You’re Not From Here!: The Consequences of Urban and Rural Identities

Rural Identity as a Contributing Factor to Anti-Intellectualism in the U.S.

“…This work further suggests that not only are there rural social identifiers, but also that this rural in-group feels threatened by and demeaned by others relating to urban areas or to people with more power and status. Lyons and Utych ( 2021 ) find that rural and urban areas are affectively polarized against one another; this affective dimension is crucial to the existence of a social identity. Effective political appeals to certain groups also point to the existence of a social identity group; Jacobs and Munis ( 2019 ) find that rural imagery and rural-based appeals change average candidate evaluations for rural respondents.…”

“…Another way is to distrust or create a sense of otherness from those seen as threatening to the in-group. Although urban areas are typically the out-group of rural areas in academic literature (Cramer, 2016 ; Lyons & Utych, 2021 ; Munis, 2020 ), which groups are considered “urban” may also have implications for what rural areas view as out-groups. For instance, Nelsen and Petsko ( 2021 ) find that white rural Wisconsinites see the typical urban resident in the state as relatively non-white.…”

Is the urban-rural divide affectively polarised? Comparative evidence from nine European countries

“…Drawing on insights from the minimal group paradigm (Billig and Tajfel, 1973), we distinguish place-based affect from the related, but different concept of place-based resentment (Cramer, 2016), suggesting that the affective component shared by both concepts can be relevant for politics on its own. Focusing on the urban-rural divide, as one of the most prominent geographic cleavages (e.g., Cramer, 2012Cramer, , 2016Jacobs and Munis, 2019;Lyons and Utych, 2021;Munis, 2020;Wuthnow, 2018), we argue that like and dislike between cities and the countryside structures voting behaviour along the cosmopolitan-nationalist divide (De Vries, 2018;Ford and Jennings, 2020;Marks, 2009, 2018;Kriesi et al, 2012).…”

“…Inspired by the literature on affective polarization, we call this phenomenon place-based affect, formally defining it as an individual's propensity to like people from their own place more than people from a respective geographic out-group. Acknowledging that there are multiple geographic divides that could be of interest, such as the centre-periphery divide (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967) or country-specific cleavages, for instance, between Northern and Southern Italy (González, 2011), in this study we focus on the urban-rural divide as a geographic fault line that has gained increasing prominence in recent years (e.g., Cramer, 2012Cramer, , 2016Jacobs and Munis, 2019;Lyons and Utych, 2021;Munis, 2020;Wuthnow, 2018). In this regard, when it comes to place-based affect running along the urban-rural divide, we investigate the political consequences of in-group/out-group antagonisms between urbanites and ruralites.…”

“…More specifically, from the viewpoint of this literature, the interplay between a feeling of belonging to a place and a perception that this place is not getting its fair share sharpens political conflict between different geographically defined social groups, and serves as a "lens" that helps people to think about politics (Cramer, 2012, p.518). In this sense, this line of literature argues that place-based identities become politically relevant if they intersect with geographic grievances that induce conflict between urban and rural residents (Lyons and Utych, 2021;Munis, 2020). 1 Place-based affect, in contrast, can be relevant to politics without reference to such grievances.…”