The forthcoming article “The public agglomeration effect: Urban–rural divisions in government efficiency and political preferences” by Theo Serlin is summarized by the author below.
Why do cities vote for the left? This pattern, which holds in almost all economically-developed democracies, is puzzling, given that urban voters on average have higher incomes and so should stand to lose in relative terms from left-wing economic policies. Typical explanations, especially in the US, focus on the role of cultural issues. Rural voters are more likely to be white, Christian, and socially conservative, and vote Republican because of the parties’ stances on issues around race and abortion. While these factors are important for the urban-rural divide now, they can’t explain the chronology of the urban-rural divide. In the US, the urban-rural divide emerged in the 1930s, before the Republican party was especially popular among white, Christian, or racially conservative voters.
I introduce an alternative explanation for the urban-rural divide: agglomeration effects. Much research in urban and spatial economics finds that businesses are more productive in cities. The forces behind that phenomenon apply all the more so to public sector provision. The public sector has natural economies of scale due to fixed administrative costs and nonrivalry. If the public sector is more productive in urban areas, the tradeoffs that urban and rural voters face between taxation and government provision are different. Urban voters receive more valuable government services for a given dollar of taxation. We would expect them to be more willing to accept higher taxes in return for more public services.
If this factor explains urban-rural divides in voting, we should only observe cities voting for the left when questions about the size of government divide left from right. This fits the timing of the emergence of the urban-rural divide in the US. In 1932, the main issues dividing the parties were prohibition and the tariff, and there was no clear urban-rural divide in voting. In 1936, the New Deal had reoriented US politics around government spending; cities moved into the Democratic camp. I also develop a number of measures of government efficiency and show that counties with more productive governments moved towards the Democrats as the parties diverged on redistribution. Surveys from the era show that urban voters were more supportive of higher taxes and the New Deal, making it more plausible that the emergent urban-rural divide was driven by this mechanism.
The US is not unique in having an urban-rural political divide. In the UK, the timing of the emergence of the divide also fits with this mechanism. There was no clear relationship between urbanization and left-wing voting at the turn of the 20th century. By the 1930s, when Labour had replaced the Liberals as the main left-of-center party, urbanization strongly correlated with vote choice. In Canada, the urban-rural divide came into being in the 1960s, when the Liberals moved left and set up the single-payer healthcare system. Around the world, the left-right urban-rural divide is a feature of economically-developed democracies with broadly programmatic politics, where the size of government is a major component of the left-right divide. Greater government efficiency in urban areas due to economies of scale and nonrivalry alters preferences for government spending and creates political cleavages.
About the author: Theo Serlin is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. Their research “The public agglomeration effect: Urban–rural divisions in government efficiency and political preferences” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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