Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy“

July 9, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Author Meets Critics: “Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy“

In-Person Author Meets Critics

Participants:

  • (Presenter) Suzanne Mettler, Cornell University
  • (Presenter) Trevor Brown, Cornell University
  • (Presenter) Lilliana Hall Mason, Johns Hopkins University
  • (Presenter) Alexander Warren Hertel-Fernandez, Columbia University
  • (Presenter) Katherine J. Cramer, University of Wisconsin, Madison
  • (Chair) Jack Lucas, University of Calgary

Session Description:

For most of American history and as recently as 35 years ago, both political parties attracted support from both rural and urban areas of the country, but since the late 1990s, rural places nationwide have increasingly supported the Republican Party, and urban and suburban places, the Democratic Party. In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown take a macro-historical, developmental approach to explaining the emergence and entrenchment of the rural-urban political divide. Drawing on decades of place-based and individual-level survey data, as well as interviews with 60 local party leaders and former elected officials from rural areas, they reveal the impact of three processes: the rise of place-based economic inequality, the perception of elite overreach, and conservative mobilization. The authors show how the rural-urban divide threatens the health of democracy–in Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they probe the capacity of public policy and political organizing to mitigate it. The book bridges two broad research traditions—historical institutionalism and political behavior—and offer fresh ways to think about the causes and consequences of polarization. In this panel, Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown will provide an overview of their new book, followed by critical reflections from leading scholars in the study of urban-rural politics, political polarization, political representation, and place-based social identities.