(Related posts: Evaluating what makes a U.S. community urban, suburban or rural and Measuring community type in Europe, from big cities to country villages)

Partisanship in the United States has become increasingly associated with geography. Over the past two decades, people living in urban areas have become more likely to identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, while larger shares of those living in rural areas identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP. Democrats and Republicans also express strikingly different preferences for the kinds of communities they would like to live in.

But the partisan differences don’t end there. Even when they live in similar areas, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to describe their community as urban, while Republicans are more likely than Democrats to describe it as rural, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of a nationally representative sample of 13,200 U.S. adults. In this post, I’ll describe how we arrived at that conclusion and what it may mean for future research projects.

Background

It’s difficult to objectively classify communities as urban, suburban or rural. But our research has found that self-reported descriptions of community type line up well with several outside categorizations used by government agencies.

The starting point for our new analysis was a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, which asked respondents directly to describe their communities as urban, suburban or rural. Democrats and Republicans responded slightly differently to this question, even when they lived in the same types of places, as determined by a range of outside indicators of urbanity. These indicators included population density, distance from the nearest major city and the luminosity of a particular ZIP code — that is, the amount of light picked up in nighttime satellite images.

Across all of these measures, Democrats were consistently more likely than Republicans to use the denser descriptor (e.g., urban or suburban rather than rural), while Republicans were more likely to use the more sparse descriptor (e.g., suburban or rural rather than urban).

#political-science #rural #suburbs #politics #cities #data-science