Identity and Political Behavior across the Urban-Rural Spectrum

• In Event: Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the ANES: New Directions

Abstract

Many countries, including the United States, have seen increased urban-rural division in political attitudes over the past few decades, and has accordingly gained greater scholarly and popular attention in recent years. As such, academic literature seeks to understand what underlies this division -- that is, how much it is based on demographic and partisan sorting, economic concerns, or cultural and identity-based factors. We examine this theme in the US context over a series of several papers. We rely on original survey data as well as American National Election Studies data from the 2020 wave and the 2019 pilot, which have a unique set of items on urban-rural residence, identity, resentment/consciousness, and affect. From these various studies, we conclude that most urban-rural differences in political attitudes do not hold up when controlling for other factors, or they are substantially weakened. However, we find that conceptualizing urban and rural as identities, which are loosely affiliated with physical location, helps explain a substantial portion of urban-rural division across a variety of political attitudes and behaviors, including intergroup affect, policy attitudes, political values, vote choice, and partisanship. In other words, urban-rural political division -- at least how it is expressed by Americans -- is mostly apparent in those who feel that being a rural person or a metro person is a significant part of how they see themselves.

Authors

• Kristin Kay Lunz Trujillo, University of South Carolina

• Jennifer Lin, Northwestern University