Rural Resentment and the Politics of Higher Education

• In Event: Political Economy of Policy Making in the United States

Abstract

A well-documented feature of American populismis rural resentment (Cramer, 2016; Wuthnow, 2018). Rural citizens are more likely to believe that opportunities for economic success are unevenly divided across rural and non-rural places and that government interventions to equalize opportunity or redistribute after the realization of unequal outcomes are disproportionately targeted toward non-rural areas. In this paper, we argue that an important source of rural resentment is the violation of equal treatment democratic norms in the provision of higher education, one of the main policy instruments that increase equality of opportunity and for which there are broadly favorable views across partisan divides (Pew 2018).We argue that technological change and globalization have increased the value of the provision of higher education over time making inequalities in its geographic distribution an important source of political conflict. We evaluate this argument in two ways. First, we construct a dataset recording geo-coded state spending for every higher education institution in the United States from 1987to 2015. We use these measures to construct county and commuting zone-level measures of the provision of higher education per adult citizen ages 18 to 30. Employing cross-sectional and panel data analyses, we show a strong negative correlation between higher education provision at the county and commuting zone level, controlling for state averages, and votes for Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Tea Party Republican candidates in the 2010 U.S. Congressional election, which we use as proxies for the strength of populism in a given locality. We further document that these inequalities cleave strongly across rural and non-rural areas. These correlations may not, however, be convincing evidence of a causal relationship between departures from equal treatment in the provision of higher education and rural resentment and populist backlash because there are many hard to observe and measure characteristics of places receiving relatively more or less higher education provision which may also contribute to resentment and populism. To provide more credible evidence of a causal relationship, our second empirical strategy takes advantage of the fact that the 2008 fiscal crisis had a differential effect on departures from equal treatment in states with higher and lower income tax elasticities. We use this relationship to construct a Bartik shift-share instrument variable for relative spending on higher education at the country and commuting zone level. We then estimate the effect of higher education spending inequalities on votes for Donald Trump in the2016 U.S. presidential election and Tea Party Republican candidates in the 2010 U.S. Congressional election to assess the effect of violations of equal treatment on resentment and the strength of populism.

Authors

• Kenneth F. Scheve, Stanford University

• David Stasavage, New York University

• Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon, Harvard University