Kathy Cramer Walsh on Rural Perspectives of Political Inequality
Politicians are not the only Wisconsins crossing into Illinois. This week Kathy Cramer Walsh of UW Madison visited UIUC to discuss her on-going participant observation research.
Cramer Walsh’s work is very different from most modern political opinion research, eschewing telephone or internet surveys. Instead, she visits coffee shops and informal meeting locations across Wisconsin. In many ways, her style of information gathering is far more similar to the foundational studies of Robert Lane, though with a focus on group interaction rather than individual interviews. Cramer Walsh traces her interest in participant observation to working on the longitudinal political socialization surveys of Jenngings and Stoker. Like UIUC faculty member Jake Bowers, Cramer Walsh conducted in person interviews as a graduate student. She found the most interesting responses were those offered to open ended questions or between questions. This interest led her to conduct participant observation studies in Michigan and now in Wisconsin.
In her most recent paper, Cramer Walsh focuses on differences in perceptions and understanding of political issues in rural and urban communities:
We should expect place to matter for political understanding because representation is allocated by geography in the United States. Government resources are allocated largely according to these districts. Therefore, individuals’ perceptions of which places get which resources, and which places have power are likely integral parts of the way they think about the political world. I call these perceptions individuals’ geographies of power.
After interviewing and interacting with small groups across rural Wisconsin, she finds that rural participants see political power concentrated in the urban areas. She argues, moreover, that these perceptions are not driven by anti-government sentiments per-se, which might be more commonly held in rural environments, but on a framework based on geographic representation.
While different in technique than a research agenda I might approach, I think Cramer Walsh’s work provides fertile ground for theory building. Specifically, I wonder to what degree current institutions exacerbate rural/urban schisms and what alternative institutions could provide. I am reminded of Andrew Rehfeld’s recent book, The Concept of Constituency: Political Representation, Democratic Legitimacy, and Institutional Design. In this book, Rehfeld considers randomly assigning citizens to representative constituencies instead of electing representatives from geographically defined constituencies. While such a plan might dilute the importance of geography in politics, the lack of specifically rural representatives might marginalize rural citizens even more and make the collective action problem facing rural interests an even greater burden.
Less radical solutions are also possible. When asked about the role of institutions in her findings, she suggested holding legislatures throughout a state on a rotating basis, rather than exclusively at a state capitol, usually an urban location. As my fellow graduate student Matthew Hayes pointed out, we have privileged face-to-face legislator interaction over face-to-face interaction between legislators and constituents. Perhaps it is worth considering technological or institutional methods to reverse this imbalance.
