban-rural value differences may be more perceived. However, we do find distinct and substantial political value differences for rural identity versus urban identity for freedom, individualism, social order, and morality. These results suggest that Americans largely share political values across the urban-rural spectrum, which provides an avenue for common ground in this split. However, place-based identities may have somewhat disparate value systems that could impact the durability of their political division.
... Cramer's work serves as a vivid illustration of the theory-building and research-inspiring role that qualitative research can have. It has spawned a wide literature on how rural resentment informs contemporary election outcomes (Borwein and Lucas 2023;Jacobs and Munis 2023) and inspired several other studies that also take a qualitative, inductive approach to theory building (Cramer and Toff 2017;Ternullo 2024;Weaver, Prowse, and Piston 2019). And although Cramer's work is an archetype of a surprising finding leading to an innovative new research agenda, all the empirical studies that we highlight rely, to some measure, on emergent findings. ...
The contemporary field of American political behavior lacks a methodological tradition of in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork. In this article, we illustrate the causes and consequences of this gap and argue for a renewal of methodological pluralism. First, we situate the current dearth of qualitative approaches within two key methodological debates during the behavioral turn in political science, showing that scholars initially embraced open-ended interviews and fieldwork but that these methods were ultimately sidelined. Although qualitative approaches persisted in historical and institutional research on American politics, their marginalization within the field of American political behavior has come at significant conceptual cost. Second, to redress this loss, we draw on existing discussions of the comparative advantages of qualitative methods to propose a framework for reintegrating interviews and ethnography into the study of American political behavior. We identify four “modes of inquiry” that should inform qualitative and mixed-methods research design in the subfield: innovating theoretically through the discovery of surprising findings, innovating theoretically through research design and case selection, identifying how contexts shape meaning-making, and tracking dynamic processes of change.
... That research tends to focus on places that are "vernacular regions," that is, places that exist in people's minds but that are not typically marked by explicit political boundaries and that lack a clear policymaking apparatus (Cooper and Knotts 2017). Examples include research on rural and urban identities and connections to places like Appalachia or "the South" (Cooper and Knotts 2017;Cooper, Knotts, and Elders 2011;Cooper, Knotts, and Livingston 2010;Cramer 2016;Fudge and Armaly 2021;Munis 2019, 2020;Jacobs and Munis 2022;Trujillo and Crowley 2022;Williams 2018). Work in this area highlights the important role that resentment plays in shaping the political importance of these place-based identities, marked by the feeling that resources, opportunities, and attention from politicians are unfairly distributed within a broader political unit. ...
The increasing nationalization of state and local politics alongside polarization and gridlock at the federal level have led states to become sites where policymaking on national hot button issues occurs. This political climate calls for a reconsideration of existing accounts of state identities, which posit that state identities are generally weak and apolitical in their content. This study considers the following questions: To what extent do respondents identify with their state? How does their state identity compare with other politically salient groups, like national identity, partisanship, race, and gender? To what extent and under what conditions are political considerations associated with state identities? How do results compare across different measures of state identification? Results show that a majority of respondents say that being from their state is an important part of their identity and the proportion saying so is similar to the proportion saying their race, class, and political party are important. Although politics may not come to mind first when respondents consider why their state is important, it relates to general feelings of connectedness, particularly for people in the political majority in their state, and being in the political majority is associated with increased levels of state identification. Results are similar across different measures of state identity. Closed- and open-ended questions show politics emerges most clearly when people explain why their state is not important to their identity. I discuss the implications of these findings and offer thoughts for future research.
... Hence, as scholars have found at a more general level with rural residents (Gimpel and Karnes 2006;Gimpel and Reeves 2024), the cultural milieu of rural Texas likely pushes these Hispanics away from the Democratic Party in this age of nationalized politics (Hopkins 2018) and clear ideological divisions between the major parties (Hetherington 2001). Additionally, research on rural resentment (Cramer 2016;Jacobs and Munis 2023) is another reason to expect rural Hispanics in Texas to be moving away from the Democratic Party and toward the GOP. Finally, recent scholarship on southern politics finds a general pattern of population growth (Bullock et al. 2019) and residential mobility (Morris 2021) positively correlated with Democratic alignment. ...
Objective
We make use of multiple data sources to examine whether there has been geographical polarization in the political behavior of Texas Hispanics from 2012 to 2022. It is widely known that partisan divisions in the American electorate continue to cleave along geographic lines. However, much of this literature on the urban–rural divide does not focus on a specific racial group, and if it does, then it typically highlights differences among non‐Hispanic white voters (Anglos).
Methods
Making use of aggregate‐ and individual‐level data, we assess Texas Hispanics’ party affiliation, participation, and vote choice according to geographic location.
Results
We find notable evidence of geographic‐based partisan polarization among Texas’ burgeoning Hispanic population.
Conclusions
Although the movement of rural/small town Texas Hispanics toward the Republican Party from 2012 to 2022 pales in comparison to this shift among Texas Anglos, a similar partisan dynamic manifests among the former group. We abstain from using the word realignment to characterize these changes in Texas Hispanics’ political behavior according to geographic location, but, nevertheless, it is clear that the Democratic Party's hold on this potentially pivotal group in the Lone Star State's electorate has loosened, and especially among rural/small town Latinos since the rise of Donald Trump.
... For example, in her study of the politics of resentment, Cramer (2016, 55) argues that rural consciousness is composed of perceptions of power, perceptions of resources, and perceptions of values and lifestyles. Moreover, as Jacobs and Munis (2022) find, voters' feelings toward particular kinds of geographies can predict their eventual vote choices, particularly in the case of rural areas. Thus, it may be the case that district demand for locally rooted legislators is based on an underlying value orientation. ...
Although commentators often point to the political value of legislators’ geographic ties, less is known about the influence of such connections once in office. Given recent scholarship underscoring the importance of geography as a dimension of identity, we argue that local legislators should behave as descriptive representatives. We collect the hometowns of all members of Congress with known birth locations from 1789 to 2020 to analyze how being born near one’s district impacts legislator behavior. We connect these data to information on a series of behaviors, finding that local legislators emphasize constituency work over policymaking and party-building. Moreover, while local legislators do not demonstrate substantively less partisan unity in roll-call voting, they attract a higher percentage of out-party cosponsors to their bills. Together, our results point to important representational implications regarding the geographic roots of legislators and the role of local connections in the contemporary Congress.
