Why Does Place Matter More (Politically) to Rural People? Political Communication, Fomenting Place Resentment, and Urban Collective Narcissism

Increasingly scholars have identified that place – via attachments, identities, or attitudes – appears to matter significantly more for rural political psychology than for the political psychologies of urbanites and suburbanites. While there’s more evidence of this asymmetry within the United States than for any other country, it is a phenomenon that is seemingly widespread throughout the western, post-industrial, democratic world. But why is this the case? In this paper, we identify and discuss two possible explanations: (1.) that asymmetries in rural-centric vs. urban-centric communications constitute a “supply side” cause, and (2.) that existing research has focused exclusively on attitudes that theory suggests should be disproportionately meaningful to rural subpopulations while overlooking other potential place-based attitudes that prove relevant to explaining non-rural public opinion. Ultimately, we find evidence in favor of both explanations. Regarding communication, we find that rural-centric political messages are more common than urban-centric communications and that experimentally manipulated urban-centric communications can foment place-based resentment among urbanites. Additionally, we introduce and investigate, for the first time, “place-based collective narcissism” and demonstrate its political relevance for non-rural Americans.