Depopulation and the Polling Booth: Political Participation in a Changing Rural America

• In Event: 40251 - Political Engagement

Abstract

How do communities affected by population loss engage with politics? A robust literature has focused upon polarization between urban and rural America, centering economic anxieties and cultural divisions as explanatory variables for the spread of right-wing perspectives among rural populations. This project asks a more foundational question: how do relationships to politics at large change when populations sizes decline? Specifically, how is depopulation associated with varying levels of political participation, and how does this association differ between the urban and the rural? Using US Census Data and county-level voting returns, I survey trends in population loss and voting participation rates across the US between 1970-2020, controlling for economic context and racial composition. I theorize several pathways through which population loss may be affecting political participation, including status threat and declining social capital. The results aim to speak to the impact of changing demographic circumstances on the vitality of political community in diverse contexts across the US, providing insight to the circumstances which are most (and least) conducive to engagement with democratic politics.

Author

• Meghann Norden-Bright, University of Wisconsin-Madison