Urban vs. Rural Representation and the Production of Policy in the States

• In Event: Issues in Representation and State Politics

Abstract

A core consequence of America’s mode of geographical representation is that rural interests are consistently over-represented in American democracy: ``…in most states the rural districts, constituting most of the area of the states, elected a majority of the state legislature even though they often possess a minority of the population…The rural vote could thus dictate what schools and roads were to be built, how local water supply was to be allotted, and what was to be taxed. It could veto urban renewal or mass transportation programs. In short, it could maintain a minority control over legislation” (Lipset and Raab 1970). More recently, in Why Cities Lose, Rodden (2019) argues that single-member, winner-take-all districts provide a mechanism for over-representing rural interests.

In this paper, we explore whether and how rural issues are prioritized at the state level, and what factors contribute to variation in the attention to them on the agenda. It is not obvious what types of issues or policies are rural, and which are urban. Thus, we initially explore how politicians frame such policies, alongside whether or not they are in step with voters’ preferences. Moreover, we examine whether differences in focus simply reflect party platforms, or whether there is meaningful variation left unexplained by partisanship.

1) We utilize a machine learning approach to measure the extent that state legislative proposals focus on ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ issues. Using this score, we estimate the proportion of the state legislative agenda that focuses on rural issues over time (2008 - 2018) and across states.

2) We then scale individual roll call votes on a rural to urban continuum and score legislators in terms of their support for rural legislation on this dimension.

3) Finally, we examine the associations between rural policy focus and a number of core political and economic factors that may explain it, including state legislative polarization (Shor and McCarty), (change in) partisan control of the legislature or governor’s partisanship, state legislative professionalization, state-level liberalism (Caughey and Warshaw), and additional population and geographic covariates (Rodden 2019).

Our findings speak to ongoing scholarly debates about the nature and sources of rural policy bias in the U.S., especially as a rural-urban divide appears increasingly to define the core cleavage dividing the two major parties.

Authors

• John Brooks, Auburn University, Montgomery

• John A. Henderson, Yale University