... This would suggest that political engagement would be sensitive to the individual-level impacts of distributive economic policies such as the MFP. However, more recent research on rural politics conceives of rural voters being more defined by geographic and cultural identity rather than economics (Cramer 2016;Jacobs and Munis 2023), suggesting that political involvement is mostly driven by post-materialist concerns. Our findings are much more consistent with these accounts than with traditional conceptions of the "pocketbook farm vote." ...
How does the extent of policy benefits—not simply their presence—affect political engagement? While fundamental to understanding the electoral implications of economic policymaking, addressing this question is challenging due to the difficulty of measuring individual voters’ policy outcomes. We examine a natural experiment embedded in President Trump’s Market Facilitation Program (MFP), which aided a core Republican constituency: farmers harmed by his 2018 trade war. Due to idiosyncrasies of program design, the MFP undercompensated some farmers for their trade war losses—and significantly overcompensated others—based solely on their 2018 crop portfolios. Analyzing over 165,000 affected voters, we show that improved compensation outcomes had negligible impacts on Republican farmers’ midterm turnout and campaign contributions, even though such variation in benefits significantly affected farmers’ propensity to view the intervention as helpful. This null result is important—our estimates suggest that even highly salient variation in policy outcomes may have limited mobilizing capacity.
... Localised decline builds a sense of alienation with political elites that have failed to represent people's concerns and areas (McKay, 2019), resentment of more prosperous communities, groups, cities and other places (Cramer 2016;Green, Hellwig and Fieldhouse, 2022;Jacobs and Munis, 2022), heightened concern about immigration and, ultimately, a desire for political disruption. It has led to growing geographic polarisation between metropolitan areas and former industrial areas (Rickard, 2020;Rodden, 2010;Jennings and Stoker, 2019), and this resulting geographic polarisation maps onto support for populist causes (Ford & Goodwin 2014;Mudde, 2016). ...
Local economic decline has been presented as an explanation for populism, political alienation and geographic polarisation. This approach risks underestimating the complexity of observing local economic decline. Using original survey questions in the British Election Study, we theorise five models to explain who is likely to perceive local economic decline, and why. Using linked objective data, we analyse the relationship of perceptions to existing economic indicators, finding correspondence but also substantial and systematic variation driven by partisanship and heuristics, such as declining personal circumstances. These findings suggest that researchers should not equate objectively measured decline with homogeneous or direct effects of the local economy on vote choice, populist leanings, and localised discontent. There is value in establishing how voters reason about economic decline to both explain their choices and the way they are likely to respond to remedial policy measures.
... Place resentment seems to be gaining ground as a new issue in both party competition and in voters' decision-making process. For instance, Trump's victory, among other factors, was partially attributed to rural resentment against urban dominance, its cultures and its policies (Cramer, 2016;Jacobs & Munis, 2023). In this sense, rural dwellers, as a consequence of the situation of neglect by urban elites and of comparative grievance with metropolitan areas, were more likely to vote for Trump. ...
In many European countries, people increasingly leave rural or small municipalities to live and work in urban or metropolitan environments. Although previous work on the 'left behind' places has examined the relationship between the rural-urban divide and vote choice, less is known about how depopulation affects electoral behaviour. Is there a relationship between experiencing a loss in population and support for the different parties? We investigate this question by examining the Spanish case, a country where the topic of depopulation has become a salient issue in political competition. Using a newly compiled dataset, we also explore whether the relationship between depopulation and electoral returns is moderated by municipality size, local compositional changes, the loss of public services and changes in amenities. Our findings show that depopulated municipalities give higher support to the main Conservative party, mainly in small municipalities. Yet, municipalities on the brink of disappearance are more likely to give larger support to the far-right. Results overall show that the effect of depopulation seems to be driven by compositional changes, and not as a result of losing public services or a deterioration of the vibrancy of the town. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the relationship between internal migration and electoral behaviour.
... This allows the contributions of the special issue to map variations at the regional and/or local levels and link them to political opinions, preferences and voting results. Articles in the special issue adopt a demand-side view of political discontent, contributing to the existing supply-side literature that has examined how political elites and parties generate or politicise discontent through the articulation of place-based divisions (Jacobs & Munis, 2023;Haffert et al., 2024). ...
... The growing body of research about the increasing urban-rural electoral divide is overwhelmingly focussed on the electoral support for major parties and more specifically for right-wing populist parties. The recent studies on Canada (Armstronget al., 2022), US (Jacobs and Munis, 2023;Metler and Brown, 2022), Anglo-American countries (Taylor et al., 2023), France (Brookes and Cappellina, 2023), Poland (Marcinkiewicz, 2018) or Sweden (Rickardsson, 2021) are good examples. ...
How does rural decline affect electoral politics? A well-known argument is that the growing geographical polarisation of populations between prospering major cities and declining hinterlands is emerging as a cleavage of electoral politics in developed countries. But prior work has focussed on specific outcomes of rural decline rather than examining whether the geographical distribution of political attitudes and behaviours within countries has become more uneven in the last decades. Using a measure of party nationalisation capturing spatial differences in electoral support across districts in OECD countries over the last 60 years, we find that a declining rural population increases differences in the geographical distribution of partisan support within countries. Nationalisation determines a party’s orientation toward distribution of public resources and support for region-specific interests.
... This over-time development of place-based trends in American politics remains largely unexplained in the growing political science literature on the rural-urban divide. Drawing on both ethnographic research and large-N survey analyses, scholars have offered several important findings, including that rural people feel resentful towards urbanites (Jacobs and Munis 2022;Cramer 2016); anti-Black racism plays a role in shaping white rural consciousness (Nelsen and Petsko 2021); and rural dwellers tend to support the Republican Party, even after controlling for various otherwise important individual-level covariates (Scala and Johnson 2017). Others have pointed to politically-based sorting as one potential mechanism (e.g., Bishop 2008;Gimpel and Hui 2015), yet recent analysis that draws on finegrained publicly available voter registration data suggests that this can only explain a fraction of the divergence we outline earlier (Martin and Webster 2020). 4 Overall, by using primarily data only from recent years and focusing on current attitudes and behavior, this literature has three major limitations that prevent us from understanding when and why any of these factors may have become politically consequential. ...
