Measuring the Rural Continuum in Political Science

Abstract

Recent accounts of American politics focus heavily on urban–rural gaps in political behavior. Rural politics research is growing but may be stymied by difficulties defining and measuring which Americans qualify as “rural.” We discuss theoretical and empirical challenges to studying rurality. Much existing research has been inattentive to conceptualization and measurement of rural geography. We focus on improving estimation of different notions of rurality and provide a new dataset on urban–rural measurement of U.S. state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2020, Political Behavior, 845–864) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2017, The Journal of Politics, 45–59) survey data to show rural self-identification is not well-captured with objective, place-based classifications, suggesting a rethinking of theoretical and empirical accounts of rural identity. We conclude with strategies for operationalizing rurality using readily available tools.

Sexuality and the city: The geography of LGBT political participation in the United States

“…Exploring patterns of LGBT participation across the urban-rural interface, we next find that LGBT identifying individuals living in urban areas exhibit higher rates of participation than those living in rural areas. Furthermore, we find that these results hold across multiple urban-rural classification schemes (Nemerever & Rogers 2021), thus lending empirical weight to contemporary accounts of the importance of urbanicity in engendering political participation.…”

“…Moreover, we have examined whether there are notable within-group differences in levels of participation by race and sex (H1b). We have also explored how patterns of LGBT participation vary across the urban-rural interface, and whether these findings held across subjective and objective definitions of rurality (Nemerever & Rogers 2021) (H2). Lastly, we have explored whether intragroup contact and mobilization fosters robust LGBT participation in America's largest metro areas (H3).…”

“…As a result, there is a need for a more nuanced test of the role of geographic context in shaping political participation among individuals with LGBT identities. Moreover, given the plethora of urban-rural classification schemes within the extant scholarship (Nemerever & Rogers 2021), it is also important that the hypothetical relationships between LGBT identity, urbanicity, and political participation hold across a variety of subjective and objective definitions of "urban" and "rural". These developments lead us to state our second hypothesis as:…”

“…However, since self-identification of urbanicity often to not correlate with objective placebased classifications (Nemerever & Rogers 2021), we also rely on objective measures on place-based indicators. Concretely we utilise the rural-urban continuum codes (RUCC) provided by the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.…”

“…Concretely we utilise the rural-urban continuum codes (RUCC) provided by the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. 12 The RUUC variable is a 9-point measure that categorically indicates the urbanicity of areas based on the population size of their metro area, degree of urbanization, and adjacency to a metro area (Nemerever & Rogers 2021) and ranges from "Metro area with 1 million inhabitants or more" to "Non-adjacent metro area with less than 2,500 inhabitants".…”