Anger from Afar: Place-Based Resentment and the 2018 Midterm Elections

• In Event: Local-level Policy and Resource Variation: Political Origins and Consequences

Abstract

Americans have always been divided – a consequence of the country’s extraordinary racial, political, and economic diversity. And increasingly, that divide has become quite literal, as people sort themselves not just across party, put also into different locales across the country. Drawing on a unique battery of questions from the 2018 CCES, we study the extent to which Americans feel anger and animosity in these spatial terms. We report results on how such acrimony correlated with vote choice in the 2018 midterm elections and how those feelings relate to other widely studied facets of political behavior such as partisanship, interest in politics, and racial resentment. We contend that an important aspect of modern American federalism is the fact that Americans continue to think in these highly spatial ways, even if traditional measures of public attitudes fail to take these place-based identities into account. Scholars argue that American political culture and identity is dominated by national issues and personalities, which challenges the traditional justifications for a federal system or political devolution. Place-based resentment is one way to measure the consequential ways in which the local still matters. To the extent that federalism captures that anger and puts it to work on behalf of the people, our work will help scholars broadly interested in federal systems understand another public basis for decentralized institutional designs.

This CCES battery is the first effort to quantitatively measure, using a representative national sample, feelings of place-based resentment in the American public. Building off of the insights of several scholars interested in place-based identities (Cramer 2016, Parker 2014, Key 1949), we describe our index of place-based resentment that captures sentiment regarding political inequality, deservingness, and appreciation for cultural and economic diversity across places. At a descriptive level, we document where feelings of place-based resentment are highest, and its association with other respondent-level attributes. We consider regional variation and report the measure's association with aspects of state and local government vitality. We show that such resentment feeds into the geographic polarization, as individuals increasingly live in places that are politically homogenous (Hopkins 2014, Bishop 2008). Importantly, we build off the extant literature to argue that both rural and urban individuals hold place-based identities, and resentment is not confined among rural respondents (Jacobs and Munis 2018). The reaction against centralized or distant institutions is not confined to just one part of the country, or just one party.

More generally, we use the results of the CCES sample to make several important contributions to the nascent study of place-based identities, American politics, and the rise of anti-establishment movements. First, we consider how the social construct of place interacts with other forms of resentment, particularly racial resentment. Qualitative accounts are quick to point out place's independent effects, and we provide empirical evidence to show that place-based resentment is distinct from other forms of prejudice. Second, we use the 2018 midterm elections as a prime opportunity for studying the political effects of place-based resentment. Rural anger is a hallmark of growing populist discontent in the American public, and the country's institutional structure, particularly federalism, allows political elites to exploit such feelings. We consider where feelings of place-based resentment were highest and how this contributed to the vote share of the two major political parties at the national and state levels.

Authors

• Nicholas F. Jacobs, Colby College

• Kal Munis