As recently as the early 1990s, Americans living in rural and urban areas voted similarly in presidential elections, yet in the decades since, they have diverged sharply as rural people in all regions of the country have increasingly supported the Republican Party. We seek to explain the sources of this growing cleavage by examining two interrelated processes of change: political-economic transformation that elevated many urban areas and marginalized rural ones, and the nationalization of policy goals. Our analytical approach is developmental, probing the timing and sequencing of trends across more than four decades. It is also comprehensive, testing theories related to economic decline, the educational gap, organizational mobilization, and racism and racial and ethnic threat. Our analysis reveals that while rural and urban counties resembled each other in several respects in the 1970s, they have since moved apart. We examine how key trends relate to political change in presidential voting. We find that in the 1990s and early 2000s, rural dwellers in places experiencing population loss or economic stagnation began to support Republican candidates. Then from 2008 to 2020, those in areas with higher percentages of less-educated residents, a higher presence of evangelical congregations per capita, and higher levels of anti-Black racism, each more prevalent in rural areas than urban areas, shifted their support to Republicans. Through sequential processes of polarization, with political-economic forces leading the way and activating rural resistance to the nationalization of policy goals subsequently, the rural-urban political divide emerged as a major fault line in the nation’s politics.
Scholars of American politics have recently turned their attention to rural politics, aiming to understand the late twentieth and early twenty-first century nationwide shift of white rural voters to the Republican Party and the ensuing rural–urban political divide. We review research that assesses the potential causes of the rise of place-based polarization, including political–economic transformation, racism, ethnocentrism, and the growing salience of social issues. We also consider its consequences, such as increased levels of social polarization and institutional threats to democracy. Most research to date has focused on individuals, whether to specify rural identity and its correlates or to probe public opinion and political behavior. We recommend that scholars broaden their scope of inquiry to include factors at the meso and macro levels by studying the interplay between place and institutions, public policies, and organizations as well as broader political, economic, and social developments. This will entail attention to change over time. We suggest that scholars resist cordoning off this research area into rural studies and instead engage with broad questions about the functioning of American democracy.
This article examines the interplays between outward and inward migration and the emergence of resentment in two cities in the Italian region of Lombardy. Drawing on the concept of ‘resentful affectivities,’ we conducted 43 ethnographically-informed interviews with shopkeepers in Pavia and Mantova. Through the emotional lenses of discontent, distrust, and nostalgia, we trace how resentful affectivities shape, interconnect, and potentially mobilize discourses around emigration and immigration. In particular, these three emotions link migration issues to normative expectations of democracy, often translating complex social-political dynamics into resentful affectivities through emigration and immigration narratives that give coherence to empty-crowded paradoxes. Emigration and immigration are articulated into resentful affectivities as the two sides of the same coin – the ‘best Italians’ are leaving while less-deserving/-desirable foreigners are arriving – with shopkeepers attributing varying degrees of agency to this dual movement, which integrates or illustrates broader criticisms to political elites. We argue that these notions connect emigration and immigration, not as counterbalancing each other, but rather through an overarching idea that broader phenomena with specific culprits are weakening and may potentially destroy a community that is nostalgically fantasized in opposition to every present facet inspiring discontent and distrust. Our contribution unveils the impact of unfulfilled expectations of political representation on resentful narratives of emigration and immigration.
Political efficacy—the belief in one’s ability to influence political outcomes—is an impactful predictor of support for democracy and political participation. However, the increasing rise of resentment politics—the belief that some groups are getting more than their fair share—may have dramatic consequences on citizens’ efficacy. Using the American National Election Study, we find resentful voters decrease their sense of external efficacy, that is, their belief that someone like them can influence the system. These effects are particularly concentrated among white respondents. However, partisanship conditions the impact of resentment for internal efficacy, that is, their belief that they understand the political system sufficiently to effectively participate. For Republicans, resentment increases their internal efficacy, while Democratic voters see a decline in their beliefs about their own comprehension of the political system. These findings have important implications for understanding the multifaceted impacts of resentment politics on political attitudes and support for democratic systems.
This study examines sociospatial differences in policy priorities across time and space. Our empirical analysis based on a dataset of over 1.1 million respondents from 1939 to 2020 demonstrates that while there are modest but consistent gaps between urban and non-urban populations in several salient policy areas, partisan affiliation significantly overshadows place-based identities in shaping policy priorities. We also demonstrate that place-based gaps in most policy areas exhibit minimal variation over time and across different economic and political contexts. These results suggest that urban and rural populations rely on elite cues in similar ways when forming policy priorities. Our study contributes to the broader understanding of representation and attitudes toward policies by highlighting the importance of policy priorities.
Urban–rural divides are large and growing in many national elections, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever‐widening urban–rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of nearly 1000 policy issue questions across 10 distinct Canadian national election studies conducted between 1993 and 2021 ( N = 5.3 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district. This dataset allows us to measure urban–rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban–rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including questions relating to gun control, immigration and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the ‘progressive cities’ hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left‐wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban–rural policy divides have grown since the 1990s. Urban–rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain the ever‐widening urban–rural political divide.
Social identity plays a central role in mass politics, shaping the perceptions citizens have of politically relevant phenomena. Does identity bias perceptions of social problems, leading citizens to show preferential concern for problems affecting their ingroup? If so, why? Most experimental research has not found evidence of such ingroup bias, but when it has, it has not distinguished empirically between ingroup favoritism or outgroup hostility, leaving open the question of whether identity biases people for their group or against outgroups. Also unclear is whether symbolic or self-interested motivations drive ingroup bias. Employing a variety of social identities and social problems, three survey experiments show citizens perceive problems affecting outgroup members as less serious and more strongly oppose government aid in those cases. Ingroup favoritism was not found because participants did not perceive ingroup victims as more similar than non-identified victims. Outgroup hostility was driven more by concerns stemming from self-interest than symbolic identity-based motivations.
