Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide

by Jonathan A. Rodden

A prizewinning political scientist traces the origins of urban-rural political conflict and shows how geography shapes elections in America and beyond

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose , the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

In the late nineteenth century, support for the left began to cluster in cities among the industrial working class. Today, left-wing parties have become coalitions of diverse urban interest groups, from racial minorities to the creative class. These parties win big in urban districts but struggle to capture the suburban and rural seats necessary for legislative majorities. A bold new interpretation of today's urban-rural political conflict, Why Cities Lose also points to electoral reforms that could address the left's under-representation while reducing urban-rural polarization.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, Political Science, Urbanism, Sociology, Urban

336 pages, Hardcover

Published June 4, 2019

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using charts and graphs, Jonathan Rodden demonstrates how the geographic concentration of Democrats dilutes their ability to succeed in elections where only 1 candidate wins in a district. He shows how this geography results in the common phenomenon of Democrats receiving more votes than Republicans but winning fewer seats in state houses and the US Congress. This does not happen in proportional voting systems where voters in larger districts elect a specified number of top vote getters.

Many charts show the concentration of Democrats in cities where industries once flourished, along railroad lines and elsewhere in politically homogeneous neighborhoods. Pollard argues that these concentrations make it difficult to draw more politically heterogeneous state house and congressional districts. This gives the rural and suburban Republicans a structural advantage which has been further fortified by gerrymandering. Charts on pages 182 and 185 show the concentration’s striking effect on elections where Republicans win more seats with fewer statewide votes.

Rodden expands the geographic analysis to ideology. Democratic constituencies have different political agendas which can divide their urban and non-urban voters on a host of economic and social issues. Any one of these issues can be the decisive boost that elects Republicans out of proportion to their numbers. Rodden notes that such issues are easier to manage in statewide elections than in district level elections.

The there is some interesting, but not determining, data about cities that have become technology hubs. These knowledge workers tend to live in the hub cities, not suburbs, and tend to live in the city’s center.

The first mention of race is on p. 85 and the second is on p. 166. Its only significant mention is how the Voting Rights Act (now invalidated) facilitated the creation of districts that assure minority representation. Such districts produce “surplus votes” that could help Democrats if some urban neighborhoods were drawn into in contiguous Republican areas. Campaign finance and voter suppression are not considered and are mentioned even less than race.

Majoritarian election systems of France, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan show the same geographic voting pattern yielding the same skewed outcome as the US. A graph on p. 257 shows the resulting parliaments as being more right leaning than the populations they govern and the cabinets in the executive branches being even more right leaning than their parliaments.

Rodden shows how proportional representation systems used in continental Europe eliminate the need to “bundle conflicts related to class, social diversity, religion, and economics together into a single overarching urban-rural battle.” In the proportional system, districts are larger and parties and have a number of seats. Voters can chose between a number of candidates and parties fill the allotted number of seats for a district in proportion to the number of votes they receive. This creates not only a better reflection of the population’s values but also balances the governing parties. One result is the social programs that have characterized much of (non-English speaking) Europe. While in the US it is common to run against needs of urban populations, in the proportional system this is less common since urban votes are needed to win seats. Rodden says that the governing result has no discernible right or left bias.

The final chapter looks to the future of US election results. The 2018 election produced a “national swing” towards Democrats “leaving room for Democrats to push further from the urban core into the suburbs of typical post-manufacturing cities.” Millennials have Democratic leanings – will they keep them when and if they move into the suburbs? If these trends are large scale and if they last, Rodden feels that “distribution of partisanship” will radically change.

Rodden notes that with the current system, the underrepresented cities (not one city is represented by a Republican in the House of Representative) financially support the suburbs and rural areas. He mentions 2016’s “Calexit” in passing but does not elaborate of the future of states that recognize this disparity seceding. He notes conditions under which the polarizing urban-rural difference might be ameliorated such as wave elections and/or geographic mobility.

