Urban-Rural Residency, Place Identity, and Affective Polarization in the United States

Abstract

The US has seen an increase in affective polarization and negative partisanship over the past few decades. Among other factors, previous work suggests that politically homogeneous social contexts foster increased out-group partisan animosity. Given the concurrent widening urban-rural divide in political affiliation, we hypothesize that rural Republicans and urban Democrats will be more affectively polarized than their respective co-partisans. Using 2020 ANES data (N = 8280), we examine partisan in-group and out-group affect among Republicans and Democrats along the urban-rural spectrum, and by urban-rural place identity. In doing so, we find our expectation to be mostly true with some important caveats. First, rural (and rural-identifying) Republicans are cooler towards Democrats, while city and city-identifying Republicans feel warmer towards the opposing party. However, among Democrats, residential identity inconsistently predicts out-group partisan affect, while urban-rural residency does consistently predict negative out-group partisan affect. Urban-rural residency and place identity do not significantly predict partisan in-group affect among Republicans or Democrats, controlling for other factors. In other words, we find that partisan out-group affect varies by residency and place identity, in line with our expectations. We discuss these results in terms of partisan asymmetry, as well as their implications for mitigating negative partisanship.