Issue Representation of Rural Voters in the States

• In Event: New Measurements for Studying Representation in State Politics

Abstract

Influential studies have demonstrated a troubling representation gap in American politics: elected officials are less responsive to the needs of racial and ethnic minorities, to the less affluent, and to sexual orientation minorities. Do geographic minorities also face a democratic deficit? Rural Americans are a numerical minority group facing considerable socioeconomic obstacles, but whose representation has been largely unexamined. This project is the first to quantitatively identify and explain the meaningful political differences between urban and rural citizens, across states and within parties. To measure mass preferences, I use an Item Response Theory analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey data from 2006 - 2018 that includes over 300,000 respondents to create new state-level measures of the rural divide within each party on social and economic policy dimensions. Then, I evaluate the extent to which state legislators represent rural voters relative to their non-rural counterparts. I pair the preferences of rural and non-rural voters with a bespoke data set of roll call votes on bills pertaining to issues covered in the CCES. Rural voters are less likely to have their preferences represented by legislative roll-call votes than non-rural voters, even when controlling for the rural proportion of the electorate.

Author

• Zoe Nemerever, Texas Tech University