Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-fg9bn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-13T20:01:31.863Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Race and White Rural Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 August 2021

Matthew D. Nelsen Open the ORCID record for Matthew D. Nelsen [Opens in a new window]  and
Christopher D. Petsko Open the ORCID record for Christopher D. Petsko [Opens in a new window]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The concept of rural consciousness has gained a significant amount of traction over the past several years, as evidenced by hundreds of citations and its inclusion within the most recent pilot of the ANES. However, many have questioned whether rural consciousness is appreciably different from racial prejudice. We assessed this issue by distributing a survey study to Wisconsinites living in rural and urban communities, and by examining the relationships between rural consciousness, racial resentment, and political attitudes in the ANES 2019 Pilot Study. The survey study revealed that participants living in rural parts of Wisconsin—unlike those living in urban parts—tended to think of city dwellers as possessing more negative attributes. In addition, the survey study revealed that rural participants thought of Milwaukeeans, specifically, as possessing stereotypically Black attributes. Moreover, this tendency was starker among those who scored higher on a measure of rural consciousness, suggesting that rural consciousness is related to racial stereotyping. Finally, in an analysis of the ANES 2019 Pilot Study, we found that rural consciousness correlated with racial resentment, and that controlling for racial resentment dramatically reduced the extent to which rural consciousness could predict political preferences (e.g., approval for Donald Trump). Thus, while white rural consciousness may not be reducible to racism, racism certainly plays a central role.

Information

Type
Article
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 19 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Race and Politics in America , December 2021 , pp. 1205 - 1218
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section.

Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JTLM7U

References

Acharya, Avidit, Blackwell, Matthew, and Sen, Maya. 2016. “The Political Legacy of American Slavery.” Journal of Politics 78 3): 621–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/686631CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alesina, Alberto, and Glaesar, Edward L.. 2004. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
American National Election Study (ANES). 2020. “2019 Pilot Study.” ANES | American National Election Studies (blog). (https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2019-pilot-study/).Google Scholar
Bartels, Larry. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.Google Scholar
Brown-Iannuzzi, Jazmin L., Dotsch, Ron, Cooley, Erin, and Payne, B. Keith. 2017. The Relationship between Mental Representations of Welfare Recipients and Attitudes toward Welfare. Psychological Science 28(1): 92–103.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Campbell, David E. 2006. Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Citrin, Jack, and Green, Donald Philip. 1990. “The Self-Interest Motive in American Public Opinion.” In Research in Micropolitics, Vol. 3, ed. Long, Samuel, 1–28. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar
Conn, Steven. 2014. Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cramer, Katherine J. 2012. “Putting Inequality in Its Place. Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective.” American Political Science Review 106(3): 517–32.Google Scholar
Cramer, Katherine J. 2016. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Darren. 2017. “A Discussion of Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” Perspectives on Politics 15(2): 525–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592717000287CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeSante, Christopher D., and Smith, Candis Watts. 2020. “Less Is More: A Cross-Generational Analysis of the Nature and Role of Racial Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Politics 82(3): 967–80. https://doi.org/10.1086/707490CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dotsch, Ron, and Todorov, Alexander. 2012. "Reverse Correlating Social Face Perception." Social Psychological and Personality Science 3(5): 562–71. DOI: 10.1177/1948550611430272CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enos, Ryan D. 2016. “What the Demolition of Public Housing Teaches Us about the Impact of Racial Threat on Political Behavior.” American Journal of Political Science 60(1): 123–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12156CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frank, Thomas. 2004. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. New York: Metropolitan Books.Google Scholar
Gaines, Dara, and Williams, Princess. N.d. “Race and Place: Racial Differences in the Political Attitudes of Southern Voters.” Working paper.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Natalie M., and Bodenhausen, Galen V.. 2021. “Gender Essentialism and the Mental Representation of Transgender Women and Men: A Multimethod Investigation of Stereotype Content.” Unpublished preprint. 10.31234/osf.io/t7yf9Google Scholar
Gilens, Martin. 2009. Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gimpel, James G., and Schuknecht, Jason E.. 2003. Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henry, P. J., and Sears, David O.. 2002. “The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale.” Political Psychology 23(2): 253–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/0162-895X.00281CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2018. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Huddy, Leonie, and Feldman, Stanley. 2009. “On Assessing the Political Effects of Racial Prejudice.” Annual Review of Political Science 12(1): 423–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jardina, Ashley. 2019. White Identity Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Key, V.O. Jr. 1949. Southern Politics. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.Google Scholar
Kinder, Donald R., and Sanders, Lynn M.. 1996. Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Mendelberg, Tali. 2001. The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mickey, Robert. 2015. Paths Out of Dixie: The Democratization of Authoritarian Enclaves in America’s Deep South, 1944–1972. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Miles, Matthew B., and Huberman, A. Michael. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis: An Expanded Sourcebook, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.Google Scholar
Ogorzalek, Thomas. 2018. The Cities on the Hill: How Urban Institutions Shaped National Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Oliver, J. Eric. 2010. The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multiethnic America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pacheco, Julianna Sandell. 2008. “Political Socialization in Context: The Effect of Political Competition on Youth Voter Turnout.” Political Behavior 30(4): 415–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, Christopher Sebastian. 2017. “The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.” Public Opinion Quarterly 81(2): 599–602. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfx012CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petsko, Christopher D., and Bodenhausen, Galen. 2019. “Racial Stereotyping of Gay Men: Can a Minority Sexual Orientation Erase Race?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 83:37–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petsko, Christopher D., Lei, Ryan F., Kunst, Jonas R., Bruneau, Emilie, and Kteily, Nour. 2020. “Blatant Dehumanization in the Mind’s Eye: Prevalent Even Among Those Who Explicitly Reject It?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000961CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quillian, Lincoln. 2006. “New Approaches to Understanding Racial Prejudice and Discrimination.” Annual Review of Sociology 32(1): 299–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sears, David O., and Henry, P. J.. 2003. “The Origins of Symbolic Racism.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85(2): 259–75. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.259CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stedman, Richard C. 2002. “Toward a Social Psychology of Place: Predicting Behavior from Place-Based Cognitions, Attitude, and Identity.” Environment and Behavior 34(5): 561–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916502034005001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
United States Department of Agriculture. n.d. “USDA ERS - What Is Rural?” Accessed March 2, 2021. (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rural-classifications/what-is-rural.aspx).Google Scholar
Valentino, Nicholas A., Hutchings, Vincent L., and White, Ismail K.. 2002. “Cues That Matter: How Political Ads Prime Racial Attitudes during Campaigns.” American Political Science Review 96(1): 75–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weaver, Vesla M. 2007. “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.” Studies in American Political Development 21(2): 230–65. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X07000211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Princess, and White, Brianna. 2017. “Black Rural Consciousness: How Location Influences African-American Political Behavior.” Presented at the 2018 National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS) Annual Meeting, Chicago, March 14–17.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Nelsen and Petsko Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JTLM7U
Link
Supplementary material: File

Nelsen and Petsko supplementary material

Nelsen and Petsko supplementary material

Download Nelsen and Petsko supplementary material(File)
File 48.6 KB