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Abstract
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In 2016, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election by securing a very large share of the rural vote. In the 2020 election, his margin of victory in rural America was even greater. This time, however, voter turnout in urban areas was much higher, an even larger share of these urban voters cast their ballot for Biden, and Trump lost the election. Analysis revealed that two variables were especially important predictors of county-level voting behavior. Counties that Trump won had a large proportion of non-Hispanic white residents and a low proportion of college graduates. When controlling for other independent variables, the effects of rural/urban residence largely disappeared. Thus, Trump's dominance in rural counties is explained by the fact that rural counties have large numbers of non-Hispanic white residents and lower levels of educational attainment than urban counties. These same variables were important in explaining the vote in five key battleground states. The relevance of these findings for the future of U.S. democracy in an era of deep political division is discussed.
Regions are seen as historically conditioned phenomena, and on different scales, they can serve as spaces for the discursively constructed identities of their inhabitants. Yet, little is known about what happens to these identities in the long-term when an old regional structure is deinstitutionalised and replaced by a new structure. This article aims to fill this gap in the knowledge; by exploring and analysing spatial identity in a regional amalgam and the relationships between the age categories of its residents, and the meaning of institutionalised and deinstitutionalised regions. The study relies on the statistical analysis of primary data acquired through a questionnaire given to residents of the region under study. The empirical research suggests that a certain time after the transformation of a regional structure the act has imprinted itself on particular generations of a rural regional amalgam in various ways, and it appears that nostalgia for the old region is widespread among older residents.
In line with the multifunctional agriculture discourse, care farming is highlighted by governments as a promising service--as an additional source of income for farmers and as a current alternative or supplement to ordinary public care services. Based on the rather modest number of care farming services and their often unstable existence, this paper examines critical aspects of the market relation between providers and buyers when it comes to ensuring sustainable and persistent farm-based day care services. Our analysis is based on interviews with farmers as providers of farm-based day care services for people with dementia living in their own homes and with representatives from the municipal health sector as buyers of these services. One of the findings is that the askew, yet harmony-characterised, power structure between the market actors makes professional ordering of care farming services critical to the providers' endurance and wellbeing. The paper concludes that the market relation between providers and buyers could be strengthened, but vulnerabilities related to such a relationship are inevitable.
This article addresses the kind of agreements and arrangements made between the mayor, as the municipality's political leader, and the community, in order to minimise potential conflicts and preserve social cohesion during and after the closing process of a local primary school. The concept of the "gift", as conceptualised and discussed by Marcel Mauss serves as theoretical approach to help to better understand the dynamics and processes involved in a primary school closure. The results are based on 30 qualitative interviews with mayors from across Austria, which help illustrate "friendly gestures" that are part of the closing process. In addition, special attention has been paid to the few cases where these "offers" from the municipality's side could not appease the local community's resistance towards the decision to close the school.
The aim of this special issue is to explore emergent phenomena in the agri-food sector through the lens of prosumption, in order to highlight its heuristic value in identifying new and emerging trends in the field, especially focusing on the interplay between social and economic relations. This introduction explores the theoretical foundations of the notion of prosumption and the linkages with the alternative agri-food networks literature in order to propose a new set of research questions that can help scholars to better articulate the relationships between the emergence of hybrid actors and new forms of work in the production and consumption of food.
Rural communities in the inland areas of Northern Sweden have long suffered from a steady population decline as young people, particularly women, have moved to the growing urban areas for education/employment. However, in recent years, alongside strategies for survival relating to tourism/hospitality industry, refugee reception has emerged as a strategy for survival whereby these rural municipalities seek to staunch the downward spiral of decline by accepting refugees in the hope that this will provide not only job opportunities but also support for local services. Using thematic analysis, we focus on media representations of rural refugee reception in small municipalities Northern Sweden and aim to contribute to an understanding of how spatial and social relations are reproduced through these representations; to understand in how 'the rural' is constructed in relation to power relations such as race and gender and how these interact with a more explicit spatial power dimension. We are interested in understanding rural refugee reception as a contested hope for the future - a strategy for survival. Our analysis shows that the media highlight the stories of how the municipalities set their hopes on refugee reception to 'save' the place not only by bringing in new, younger inhabitants, but also employment opportunities. However, it also shows that refugee reception may become merely a short-term, temporary solution and not something that challenges or changes the more general migratory patterns in Sweden.
The Duero River borderland between Spain and Portugal is a region marked by historic geographic isolation and more recently by economic marginalization. Acknowledged for not only its biodiversity, the cultural landscape is also distinguished by its archaeological, historic, and ethnographic heritage. Due to massive socioeconomic outmigration and a prevalent cultural disdain for the countryside, there is a developing disconnection of the collective memory among village residents with the cultural landscape and its agropastoral past. In this study, the principles of the Historic Landscape Characterization methodology and the ideals established by the European Landscape Convention of 2000 are implemented due to their goals of community engagement and awareness raising of the value of cultural landscapes. A strong ethnographic component has been applied to this research whereby residents in interviews characterize the landscape through the recollection of its toponyms and past agropastoral land use. The data acquired from the interviews are input into a GIS as ethnographic layers to complement the empirical landscape analyses. This aggregation of information is placed into a final series of maps for residents and regional authorities to access, use, and learn from the unique landscape history of the region. The value of the analysis is twofold: (1) it contributes to the interpretation of the historical development of the Duero River transborder landscape; and (2) it demonstrates the role of incorporating an ethnographic approach into an archaeological landscape analysis.
Language: en |