Replication Data for: "The Heterogeneous Associations of Rural Consciousness and Political Preferences"

Abstract: Although rural Americans’ sense of place-based consciousness has been an influential explanation for their right-wing politics, recent studies have often found rural consciousness is weakly associated with Republican partisanship and conservatism. Analyzing the 2020 American National Election Study (n=3,154) and reanalyzing three recent studies of rural consciousness (ntotal=3,203), I show this incongruity is explained by heterogeneity in how rural consciousness is associated with political preferences. For politically engaged Americans, rural consciousness is associated with right-wing partisan-ideological identification and economic conservatism, as theories of rural consciousness predict. For disengaged Americans, however, rural consciousness is associated with left-wing partisan-ideological identification and economic policy liberalism. I contend these heterogeneous associations are consistent with politically engaged rural Americans subordinating their instrumental (material) interests relative to symbolic (identity-based) ones. In turn, how rural consciousness translates into political preferences is contingent on rural citizens’ weighing of instrumental and symbolic interests, which push them in opposite directions in terms of political identity and economic policy preferences.