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 studying 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 U.S. state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2020, Political Behavior, 845–864) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2017, The Journal of Politics, 45–59) 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.

Jerusalem Building: Lolly Willowes, Blake and Rural Politics

Sylvia Townsend Warner's work is richly allusive, yet the precise purpose of her myriad references to, and echoes of, earlier works of literature often remains opaque. This essay explores one particular intertext in her work from the 1920s: the poetry of William Blake. In her essays, poetry, and in particular Lolly Willowes (1926), Warner, I argue, attempts to liberate Blake from both jingoistic nationalism and from progressive improvement. It is in particular in the intertextual dialogue she opens up with rural preservationist J. W. Robertson Scott that we can see how Warner seeks to free Blake from those who believed that Jerusalem could be literally built, rather than it being the preserve of an unfettered imagination. As I demonstrate, Laura Willowes has a series of Blakean epiphanies that allow her to become a critic of the materialism of modernity.