Aridification in the U.S. Southwest has led to tension about conservation and land management strategy. Strain on multi-generational agricultural livelihoods and nearly 150-year-old Colorado River water adjudication necessitates solutions from transdisciplinary partnerships. In this study, farmers and ranchers in a small San Juan River headwater community of southwestern Colorado engaged in a participatory, convergent research study prioritizing local objectives and policy. Acknowledging the historic and sometimes perceived role of academic institutions as representing urban interests, our goal was to highlight how research can support rural governance. This process involved creating community partnerships, analyzing data, and supporting results distribution to the surveyed population through social media. The survey was designed to support a local waterway management plan. Survey results showed lack of water availability and climate changes were selected by producers as most negatively affecting their operations, and many were extremely interested in agroforestry methods and drought-resistant crop species. Statistical analysis identified that satisfaction with community resources was positively correlated with scale of production, satisfaction with irrigation equipment, and familiarity with water rights. We hope to contribute our framework of a convergent, place-based research design for wider applications in other regions to uncover solutions to resource challenges.
In this paper, we assess what variables correlate with how people feel about rural residents. Specifically, this paper examines partisan media use, political beliefs, and placed-based identity as predictors of people's evaluations of rural residents. We also examine the two-way interaction of media use and political beliefs and the three-way interaction of media use, political beliefs, and placed-based identity to better understand where the correlations between media use and feelings toward rural residents are concentrated.
Combining research in political geography and social psychology, this article investigates lay theories of “place effects”—that is, ordinary citizens' beliefs about the effects that urban or rural places have on the individuals who live in them. We do so using a novel survey vignette embedded in a large‐scale survey of the Canadian public. Our results suggest that (1) citizens see rural identities as less malleable than urban identities, (2) lay theories of place effects depend on citizens' own place identities, and (3) lay theories of place effects are stronger for nonpolitical than for political place‐based characteristics. We also find that lay theories of place effects are associated with individual‐level characteristics that are connected to cosmopolitan‐communitarian divides, such as ideology and postsecondary education. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for the growing literature on urban–rural divides and for research on citizens' implicit theories of places and their political consequences.
Conventional wisdom claims that rural voters are politically mobilized by right‐wing and culturally conservative forces, while urban voters are left‐leaning and have progressive cultural views. Leveraging original survey data from Norway, our work challenges this dichotomy. We build on cleavage theory and recent research on place identitiesto develop a latent measure of rural attachment. Using regression analysis, we investigate how well this measure maps onto five different cultural attitudes, left‐ right ideology, and partisan voting. The findings show that people with rural identities are not more right‐wing, reluctant towards immigration, or anti‐environmental than their urban counterparts. Instead, the geographic cleavage relates to dissatisfaction with the way the central government treats rural areas, resistance to the EU, and voting for the agrarian Center Party. The findings from Norway therefore show that it is possible to mobilize rural identifiers without disparaging immigrants or adopting other radical‐right stances. Our work suggests that the supply of political parties plays a decisive role in how rural identities are activated and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the urban‐rural divide in advanced, multi‐party democracies.
How does partisan identity impact rural identity? While prior research has found associations between rural identity and partisanship, few studies experimentally validate this relationship. Using two separate experiments–a partisan prime and a conjoint–we explore the relationship between rural identity and partisan identity to show that when partisan identity is in conflict with rural identity, the partisan identity dominates. Our findings indicate that the relationship between partisan identity and rural identity is asymmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. For Republicans, rural identity often reinforces their partisan identity. However, for Democrats, rural identity is subordinate to their partisan identity. That is, Democrats weaken their rural identity when primed to think about their partisan identity and Democrats’ partisan identity supersedes the expression of a rural identity when rating hypothetical candidates. Overall, when rural and small town Democrats are thinking in a partisan mindset, their rural identity becomes less salient.
This chapter places the location dilemma in the domain of representative democracy. It discusses the role of political parties in channelling political conflicts on location decisions and illustrates how they represent public opinion in location decisions using Swedish survey data. The chapter delves into numerous challenges for parties and representative democracy to overcome in making location decisions that resonate with the will of the people and thereby bestow legitimacy.
Do rural Americans trust the government less than non-rural Americans? In an era of declining trust in government and mounting geographic polarization, this research examines the relationship between geography, identity, and attitudes of political trust in the United States. Using national survey data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies time series surveys, this quantitative analysis tests hypotheses that rurality in the context of place and place-based identity is associated with lower trust in the federal government. Overall, the results show that both living in and identifying with more rural areas corresponds with decreased government trust, regardless of the political party of the incumbent president. These findings contribute to the understanding of America’s urban-rural political divide and suggest significant implications for both partisan leaders and policymakers.
Most of the money spent in U.S. congressional campaigns comes from donors residing outside the race’s electoral district. Scholars argue that legislators accepting out-of-district donations become “surrogate representatives” for outside donors. Yet researchers have neglected a critical question: How do geographic constituents react when their representatives accept money from outside donors? We argue that geographic constituents feel forced to share their representatives with out-of-district donors at the expense of their own representation. In an experiment during the 2021 U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, we found that Georgians who learned about out-of-district donations to particular candidates expected their senator to spend significantly less time and effort working for the interest of Georgians. A follow-up experiment during the 2022 U.S. Senate elections identified local identity as a moderating variable. Relative to those receiving no prime, respondents whose local identity was primed and who learned about out-of-district donations expected their senator to spend less time and effort working for geographic constituents. Our findings highlight the rivalrous nature of representation and the trade-offs accompanying out-of-district donations and surrogate representation.
Building on an interview study from Sweden (n = 80), this article develops the concept of media resentment as a tool for understanding contemporary developments such as the diminished trust in news media and journalism. We view media resentment as a complex of feelings and ideas that are both individual and social, embodied, and ideal. Media resentment is defined as the feeling that the media – intentionally or unintentionally – are denying you or endangering what you have rightfully earned, whether by not giving it to you, by directly telling you to abstain from it or by intervening in social processes so that your enjoyment of what you have earned becomes impossible.
Contemporary public opinion in the United States has been characterized by affective polarization and the nationalization of political behavior. In this paper, we examine whether local framing can decrease voters’ reliance on national partisan identities when evaluating their representatives in the United States Congress. Relying on both an experimental study and observational data from senators’ Facebook posts, we find evidence that “talking local” is an effective means for representatives to bypass the “perceptual screen” of partisanship . Candidates who “go local” in their communication style are able to expand their electoral coalition by appealing to independents and outpartisans alike. Observational findings suggest that many politicians, especially those representing competitive districts, are aware of this and “go local” strategically.
