How does partisan identity impact rural identity? While prior research has found associations between rural identity and partisanship, few studies experimentally validate this relationship. Using two separate experiments–a partisan prime and a conjoint–we explore the relationship between rural identity and partisan identity to show that when partisan identity is in conflict with rural identity, the partisan identity dominates. Our findings indicate that the relationship between partisan identity and rural identity is asymmetrical for Democrats and Republicans. For Republicans, rural identity often reinforces their partisan identity. However, for Democrats, rural identity is subordinate to their partisan identity. That is, Democrats weaken their rural identity when primed to think about their partisan identity and Democrats’ partisan identity supersedes the expression of a rural identity when rating hypothetical candidates. Overall, when rural and small town Democrats are thinking in a partisan mindset, their rural identity becomes less salient.
BarberM.PopeJ. C. (2019). Does party Trump ideology? Disentangling party and ideology in America. American Political Science Review, 113(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055418000795
3.
BrauerM.CarpenterS. M.NiedenthalP. M. (2020). Did rural resentment of government employees elect Donald Trump?Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties, 32(2), 469–488. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2020.1844217
4.
CramerK. (2012). Putting inequality in its place: Rural consciousness and the power of perspective. American Political Science Review, 106(3), 517–532. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23275431
5.
CramerK. (2016). The politics of resentment: Rural consciousness in Wisconsin and the rise of scott walker. The University of Chicago Press.
6.
DawkinsR.NemereverZ.MunisB. K.VervilleF. (2023). Place, race, and the geographic politics of white grievance. Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-023-09897-4
7.
DiamondE. P. (2020). The influence of identity salience on framing effectiveness: An experiment. Political Psychology, 41(6), 1133–1150. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12669
8.
DiamondE. P. (2021). Understanding rural identities and environmental policy attitudes in America. Perspectives on Politics, 21(2), 502–518. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592721002231
9.
EganP. (2019). Identity as dependent variable: How Americans shift their identities to align with their politics. American Journal of Political Science, 64(3), 699–716. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12496
HorwitzS. N.HuddyL.MasonL. (2016). Political identity convergence: On being latino, becoming a democrat, and getting active. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2(3), 205–228. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2016.2.3.11
12.
HuddyL. (2015). Group identity and political cohesion. In ScottR. A.KosslynS. M.BuchmannM. (Eds.), Emerging trends in the social and behavioral sciences: An interdisciplinary, searchable, and linkable resource. Wiley Online Library. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0155
13.
IyengarS.KrupenkinM. (2018). Partisanship as social identity; implications for the study of party polarization. The Forum, 16(1), 23–45. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2018-0003
14.
JacobsN. F.MunisB. K. (2022). Place-based resentment in contemporary U.S. Elections: The individual sources of America’s urban-rural divide. Political Research Quarterly, 76(3), 1102–1118. https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221124864
15.
JacobsN. F.SheaD. M. (2024). The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America.Columbia University Press.
16.
JadhavA. (2021). Was it rural populism? Returning to the country, “catching up,” and trying to understand the Trump vote. Journal of Rural Studies, 82, 553–569. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.10.008
17.
JardinaA. (2019). White identity politics. Cambridge studies in public opinion and political psychology. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108645157
18.
KlarS. (2013). The influence of competing identity primes on political preferences. The Journal of Politics, 75(4), 1108–1124. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613000698
19.
KlarS. (2014). Partisanship in a social setting. American Journal of Political Science, 58(3), 687–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12087
20.
LinJ.Lunz TrujilloK. (2023). Are rural attitudes just Republican?Political Science Research and Methods, 12(3), 675–684. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2023.48
Lunz TrujilloK. (2022a). Feeling out of place: Who are the non-rural rural identifiers, and are they unique politically?APSA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.33774/apsa-2022-bj5dq
23.
Lunz TrujilloK. (2022b). Rural identity as a contributing factor to anti-intellectualism in the U.S. Political Behavior, 44(3), 1509–1532. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09770-w
24.
LyonsJ.UtychS. M. (2021). You’re not from here!: The consequences of urban and rural identities. Political Behavior, 45(1), 75–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-021-09680-3
MettlerS.BrownT. (2022). The growing rural-urban political divide and democratic vulnerability. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 699(1), 130–142. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162211070061
27.
MunisK. (2020). Us over here versus them over there, literally: Measuring place consciousness in American politics. Political Behavior, 44(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09641-2
NemereverZ.RogersM. (2021). Measuring the rural continuum in political science. Political Analysis, 29(3), 267–286. https://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2020.47
TajfelH.TurnerJ. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In HatchM. J.SchultzM. (Eds.), Organizational identity (pp. 56–66). Oxford University Press.
35.
TrujilloK. L.CrowleyZ. (2022). Symbolic versus material concerns of rural consciousness in the United States. Political Geography, 96, Article 102658. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102658
WuthnowR. (2018). The left behind. Princeton University Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
