Putting Inequality in Its Place PDF Notes

Putting Inequality in Its Place: Rural Consciousness and the Power of Perspective

Introduction

The article addresses the question of why people vote against their own interests.
It challenges existing explanations by considering the role of group consciousness.
The study is based on observations of conversations among groups in Wisconsin from 2007 to 2011.
It introduces the concept of "rural consciousness," where people have a place-based identity intertwined with a perception of deprivation.
Rural residents attribute deprivation to decisions made by urban political elites who disregard rural residents and lifestyles.
This leads rural residents to favor limited government, even if it contradicts their economic self-interests.
The study suggests researchers should consider group consciousness-based perspectives, rather than pitting interests against values.

The Debate on Voting Against Interests

Scholars have long puzzled over why people vote against their own interests.
Thomas Frank argued that the Republican Party succeeds by distracting voters with social issues.
Larry Bartels countered that voters do care about economic issues but misunderstand distributive issues.
This article offers an alternative: some people understand politics through a social identity linked to distributive justice.
Economic interests are intertwined with values, and inequality is understood through specific perspectives.

Group Consciousness

Group consciousness involves identifying with a social group and politicizing that identity through perceived relative deprivation.
Deprivation is seen as the fault of the political system, not individual behavior.
Group consciousness frames understandings and fosters negative perceptions of outgroups.
Previous research has focused on categories like race or gender.
This study reveals the importance of rural consciousness, which has been overlooked.

Rural Consciousness

This study defines rural consciousness as:
- Ideas about one's geographic place and its power and resource allocation relative to other places.
- Beliefs about rural people's values and lifestyles, emphasizing hard work.
- A lens for thinking about oneself, others, and public affairs.
- Social identification with rural residents and a perception of distributive injustice toward this group.
- Perception of deprivation relative to metropolitan areas.
- Attribution of injustice to political elites in urban areas.
- Orientations toward government, including political trust (judgments about past performance and future expectations).
- Political alienation, including a rejection of political norms and goals and a sense of political isolation, and low external efficacy (belief that government is unresponsive).
This study of rural consciousness connects interests and preferences, revealing how place-based identity intertwines with perceived deprivation.
Rural residents view deprivation as the fault of urban political elites and favor limited government.

Methodology & Conceptualization of Opinion

The study aims to understand political understanding in terms of what people have, not what they lack.
It uses an ethnographic approach, investigating how people make sense of politics in everyday life.
The research involved studying public affairs conversations among 37 groups in 27 Wisconsin communities over four years.
It conceptualizes public opinion as understandings created together within these groups.
Political actors often use face-to-face group conversations to gauge constituent opinions, especially at lower government levels.
The study seeks to explain how people's perspectives lead them to see certain stances as natural and right.
It adopts an interpretivist goal of understanding individuals' understandings as a prerequisite for adequate explanation.
The article explains the contours of rural consciousness and contrasts it with urban and suburban conversations.
This is a constitutive analysis (examining what rural consciousness consists of) rather than a causal analysis.
The purpose is to examine what rural consciousness is and what it does, organizing considerations of resource distribution, decision-making authority, and values.
This study is of political understanding and group consciousness, conducted in Wisconsin but not of Wisconsin.

Contrasting with Positivist Approaches

A positivist study might measure identities and orientations to government and include them as independent variables in a multivariate analysis.
However, this assumes that values on one independent variable move independently of the other.
The object of study here is the perspectives that people use to arrive at a position, not a position on an attitude scale.
The goal is to understand how people themselves combine identities and attitudes, constituting perceptions of themselves to make sense of politics.
The goal is to show that rural consciousness structures how people think about politics, screening out certain considerations and making others obvious.
Explaining involves identifying and clarifying the resources and reasoning processes people use to make sense of politics.
The study suggests a revision of how we study the gap between interests and votes and an expansion of our methods for studying public opinion.
There is a need for scholars to listen to the people they study and discover the categories they use to understand politics.
This investigation was conducted in the hope that positivist and constitutive approaches can inform one another.
The study complements positivist analyses by generating hypotheses, suggesting new measures, illuminating existing puzzles, and confirming previous findings.

Place and Politics

The research builds upon the historical understanding that rural vs. urban distinctions matter for public opinion.
Previous research on how location matters has focused on:
- Composition effects: How other social categories affect behavior.
- Demographic compositions: Differences across geographic areas resulting in differences in social structure and culture.
- Class conflict: The rural/urban divide as a label for underlying class conflict.
- Competition over material resources: The rural/urban divide arising from competition.
This article shows how place consciousness itself serves as a perspective through which people interpret politics.
It argues that the significance for politics of being a rural resident is not just demographic differences or different experiences.
It also goes beyond the argument that rural/urban divides are manifestations of class conflict or conflict over material resources.
Consciousness of being a rural resident itself can make preferences for limited government obvious, appropriate, and expected even among low-income people.