Rural resentment is a form of place-based grievance politics that scholars have used to explain the growing urban-rural divide in American politics. However, whereas extant theory assumes that rural resentment stems from rural identification, recently available data shows that beliefs about geographic inequity, which are central to rural resentment, are not held exclusively by those who embrace a rural identity. If geography is not the sole source of rural resentment, then what else explains this ostensibly place-based phenomenon? Among White Americans who do not identify as rural, we posit that belief in the existence of deliberate rural deprivation by government and media elites can be conceived as ‘place-based empathy’ toward rural Americans. Further, we argue that place empathy toward rural areas is partially an expression of White grievance politics stemming from the belief that the stereotypical rural resident is a White American suffering from relative deprivation at the hands of government officials who privilege non-white (and non-rural) constituents over them. Using the 2020 American National Election Time Series, as well as novel mTurk data, we show that White consciousness predicts beliefs about geographic inequity among non-rural identifiers but not rural identifiers. Instead, consistent with previous research, we show that racial prejudice is a better predictor of geographic attitudes for rural identifiers and White consciousness has little independent association. These findings provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of the ways race and place intersect to explain the grievance politics of White Americans in the Trump era.
The concept of rural consciousness has gained a significant amount of traction over the past several years, as evidenced by hundreds of citations and its inclusion within the most recent pilot of the ANES. However, many have questioned whether rural consciousness is appreciably different from racial prejudice. We assessed this issue by distributing a survey study to Wisconsinites living in rural and urban communities, and by examining the relationships between rural consciousness, racial resentment, and political attitudes in the ANES 2019 Pilot Study. The survey study revealed that participants living in rural parts of Wisconsin—unlike those living in urban parts—tended to think of city dwellers as possessing more negative attributes. In addition, the survey study revealed that rural participants thought of Milwaukeeans, specifically, as possessing stereotypically Black attributes. Moreover, this tendency was starker among those who scored higher on a measure of rural consciousness, suggesting that rural consciousness is related to racial stereotyping. Finally, in an analysis of the ANES 2019 Pilot Study, we found that rural consciousness correlated with racial resentment, and that controlling for racial resentment dramatically reduced the extent to which rural consciousness could predict political preferences (e.g., approval for Donald Trump). Thus, while white rural consciousness may not be reducible to racism, racism certainly plays a central role.
What are the behavioral consequences of municipal identity? A long tradition of public policy theory has emphasized how municipal policymaking is shaped by local residents’ shared interest in the prestige, power, and economic growth of their cities. A separate tradition of social identity theory shows that perceived membership in politically salient groups, including place-based identities, shapes political behavior, particularly in the context of intergroup rivalry. This paper integrates insights from these two traditions, providing a novel analysis of municipalities as a source of meaningful group identity. Using two large Canadian surveys, we measure municipal identity as a social identity, demonstrating that municipalities provide a meaningful basis of social identity for many individuals. We then show that municipal identity has important political correlates: strong municipal identifiers have higher levels of interest in municipal politics, higher participation in municipal elections, and distinctive policy preferences on issues related to municipal status and intermunicipal competition. We discuss the implications of our findings for political behavior, municipal politics, and social identity research.
The question of how the political attitudes and behaviors of those living in rural areas compare to those living in suburban or urban areas has become increasingly important to understanding national elections in the United States in recent years. Those living in urban areas tend to vote for Democrats and those living rural areas tend to vote for Republicans, while the suburbs have become relatively competitive. Additionally, the political views of rural Americans are often characterized as being relatively conservative, especially regarding social or cultural issues. The question at hand is how suburban and urban attitudes compare, especially in an era of increasing rural-urban electoral polarization. Using data from the 2006 – 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Studies, I compare rural, suburban, and urban political attitudes concerning the issues of gun control, abortion, and same-sex marriage. These issues are typically identified as “culture war” issues and stereotypes about rural Americans purport that their views on these issues are very conservative. The results indicate that there are differences in political issue preferences between urban Americans and those living in the suburbs, small towns, and rural areas. Those living in small towns and rural areas did have some of the most conservative views on these issues, but many suburban residents also held similar views, implying that is it not so much an urban-rural divide that is present in American politics, but instead a divide between those who live in the urban core and outside of it.
As the American political landscape becomes increasingly divided along urban–rural lines, it raises the prospect of deepening social identities that are tied to one’s community-type. As community-type becomes an important social identity, it can lead to favoritism of one’s community in-group, or denigration of one’s community out-group. We explore the extent to which urban and rural identities exist above and beyond other factors like party and race, and whether they are consequential for the ways in which people evaluate the political and non-political world. Using national survey data, we demonstrate that people in both urban and rural locations hold beliefs that are consistent with a community-type social identity that is independent of other factors which are correlated with the urban–rural divide. We use two different experiments to assess the consequences of this identity, finding that there are distinct effects in the political arena when allocating government resources, and in the non-political world when judging hypothetical job applications. These effects are generally smaller in magnitude than other factors, such as partisanship, but suggest that community-type identities are important in politics.
Political scientists are accustomed to imagining electoral politics in geographical terms. For instance, there is a “red America” that largely covers the country’s expansive heartland and there is a “blue America” mostly confined to the coasts. Until recently, however, public opinion scholars had largely lost sight of the fact that the places where people live, and people’s identification with those places, shape public opinion and political behavior. This paper develops and validates a flexible psychometric scale measure of a key political psychological dimension of place: place resentment. Place resentment is hostility toward place-based outgroups perceived as enjoying undeserved benefits beyond those enjoyed by one’s place-based ingroup. Regression results indicate that males, ruralites, younger Americans, those high in place identity, and those high in racial resentment are more likely to harbor higher levels of place resentment.
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.
Researchers have increasingly turned to online convenience samples as sources of survey responses that are easy and inexpensive to collect. As reliance on these sources has grown, so too have concerns about the use of convenience samples in general and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in particular. We distinguish between “external validity” and theoretical relevance, with the latter being the more important justification for any data collection strategy. We explore an alternative source of online convenience samples, the Lucid Fulcrum Exchange, and assess its suitability for online survey experimental research. Our point of departure is the 2012 study by Berinsky, Huber, and Lenz that compares Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to US national probability samples in terms of respondent characteristics and treatment effect estimates. We replicate these same analyses using a large sample of survey responses on the Lucid platform. Our results indicate that demographic and experimental findings on Lucid track well with US national benchmarks, with the exception of experimental treatments that aim to dispel the “death panel” rumor regarding the Affordable Care Act. We conclude that subjects recruited from the Lucid platform constitute a sample that is suitable for evaluating many social scientific theories, and can serve as a drop-in replacement for many scholars currently conducting research on Mechanical Turk or other similar platforms.
