{"title":"Explaining Rural Conservatism: Political Consequences of Technological Change in the Great Plains","authors":"Aditya Dasgupta, Elena Ramirez","doi":"10.1017/s0003055424000200","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.","PeriodicalId":48451,"journal":{"name":"American Political Science Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.9000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"American Political Science Review","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0003055424000200","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds in the United States and other advanced capitalist economies. But this was not always the case. What explains the rise of rural conservatism? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-World War II introduction of new irrigation technologies, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains using groundwater. Difference-in-differences analyses exploiting the shock’s differential impact on counties overlying the Ogallala Aquifer—a pattern validated with remote-sensing data—show that technological change contributed significantly to the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional analyses, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside the Ogallala Aquifer boundary, suggest that this was due to the rise of capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.
期刊介绍:
American Political Science Review is political science''s premier scholarly research journal, providing peer-reviewed articles and review essays from subfields throughout the discipline. Areas covered include political theory, American politics, public policy, public administration, comparative politics, and international relations. APSR has published continuously since 1906. American Political Science Review is sold ONLY as part of a joint subscription with Perspectives on Politics and PS: Political Science & Politics.