PI: Zoe Nemerever, Assistant Professor, Utah Valley University
Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, Edward Artinian Fund for Publishing
Project Abstract: Legislators with constituencies that have divided policy preferences will have to choose which side to represent when they cast their single roll call vote on a bill. Previous studies find that when legislators must decide between representing different constituencies, they often favor White, affluent, and politically-engaged co-partisan constituents. However, political scientists do not yet know if there a geographic bias when legislators must choose between representing distinct urban, suburban, and rural segments of their districts. I examine whether rural voters, as geographic minorities whose proportion of the U.S. population is shrinking, are less likely to have their political preferences represented in state policymaking. To investigate this question, I compare expressed constituent preferences with legislator roll call votes on nearly 1,700 state bills across 58 different policy issues. Rural voters do indeed face a significant representation deficit when being represented by Democratic legislators, and this representation gap is persistent across race, ethnic, education, and gender subgroups. On the other hand, Republican legislators are only slightly more likely to represent the preferences of their rural constituents relative to their nonrural constituents. Although rural voters received disproportionate representation through malapportioned U.S. Senate districts and the Electoral College, there is troubling geographic bias in representation by American state legislatures.