In this essay, we contribute a response to intellectual and practical problems by presenting a perspective on environmental communication that is reflexively grounded in place. The perspective is designed to explore human relations with nature, while embracing cultural and linguistic variability. Our goals are to introduce a way to think through communication to places, and further to link that understanding to issues of engaged environmental action, to deeply seated notions of identity, and to the affective dimension of belonging that place-based communication often brings with it. Our way of doing this is to theorize and study cultural discourses of dwelling, which we explicate theoretically, then further illustrate by analyzing the discourse of adult-onset hunters. Our discussion concludes by exploring not only environmental speaking, but listening environmentally.
In 2008 journalist Bill Bishop achieved the kind of notice that authors dream about. His book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, was mentioned regularly during the presidential campaign; most notably, former president Bill Clinton urged audiences to read the book. Bishop's thesis is that Americans increasingly are choosing to live in neighborhoods populated with people just like themselves. In turn, these residential choices have produced a significant increase in geographic political polarization. Bishop does not contend that people consciously decide to live with fellow Democrats or Republicans; rather political segregation is a byproduct of the correlations between political views and the various demographic and life-style indicators people consider when making residential decisions. Whatever the cause, Bishop contends that the resulting geographic polarization is a troubling and dangerous development.
The current debate over the extent of polarization in the American mass public focuses on the extent to which partisans' policy preferences have moved. Whereas "maximalists" claim that partisans' views on policies have become more extreme over time (Abramowitz 2010), "minimalists" (Fiorina and Abrams 2009) contend that the majority of Americans remain centrist, and that what little centrifugal movement has occurred reflects sorting, i.e., the increased association between partisanship and ideology. We argue in favor of an alternative definition of polarization, based on the classic concept of social distance (Bogardus 1947). Using data from a variety of sources, we demonstrate that both Republicans and Democrats increasingly dislike, even loathe, their opponents. We also find that partisan affect is inconsistently (and perhaps artifactually) founded in policy attitudes. The more plausible account lies in the nature of political campaigns; exposure to messages attacking the out-group reinforces partisans' biased views of their opponents.
Attitudinal differences between urban and rural voters in America have been in the spotlight in recent years and engaging rural populations politically has been growing in importance, particularly since the 2016 presidential election. Meanwhile, social and geographic sorting is increasing the salience of a rural identity that drives distinct policy preferences. While recent research has examined how rural identities drive social and economic policy preferences, rural Americans are also particularly relevant to the fate of environmental policy. Farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners manage huge portions of American lands and watersheds and are important stakeholders in the implementation of environmental policies. Despite this, the environmental policy preferences of rural Americans have received little attention from the research community. This study fills a gap in the literature by investigating how collective identities among rural Americans drive environmental policy preferences. Through eight focus groups and thirty-five interviews with rural voters across America (total n=105), this study explores how four components of rural American identity—connection to nature, resentment/disenfranchisement, rootedness, and self-reliance—inform specific rural perspectives on environmental policy. The findings have implications for how to best design, communicate, and implement environmental policies in a way that can better engage rural Americans on this issue.
Recent work on the influence of social identities reveals that placed-based attachments serve as a powerful heuristic when making political assessments. When a politician makes a place-based appeal—such as cuing rural origins—individuals who share that identity more strongly support the candidate. Yet, other important identities—namely, partisanship—are strongly related to place. Here, we attempt to disentangle the unique influence of a place-based identity (and the strength thereof) on candidate support. Additionally, we ask whether shared place can compel supportive behavior, rather than merely increase expressive support. Using a unique survey experiment, we find that those who strongly identify with a place are more willing to donate to the campaign of a shared-place candidate, relative to weaker place identification, but only among co-partisans. We find little evidence that place attachment influences supportive behavior beyond the role of partisanship. Disparate identities—here, place and partisanship—that create cross-pressures can operate in tandem.
Recent accounts of American politics focus heavily on urban–rural gaps in political behavior. Rural politics research is growing but may be stymied by difficulties defining and measuring which Americans qualify as “rural.” We discuss theoretical and empirical challenges to studying rurality. Much existing research has been inattentive to conceptualization and measurement of rural geography. We focus on improving estimation of different notions of rurality and provide a new dataset on urban–rural measurement of U.S. state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2020, Political Behavior , 845–864) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2017, The Journal of Politics , 45–59) survey data to show rural self-identification is not well-captured with objective, place-based classifications, suggesting a rethinking of theoretical and empirical accounts of rural identity. We conclude with strategies for operationalizing rurality using readily available tools.
Throughout the mid-twentieth century, scholars identified considerable contextual variation in American electoral politics. Party platforms varied significantly across the country, split ticket voting was commonplace, and candidate idiosyncrasies appeared to matter a great deal to voters. According to previous research, candidates' roots seemed especially important to voters, with “homegrown” candidates enjoying a boost at the polls. There is good reason to expect, however, that voters may no longer care about candidate roots. Partisan politics have polarized, both ideologically amongst elites and “affectively” amongst the electorate, continually since the mid-1990s (Mason, 2018). In addition, recent work suggests that American political behavior has “nationalized; ” meaning that national level partisan cues dominate voters' decision calculus, from presidential to mayoral races (Hopkins 2018). Both trends suggest little to no role for apolitical candidate characteristics to factor into voters' evaluations of candidates. To reassess voters’ appetite for homegrown candidates, this paper features observational and conjoint experimental studies designed to discern whether individuals in the United States still care about candidate roots. Results indicate that, despite trends of partisan polarization and nationalization, voters continue to consider candidate roots important. Furthermore, this preference appears especially strong among those with a strong place identity, suggesting that those for whom geographical identity is most important are particularly sensitive to geographical cues.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining’s end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation’s first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.