Understanding as Categorization

Understanding why rural consciousness is important requires recognizing the psychology behind understanding and the importance of place.
People categorize when making sense of the world.
Parsing people into "us" and "them" is a powerful act of categorization.
Social group identities serve as reference points for social comparison and boundaries of allegiance.
They help guide notions of appropriate behavior/attitudes and influence what messages people pay attention to.
Social group identities influence political attitudes and behaviors.
Group consciousness literature shows that social identities imbued with distributive justice are crucial for political behavior.
Place-based group consciousness is vital because place is a tool for understanding many aspects of life.
We interpret ourselves and others with reference to specific places.
One of the first questions we ask is, "Where are you from?"
Although social science assumes distinctions between places are fading, modern life has not erased the importance of place.
It may have increased the need to draw boundaries and define geographic communities.

The Importance of Place

Place matters for political understanding because representation and resources are allocated by geography.
Perceptions of distributive justice are likely related to place, especially among those who feel deprived.
Group identities are more salient among minority groups, and rural residents compose only 17% of the U.S. population.
The term "rural" carries great meaning for those who identify with it.
Conflicts between rural and urban areas within states are intensifying, suggesting more sensitivity to distributive inequalities.
In Wisconsin, rural/urban divides have been part of politics for at least a century.
Figures like Joe McCarthy and Bob LaFollette tapped into rural skepticism of distant institutions.
Wisconsin's apportionment of state legislative seats by population since 1954 gives urban Democrats more representation.
Since the mid-20th century, Wisconsin has largely reflected the national map of blue cities and red rural areas.
Democratic success in metropolitan areas is due to stronger union organizing.
Rural areas may retain an anti-Democratic Party stance from World War I and World War II, influenced by German heritage and isolationism.
Wisconsin is a fruitful place for examining rural consciousness because rural areas are more volatile than the correlation between rural and Republican suggests.
The state has open primaries, nonpartisan municipal elections, and lenient voter registration laws, reflecting its confidence in the independent citizen.
The fact that most of Wisconsin's population lives outside the two metropolitan areas makes the rural areas a political battleground.

Defining Rural

There is no single way to define a rural area.
Residents often classify their communities differently from analysts.
This study focuses on residents’ perceptions of their communities and how they compare to others.
The important distinction is metro vs. nonmetro (major urban area vs. other areas).
A place is considered rural if the group members regard it as nonmetro. This definition is based on self-identification rather than a rigid demographic or geographic definition. This focus on perception is key to understanding the role of rural consciousness.

Methods of the Study

The study originated as an investigation of social class identity in political understanding.
Wisconsin was chosen for its economic heterogeneity, likely providing a variety of perceptions of social class.
The prominence of rural consciousness emerged during fieldwork.
Sites were selected using a stratified purposeful approach, categorizing Wisconsin counties into eight regions based on various factors.
Municipalities within each region were chosen purposefully and randomly for additional variation.
Groups were identified through University of Wisconsin Extension educators and local newspaper editors.
The suggested groups met regularly and informally in gathering places.
The researcher spent time with multiple groups in each municipality for socioeconomic and gender variation.
Each group was visited between one and five times from May 2007 to May 2011.
Pseudonyms are used to protect the participants' confidentiality, and communities are not identified by name (except for Madison and Milwaukee).
Access was gained by greeting members, explaining the researcher's role and purpose, and asking for permission to record conversations.
Participants were given tokens of appreciation.
The initial question was, "What are the big concerns for people in this community?"
The studied groups were predominantly male, non-Hispanic white, and of retirement age.
There was socioeconomic variation across groups, from people near homelessness to wealthy business owners.
Groups were categorized as lower-income or upper-income based on stated occupations.
The participants may be more attentive to current events, more talkative, and have larger social networks than the average person.
Many participants were opinion leaders in their communities.
The researcher's presence altered conversations, increasing the salience of place identity for rural groups.
The interview protocol generated talk about topics likely to invoke economic considerations and social class references.
Data analysis included data displays and adjustments to collection to test conclusions.
The researcher looked for patterns across groups, displayed data in a matrix, wrote memos, and validated conclusions through additional evidence and considering spurious relations.
Detailed and verbal reports of results were given to the groups for feedback.

Empirical Analysis and Elements of Rural Consciousness

Wisconsin has two main metropolitan centers (Milwaukee and Madison) and the "Outstate" area often called "Up North."
Rural residents' identification as people living in a rural area was central to how they talked about themselves and current events.
Consistent with group consciousness, identification as a rural resident was more than geographic; it included perceptions of inequalities of power, differences in values, and inequalities in resources.

