Paige Kelly's Graduate Defense Seminar

A Graduate Defense Seminar will be presented by Paige Kelly, MS candidate in Rural Sociology. She will present Rurality, Region, and Republican Voting in 370 Kottman Hall.

The recent political polarization in U.S. presidential elections has often been depicted as a function of the dichotomous relationship between populations of red-rural and blue-urban states by popular media and social sciences. This approach widely assumes that rurality operates as a discrete determinant of individuals’ voting choices independent of their sociodemographic attributes. As a result, this generalization often conflates rurality, in and of itself, as a key influence of Republican voting rather than recognizing the role of sociodemographic characteristics, more prevalent in rural areas, in influencing voting choices. In this study, I ask to what degree rurality is a significant influence of Republican voting. More specifically, I seek to address the degree to which individuals’ geographic regional contexts, relative to their sociodemographic attributes, influence their voting choices in presidential elections.

Advisor: Linda Lobao