A growing number of scholars have documented how social identities defined by an attachment to place influence individuals’ understandings about political power and representation. Drawing on this theoretical framework, we explore how place-based identities matter for American federalism by documenting how attachments to the American states alter individuals’ decisions to leave, or exit, as well as to welcome newcomers into their local communities. Using a set of conjoint experiments designed to measure individual attitudes about place, politics, and America’s federal polity, we find evidence that Americans hold deep and consequential attitudes about the places in which they live. Our evidence confirms that state identities are still highly relevant in shaping American federalism and the competitive pressures between intergovernmental jurisdictions. While federalism may encourage individuals to leave, federalism also nourishes place-specific attachments, motivating people to stay.
Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. This book is a comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America, and its findings are sobering. The book looks at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests—membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created—representing more than 35,000 organizations over a 25-year period—this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well-educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities—and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice. This book reveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.
The contemporary practice of homeownership in the United States was born out of government programs adopted during the New Deal. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC)—and later the Federal Housing Administration and GI Bill—expanded home buying opportunity, although in segregationist fashion. Through mechanisms such as redlining, these policies fueled white suburbanization and black ghettoization, while laying the foundation for the racial wealth gap. This is the first article to investigate the long-term consequences of these policies on the segregation of cities. I combine a full century of census data with archival data to show that cities HOLC appraised became more segregated than those it ignored. The gap emerged between 1930 and 1950 and remains significant: in 2010, the black-white dissimilarity, black isolation, and white-black information theory indices are 12, 16, and 8 points higher in appraised cities, respectively. Results are consistent across a range of robustness checks, including exploitation of imperfect implementation of appraisal guidelines and geographic spillover. These results contribute to current theoretical discussions about the persistence of segregation. The long-term impact of these policies is a reminder of the intentionality that shaped racial geography in the United States, and the scale of intervention that will be required to disrupt the persistence of segregation.
This article examines the extent to which economic attitudes, political predispositions, neighborhood context, and socio-demographic factors influence views toward adult, undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. We specifically examine how these factors differ for respondents living in various types of American urban, suburban, and rural areas. Arguably, in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, public opinion toward often racialized immigration policy proposals is incomplete without an understanding of the role of place and geographic identity. In the 2016 general election, 62 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump, as compared with 50 percent of suburban voters, and 35 percent of urban voters. However, we know little about how their views toward undocumented immigration, a persistent hot-button issue, varied by geographic type. Our findings suggest that views toward undocumented immigrants currently living and working in the United States are conditioned by factors related to a respondent’s geographic type. We find that attitudes toward immigrants vary considerably across place. These findings provide support to our argument about the development of a geographic-based identity that has considerable impact on important public opinion attitudes, even after controlling for more traditional explanatory factors.
The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.
Cambridge Core - Sociology of Race and Ethnicity - Segregation by Design - by Jessica Trounstine
Prior research has shown that social identities defined by an attachment to place (i.e., “place-based” identities) are influential in shaping how citizens understand and think about political topics. Moreover, prior research has also argued that candidates sometimes use “place-based appeals” in order to win support among the electorate, and that such appeals are seemingly widespread. While past research has provided a rich understanding of what place-based identity and place-based appeals are, there is a large gap in what we know about the causal effects of such appeals. In this study, we address this gap by testing experimentally the effects of place-based appeals on voters’ evaluation of candidate likeability and ability to understand their constituents, across the broader American patchwork. Using a set of modified campaign mailer advertisements, we alter whether respondents see an ad that uses rural or urban imagery when introducing a candidate. Our results indicate that, consistent with existing theory, place-based appeals are impactful in shaping political evaluations among rural voters, but do not appear as relevant for urban voters. Overall, we argue that place—or symbolically charged geographical sites—is a useful, widespread, and potentially powerful political heuristic.
The Space between Us brings the connection between geography, psychology, and politics to life. By going into the neighborhoods of real cities, Enos shows how our perceptions of racial, ethnic, and religious groups are intuitively shaped by where these groups live and interact daily. Through the lens of numerous examples across the globe and drawing on a compelling combination of research techniques including field and laboratory experiments, big data analysis, and small-scale interactions, this timely book provides a new understanding of how geography shapes politics and how members of groups think about each other. Enos’ analysis is punctuated with personal accounts from the field. His rigorous research unfolds in accessible writing that will appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, illuminating the profound effects of social geography on how we relate to, think about, and politically interact across groups in the fabric of our daily lives.
The national electoral map has split into warring regional bastions of Republican red and Democratic blue, producing a deep and enduring partisan divide in American politics. In Red Fighting Blue, David A. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties' geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters' partisan preferences, as magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections - with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government. Provides a clear answer to the question of whether Americans have become regionally divided into 'red' and 'blue' states - and explains why this geographic pattern emerged over the past twenty years of American elections Offers new insight into the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making Integrates evidence from different subject domains - including public opinion, election results, party history, and congressional studies - to provide a 'big picture' of American polarization and gridlock.
This article documents the diversity of political attitudes and voting patterns along the urban-rural continuum of the United States. We find that America’s rural and urban interface, in terms of political attitudes and voting patterns, is just beyond the outer edges of large urban areas and through the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton performed well in densely populated areas on the urban side of the interface, but they faced increasingly difficult political climates and sharply diminished voter support on the rural side of the interface. The reduction in support for Clinton in 2016 in rural areas was particularly pronounced. Even after controlling for demographic, social, and economic factors (including geographic region, education, income, age, race, and religious affiliation) in a spatial regression, we find that a county’s position in the urban-rural continuum remained statistically significant in the estimation of voting patterns in presidential elections.
The policies of Republican Governor Scott Walker have come to symbolize a resurgent assault on the public sector, and on public employee unions in particular, by the Republican Party. The fact that this is happening in Wisconsin, the state that in the last century was considered the “laboratory of Progressivism,” makes the politics surrounding these policies all the more compelling. In The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker , Katherine J. Cramer analyzes the “politics of resentment” surrounding these developments. Employing an ethnographic “method of listening,” Cramer furnishes thick description of the political language employed by rural Wisconsinites, and proceeds to develop an interpretive theory of “political resentment” that illuminates the reasons why lower-class citizens so strongly oppose public policies seeking to offset social and economic inequality. The book is important methodologically and politically. We have thus invited a range of social and political scientists to comment on the book as a work of political science and as a diagnosis of the current political moment.