Power

The rural vs. urban lens structured ideas about which areas had the ability to force actions (definition of power, Dahl 1961) and control the agenda (Bachrach & Baratz 1963).
Rural areas claimed major decisions were made in urban areas by urban people and communicated outward.
Madison was the main target, as it is the state capital.
Authority flowed out from Madison and Milwaukee, exercised without regard for rural concerns.
Half the nonmetro groups felt public officials were dismissive of nonmetro people.
These antigovernment perspectives were rooted in place identities; officials had little experience with or understanding of rural life.
The observed rural consciousness contained attitudes of trust, alienation, and efficacy concerning institutions like the state university and the government.
Identification as rural was equated with disenfranchisement from state power.
Even higher-income people in nonmetro areas saw themselves as of a lower status than upper-income people in the metro areas.
Many nonmetro groups assumed decision-makers held negative stereotypes of rural residents (hicks, bumpkins).
Groups also ridiculed urbanites' lack of common sense, priding themselves on understanding the land and earning a living manually.
This rural consciousness conveyed pride in the ingroup and a sense of relative deprivation.
Rural residents' resentment of cities wasn't a perception that cities were idyllic; they preferred their lifestyles to the fast pace and lack of rootedness of city living.

Values and Lifestyles

The identification as rural included claims that rural people have values and lifestyles distinct from metro areas.
Rural residents talked about themselves as a particular kind of people.
In a small hamlet in the northwestern part of the state, a group described themselves as poor and lacking in jobs.
They viewed health care as part of a crisis of inequality, where urban decision-makers were out of touch with rural folk.
They perceived they had to work harder than people in other regions, and urban professionals were lazy.
These comments show how rural identity included claims that rural people live a specific lifestyle, interwoven with claims about inequality.
People perceived that members of the outgroup threatened their community, values, and livelihood.
Rural residents blamed threats to rural living on cold bureaucracies in cities.
Governments, Walmarts, and corporate farms were regarded as urban entities, out of touch with values that had made communities stable.
In this framework, residents readily viewed government as antirural.

Hard Work

Many Americans value hard work, but rural people in this study understood even this value through their group consciousness.
Republicans linked hard work with opposition to social welfare programs.
Rural Republicans emphasized their commitment to a work ethic, claiming rural living mandated it.
Democratic groups saw hard work as important but not enough to make ends meet.
The manner in which rural consciousness worked in these conversations illustrates how people use group consciousness and partisanship to understand politics.
Partisanship helps explain how these people relate hard work to economic success but does not fully explain the rural consciousness.
It is an oversimplification to regard the rural vs. urban divide as simply racism.
Writing off rural antipathy toward urban areas as a cover for racism does three unfortunate things for our understanding of public opinion:
- It implies that urban life is less racist than rural life.
- It ignores the orientations toward government in this group consciousness that are related to Tea Party messaging.
- It prevents us from confronting the complexity and intractability of the racism that did emerge.

Resources

The understanding of the distribution of jobs, wealth, and spending in rural vs. urban terms was a main element of rural consciousness.
Many nonmetro groups felt their communities did not receive their share of resources and that metro residents misunderstood this inequality.
Urban areas were seen as having less unemployment and the best jobs and their tax dollars were perceived as being “sucked in” by Madison and spent on city projects.
Empirical analyses are only partially supported by these perceptions.
- Rural counties do receive fewer public dollars than urban counties.
- Rural residents pay more state and local taxes on a per capita basis.
- Average household incomes are higher in urban areas.
Rural residents often assumed their perceptions were fact
They perceived that the rural vs. urban distinction was the main way to characterize the distribution of taxation, wealth, and the cost of goods and services in the state.
Rural residents also used the rural consciousness to understand the individual-level distribution of wealth, claiming that all the wealthy people live in urban areas. This further reinforces the idea of a systematic injustice.

Rural Consciousness in Contrast to Urban and Suburban Conversations

Many urban and suburban people mentioned place when describing themselves and their views.
However, only among rural residents was the use of perspectives that equated where one lived with power, values, and resources truly clear.
Milwaukee groups, for example, didn't refer to place when discussing allocation of resources, instead citing race, ideology, or citizenship.
Illustrations include discussions about healthcare: the northern rural group cited that rural economy was downtrodden, and blamed urbanites for bad decisions, which placed identity at the forefront.
Walker's budget proposals highlight perspectives of both areas: rural groups used their lens of rural people governed by urbanites, again, placing identity as a crucial piece.
Personal experience contrasts with collective identity.
- The Madison group focused on their individual identity, emphasizing Harold's experience and the need for hard work and individual responsibility.
- The rural group related economic hardship to their status as rural individuals.
The lens through which rural residents view public affairs differs from the lens of urban residents, screening out workers