Abstract
Previous work suggests rural identity often stems from direct experience living in a rural area, and that categorical group membership occurs before social identification. Puzzlingly, however, some U.S. survey takers not living in a rural area indicate that being rural is part of their identity. Using ANES data from 2020 (N = 8280) and 2019 (N = 3165), as well as original survey data from YouGov (N = 2615), I find that these non-rural rural identifiers are similar to rural identifiers in rural areas in terms of group-based affect and values, and are more right-leaning and populist than people who do not identify as rural (regardless of their location). Few consistent demographic differences between rural and non-rural rural identifiers exist. I conclude that: (1) rural identification has similar political, attitudinal, and demographic tendencies regardless of respondent location, and (2) non-rural rural identifiers have either been socialized in a rural area but moved away, or they personally affiliate with values and norms of rural areas despite not categorically being part of the group. This study has implications for the study of urban–rural political behavior, and for our understanding of identity and politics more broadly.
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Data Availability
Data and replication materials available on the Political Behavior Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YZSKAP.
Notes
Data and replication files can be found on the Political Behavior Harvard Dataverse here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YZSKAP
Response options include: Extremely important, very important, moderately important, slightly important, and not at all important.
Response options include: A great deal, quite a bit, somewhat, very little, not at all.
Half of respondents in the 2019 ANES received a different version of the question: Regardless of where you currently live, where do you feel you belong or fit in the best: cities, suburbs, small towns, or the countryside (rural areas)?
See Figure S6 in the Supplemental Material for the means and distributions of the continuous rural identity measures.
Note that the non-rural rural identifiers in the 2019 and 2020 ANES are not majority Republicans: 47–49% of the non-rural rural identifiers in these samples identify as Republican.
To better clarify the role of race in rural identity, the means for racial resentment and multiculturalism were also calculated for only white respondents. The relationships are largely similar, though scores were higher for racial resentment among whites compared to the full sample. See Figures S8 and S9 in the Supplement.
These results for racial resentment and multiculturalism were replicated for only white respondents. The results for racial resentment and multiculturalism are substantively the same for the whole sample versus only white respondents, though with slightly stronger coefficients. See Supplement Tables S7 and S17 for details.
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Funding for this study was generously provided by the Center for the Study of Political Psychology at the University of Minnesota.
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Lunz Trujillo, K. Feeling Out of Place: Who Are the Non-Rural Rural Identifiers, and Are They Unique Politically?. Polit Behav (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-024-09915-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-024-09915-z