The policies of Republican Governor Scott Walker have come to symbolize a resurgent assault on the public sector, and on public employee unions in particular, by the Republican Party. The fact that this is happening in Wisconsin, the state that in the last century was considered the “laboratory of Progressivism,” makes the politics surrounding these policies all the more compelling. In The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker , Katherine J. Cramer analyzes the “politics of resentment” surrounding these developments. Employing an ethnographic “method of listening,” Cramer furnishes thick description of the political language employed by rural Wisconsinites, and proceeds to develop an interpretive theory of “political resentment” that illuminates the reasons why lower-class citizens so strongly oppose public policies seeking to offset social and economic inequality. The book is important methodologically and politically. We have thus invited a range of social and political scientists to comment on the book as a work of political science and as a diagnosis of the current political moment.
Against the backdrop of Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement, we ask what the American politics subfield has to say about the political lives of communities subjugated by race and class. We argue that mainstream research in this subfield-framed by images of representative democracy and Marshallian citizenship-has provided a rich portrait of what such communities lack in political life. Indeed, by focusing so effectively on their political marginalization, political scientists have ironically made such communities marginal to the subfield's account of American democracy and citizenship. In this article, we provide a corrective by focusing on what is present in the political lives of such communities. To redress the current imbalance and advance the understandings of race and class in American politics, we argue that studies of the liberal-democratic "first face" of the state must be complemented by greater attention to the state's more controlling "second face." Focusing on policing, we seek to unsettle the mainstream of a subfield that rarely inquires into governmental practices of social control and the ways "race-class subjugated communities" are governed through coercion, containment, repression, surveillance, regulation, predation, discipline, and violence.
This book shows how ordinary Americans imagine their communities and the extent to which their communities' boundaries determine who they believe should benefit from the government's resources via redistributive policies. By contributing extensive empirical analyses to a largely theoretical discussion, it highlights the subjective nature of communities while confronting the elusive task of pinning down pictures in people's heads. A deeper understanding of people's definitions of their communities and how they affect feelings of duties and obligations provides a new lens through which to look at diverse societies and the potential for both civic solidarity and humanitarian aid. This book analyzes three different types of communities and more than eight national surveys. Wong finds that the decision to help only those within certain borders and ignore the needs of those outside rests, to a certain extent, on whether and how people translate their sense of community into obligations.
How did race affect the election that gave America its first African American president? This book offers some fascinating, and perhaps controversial, findings. Donald R. Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle assert that racism was in fact an important factor in 2008, and that if not for racism, Barack Obama would have won in a landslide. On the way to this conclusion, they make several other important arguments. In an analysis of the nomination battle between Obama and Hillary Clinton, they show why racial identity matters more in electoral politics than gender identity. Comparing the 2008 election with that of 1960, they find that religion played much the same role in the earlier campaign that race played in '08. And they argue that racial resentment-a modern form of racism that has superseded the old-fashioned biological variety-is a potent political force. © 2012 by Donald R. Kinder and Allison Dale-Riddle. All rights reserved.
Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system.The Unheavenly Chorusis the most comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America ever undertaken--and its findings are sobering. The Unheavenly Chorusis the first book to look at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests--membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created--representing more than thirty-five thousand organizations over a twenty-five-year period--this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities--and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice.The Unheavenly Chorusreveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.
“Geographic polarization”, the spatial concentration of “like” voting behavior, is a phenomenon closely related to “partisan polarization”, the intensification of diametrically ideological positions, is understudied, and is critical to the understanding of current American electoral behavior. To date, few studies have examined geographic polarization, and those that do have done so at the scales of regions, states, and counties. However, local influences operating within areas smaller than counties influence voting behavior and can produce geographic polarization. To address these scalar and methodological shortcomings, this research focuses on the smallest political units, precincts, using a case study of the Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Area. Presidential election data from 1976 through 2008 were collected by precincts, analyzed using spatial statistics, and mapped to examine evolving geographic polarization over this 32-year period. The results measured at the precinct-scale, suggest an increased concentration of partisan behavior and emphasize a local residential spatial pattern of geographic polarization.
Whether Americans have “sorted” into politically like-minded counties and to what extent is hotly debated by academic and journalists. This paper examines whether or not geographic sorting has occurred and why it has occurred using a novel, dynamic analysis. Our findings indicate that geographic sorting is on the rise, but that it is a very recent phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, counties tended to become more competitive, but by 1996 a pattern of partisan sorting had emerged and continued through the present. Results suggest this pattern is driven by Southern re-alignment and voting behavior in partisan stronghold counties. Lastly, we find evidence that migration can drive partisan sorting, but only accounts for a small portion of the change.
Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.
Why do people vote against their interests? Previous explanations miss something fundamental because they do not consider the work of group consciousness. Based on participant observation of conversations from May 2007 to May 2011 among 37 regularly occurring groups in 27 communities sampled across Wisconsin, this study shows that in some places, people have a class- and place-based identity that is intertwined with a perception of deprivation. The rural consciousness revealed here shows people attributing rural deprivation to the decision making of (urban) political elites, who disregard and disrespect rural residents and rural lifestyles. Thus these rural residents favor limited government, even though such a stance might seem contradictory to their economic self-interests. The results encourage us to consider the role of group consciousness-based perspectives rather than pitting interests against values as explanations for preferences. Also, the study suggests that public opinion research more seriously include listening to the public.
Contextual influences on public opinion have usually been conceived as the result of interpersonal discussion. More recently, some have suggested the locale provides a default source of political information in the absence of national-level information. I test an alternative mechanism for the influence of the local context: citizens who weigh the local interest in forming political attitudes. Using the 1993 Canadian Election Study merged to census and economic data down to the neighbourhood level, I find that very specific indicators of local interests influence issue-opinions and group feelings to which those interests are directly relevant. This influence is no stronger among those who discuss politics, nor among those lacking national political information. This is powerful circumstantial evidence that supports the hypothesis that the local interest is an important determinant of political attitudes.
This study combines sample survey data with aggregate census tract data to show that the neighborhood social context has an important effect upon the extent of individual political activity and the degree to which participation is structured by individual status. Higher status contexts often encourage participation among higher status individuals at the same time that they discourage participation among lower status individuals. As a result, political activity is more highly structured by individual status in higher status contexts than in lower status contexts. The effect of the social context seems most pronounced upon political activities which require social interaction, and alternative explanations based upon individual attributes do not satisfactorily account for the social context's effect.