Public Policy and the Rural-Urban Political Divide

• In Event: Mobilization, Countermobilization, and Backlash in the U.S. Policy State

Abstract

In recent decades, America’s long-standing North-Sound political cleavage has been eclipsed by a new place-based division: the rural-urban divide. As late as the 1990s, voters in rural counties supported Republican candidates by a mere 2 percentage points more than their urban peers, but the gap has widened ever since, to 10 percentage points in 2000 and a full 21 points in 2020. Meanwhile, Americans' lives have been affected in new and different ways by public policy, as it relates to federal social welfare transfers, the expansion of the carceral state, or prolonged military interventions abroad. Federal spending on social transfers, for example, has increased dramatically across the nation, but it has paradoxically done so disproportionately in rural areas, where residents are more likely to support elected officials who favor cutting such programs. Meanwhile, trade liberalization has increased the economic vulnerability of millions through increased competition and threat of job loss.

In this paper, we explore how public policy has influenced the growing rural-urban political divide in recent decades. We do so by merging individual- and county-level data on public opinion and political behavior place-based measures proxying the presence of social and carceral policy, as well as exposure to trade competition and war casualties. We examine how such policies have shaped political attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, including presidential vote choice, across America’s growing regional divisions.

Authors

• Trevor Brown, Cornell University

• Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University