Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-03T09:34:39.329Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are rural attitudes just Republican?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2023

Jennifer Lin Open the ORCID record for Jennifer Lin [Opens in a new window]  and
Kristin Lunz Trujillo Open the ORCID record for Kristin Lunz Trujillo [Opens in a new window]
Jennifer Lin
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Kristin Lunz Trujillo*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA
*
Corresponding author: Kristin Lunz Trujillo; Email: lunztruk@mailbox.sc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Rural residents are typically construed as being more conservative than urban residents. Is this true, or do rural residents carry unique interests from Republicans or conservatives? Using the 2020 ANES, we compare responses from 22 national issues by interacting urban and rural residency with Republican and Democrat identification. We find that issue preferences are partisan, not place-based: rural Democrats resemble their urban counterparts and urban Republicans resemble their rural counterparts, rather than rural areas specifically being more Republican. However, rural Democrats are more conservative than urban Democrats on issues relating to immigration, transgendered people in the military, and income inequality. These results point to partisan nationalization in issue stances, with exceptions, and that rural is not always Republican.

Keywords

ideologypartisanshippolitical attitudespolitical geographyurban–rural
Type
Research Note
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , First View , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of EPS Academic Ltd

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Achen, C and Bartels, L (2017) Democracy for Realists. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Armstrong, D, Lucas, J and Taylor, Z (2022) The urban–rural divide in Canadian federal elections, 1896–2019. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 55, 84–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, B (2008) The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing US Apart. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Borwein, S and Lucas, J (2023) Municipal identity and city interests. Political Behavior 45, 877–896.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, JR and Enos, RD (2021) The measurement of partisan sorting for 180 million voters. Nature Human Behaviour 5, 998–1008.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cramer, KJ (2016) The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darmofal, D and Strickler, R (2016) Bringing together spatial demography and political science: Reexamining the big sort. In Recapturing Space: New Middle-Range Theory in Spatial Demography, New York, NY: Springer, pp. 139–156.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doherty, C, Kiley, J and Asheer, N (2020) In a Politically Polarized Era, Sharp Divides in Both Partisan Coalitions. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.Google Scholar
Ellis, C and Stimson, J (2012) The operational-symbolic disconnect. In Ideology in America. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fennelly, K and Federico, C (2008) Rural residence as a determinant of attitudes toward US immigration policy. International Migration 46, 151–190.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ford, R and Jennings, W (2020) The changing cleavage politics of Western Europe. Annual Review of Political Science 23, 295–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudge, D (2020) Eographic differences of individual views toward the role of government. American Review of Politics 37, 71–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gimpel, JG, Lovin, N, Moy, B and Reeves, A (2020) The urban–rural gulf in American political behavior. Political Behavior 42, 1343–1368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D (2018) The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huijsmans, T (2023) Place resentment in “the places that don't matter”: explaining the geographic divide in populist and anti-immigration attitudes. Acta Politica 58, 285–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, K and Scala, D (2022) The rural–urban continuum and the 2020 US presidential election. The Forum 20, 229–255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, J and Lunz Trujillo, K (2022) Urban–rural differences in non-voting political behaviors. Political Research Quarterly 76, 851–868.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lunz Trujillo, KL (2021) A Case of Misunderstood Identity: The Role of Rural Identity in Contemporary American Mass Politics (Ph.D. thesis), Order No. 28718499. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.Google Scholar
Lunz Trujillo, K (2022a) Feeling out of place: who are the non-rural rural identifiers, and are they unique politically?. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lunz Trujillo, K (2022b) Rural identity as a contributing factor to anti-intellectualism in the US. Political Behavior 44, 1509–1532.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, G and Webster, S (2020) Does residential sorting explain geographic polarization?. Political Science Research and Methods 8, 215–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mason, L (2018) Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, R (2019) Cosmopolitan immigration attitudes in large European cities: contextual or compositional effects?. American Political Science Review 113, 456–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moskowitz, D (2021) Local news, information, and the nationalization of us elections. American Political Science Review 115, 114–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mummolo, J and Nall, C (2017) Why partisans do not sort: the constraints on political segregation. The Journal of Politics 79, 45–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munis, BK (2022) US over here versus them over there…literally: measuring place resentment in American politics. Political Behavior 44, 1057–1078.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelsen, MD and Petsko, CD (2021) Race and white rural consciousness. Perspectives on Politics 19, 1205–1218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nemerever, Z and Rogers, M (2021) Measuring the rural continuum in political science. Political Analysis 29, 267–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Popp, E and Rudolph, T (2011) A tale of two ideologies: explaining public support for economic interventions. Journal of Politics 73, 808–820.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodden, JA (2019) Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban–Rural Political Divide. UK: Hachette.Google Scholar
Scala, D and Johnson, K (2017) Political polarization along the rural–urban continuum? The geography of the presidential vote, 2000–2016. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 672, 162–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, J (n.d.) Rural identity and LGBTQ public opinion in the United States. OSF preprint.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Lin and Lunz Trujillo Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2MZE9D
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Lin and Lunz Trujillo supplementary material

Lin and Lunz Trujillo supplementary material

Download Lin and Lunz Trujillo supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 232.2 KB