A Case of Misunderstood Identity: The Role of Rural Identity in Contemporary American Mass Politics

Abstract

Why do rural individuals tend to be more right-wing in the contemporary U.S.? I answer this question by treating rurality as a social identity – a psychological attachment to rural or small-town life that encompasses a particular set of values and worldview. Previous studies on rural identity by scholars such as Katherine Cramer or Arlie Hochschild argue that rural areas’ turn to the right – particularly to right-wing populism - is rooted in socioeconomic class-based concerns and anti-urban resentment. However, using national experimental and survey data, in contrast to the qualitative and ethnographic approaches typically used, I find that rural identifiers are not more likely to be lower- or working-class individuals or to express economic concerns. Further, rural social identity does not significantly differ between racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. In other words, politically speaking the white working class does not equal rural identity, something often and nearly automatically assumed in scholarly and popular accounts. Instead, I argue that the turn to the right has been due to rural identifiers’ intermediate status in the societal status hierarchy. Rural areas perceive a group status-based threat from two different out-groups, which map onto definitions of right-wing populism. The first out-group is experts and intellectuals, who rural residents believe favor lower-status groups, such as immigrants – a second out-group - allowing them to cut in line ahead of rural Americans to gain social, economic and political status. These two out-groups (intellectuals/experts and immigrants) are more likely to be urban residents but not necessarily, complicating the idea of anti-urban resentment being the primary feature of rural identity. In this work, I rely on several sources of quantitative data, including original survey data and experiments collected over three years, as well as data from the ANES (American National Election Studies), the CCES (Cooperative Congressional Election Studies), and county-level data.