Replication Data for: Measuring the Rural Continuum in Political Science

Recent accounts of American politics focus heavily on urban-rural gaps in political behavior. Rural politics research is growing but may be stymied by difficulties defining and measuring which Americans qualify as “rural.” We discuss theoretical and empirical challenges to study- ing rurality. Much existing research has been inattentive to conceptualization and measurement of rural geography. We focus on improving estimation of different notions of rurality and provide a new dataset on urban-rural measurement of US state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2019) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2016) survey data to show rural self-identification is not well-captured with objective, place-based classifications, suggesting a rethinking of theoretical and empirical accounts of rural identity. We conclude with strategies for operationalizing rurality using readily available tools.

近年来有关美国政治的相关研究，大多聚焦于政治行为中的城乡差异。乡村政治研究虽呈增长态势，但因难以界定和衡量哪些美国民众可被归类为“乡村人口”而可能遭遇瓶颈。本文探讨了研究“乡村性”（rurality）所面临的理论与实证双重挑战。现有多数研究均未充分关注乡村地理的概念界定与量化测度。本文致力于优化针对不同乡村性概念的测算方法，并提供一套全新数据集，用于测度美国州立法选区的城乡属性。我们通过两项乡村政治研究，对构念效度与测度方法展开严谨检验：其一，我们复刻了Flavin与Franko（2019）的研究，以此证明实证结果对乡村人口的测度方式较为敏感；其二，我们借助Mummolo与Nall（2016）的调查数据，发现基于客观地域的分类方式无法有效捕捉民众的乡村身份自我认同，这提示我们亟需重新审视乡村身份的理论与实证研究框架。最后，本文提出了利用现有便捷工具实现乡村性操作化的可行策略。