This book is recommended for anyone professionally involved in elections. Unfortunately candidates, journalists , consultants and their staffs are too busy to read it. The book’s real audience will probably be found in those political junkies who appreciate policy over partisanship and in university political science classes.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why Cities Lose, by Jonathan A. Rodden

In reading this book, I not only was annoyed that this is the second book I have read recently which insults my native state for things that are not in fact bad things but are very good things, and also demonstrates a very deep failure to understand something important about the American republic, or indeed any well-functioning republic. While the author supports the malapportionment of electoral districts in order to bias them in favor of urban voters (which the author considers "evening out" the disadvantages of voter concentration and "wasted votes") as well as proportional voting that leads to coalitions and encourages bare majoritarian tyranny, a better approach for a republic lies in something approximating the Swiss model of requiring a broader consensus that does not depend on only having more votes but also more cantons or areas in favor of legislation, thus discouraging temporary and concentrated majorities from trying to throw their weight around and abuse the wider general public. Unfortunately, the author seems completely unaware of the benefits of requiring more consensus that disregards the fraudulent running up of votes in precincts where there is literally no opposition to the terrible politics of the contemporary extreme left, demonstrating the lack of legitimacy of elections in many cities within the United States, problems which the author does not appear to remotely grasp.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit less than 300 pages long and it is divided into nine chapters. The book begins with an introduction and then discusses the dilemma of the left (1) related to geography that seeking to appeal to mainstream, pragmatic audiences threatens leftist parties with challenges from more "authentic" and extreme urban parties of the left. The author then discusses the role of the industrial revolution in setting up the current urban crisis of Anglophone leftist parties (2), as well as the transition that the Labour and Democratic parties made from being workers' parties to urban parties (3). The author discusses urban form and voting (4) as well as complaining about what is wrong with Pennsylvania Democrats (5) and what makes them so unsuccessful at winning control of state legislature seats (by no means a bad thing). The author talks about the role of political geography in the representation of Democrats (6), complaining that being an urban party tends to reduce representation especially where districts must represent the lines of cities and counties to some extent. The author then talks about the battle for the soul of the left (7) and how it is affected by the dilemma between trying to appeal to urban extremists and suburban moderates simultaneously. The author then plugs for proportional representation and comments why it has not attracted more interest from incumbents with safe seats in urban districts (8), as well as a look to the end of the dilemma (9) through various possibilities. The book ends with acknowledgements, notes, and an index.

This book's title is by no means worthy of 300 pages of turgid and partisan writing arguing that the gerrymandering of the left--which the author freely admits--is justified as a way to balance the scales that geography has against extremist parties of the left whose only appeal is in brainless and morally and politically corrupt urban voters. The short answer to the book's titular question is that cities and the political parties they vote for lose because they deserve to lose, because urban voters are too slender of a reed to depend on in providing the legitimacy for consensual republican rule, too subject to be stirred up into mob action by demagogues and too prone to domination by corrupt politicians who are able to ensure themselves decades of seniority within political offices in safe seats because of their control of patronage and incumbency benefits. The author's complaints that the decline in bipartisanship has made life difficult for leftists to secure the majority of votes in national and state districts apportioned in a winner-take-all first-past-the-post system is the whining of a loser who deserves ridicule and political exile. Those who cannot bother to appeal to moderate, to say nothing of conservative voters, do not deserve political office, and certainly do not deserve to have their corruption waved aside as being balancing the scales tipped against them. Those scales are tipped for a good reason, to keep corrupt demagogues from monopolizing political power in our republic. The author should try urging less corruption and less extremism from his fellow travelers on the left, and stop complaining that things are stacked against him and others of his ilk.

[Soren Dayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really valuable book about urban/rural political divides in the US and the anglosphere. Makes some wonderful comparative points about why the European democracies turned to proportional representation and why the US didn't. It makes a compelling argument that advocates of redistricting reform will get less than they think, which is consistent with other political science work.

Well worth the read.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of it is a bit heckling and other a bit repetitive. The entire quagmire is neither black or white; suburban, city or county; slavery, farming or industry--It is more complicated but this book is a good start.

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taxation Without Representation: The Structural, Blatant, Anti-Democratic Bias for Rural-Conservative Representation

Most everyone is aware of the ills of gerrymandered districts, but few talk about the deep structural bias that persists even with perfectly neutral districts. Rodden is one of the few. He presents a convincing case that this insidious, structural bias is much more relevant to the urban-rural political divide than mere gerrymandering in the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Such bias is not partisan; it is baked into our founding institutions. Fulfilling the promise of Democracy and achieving accurate representation requires reform. Proportionally representative systems—like those found throughout Europe—seem the best solution.

Rodden makes this argument by analyzing historical, worldwide trends in industrialization and urbanization, shifting political values and demography, the policy and practice of districting, and the political-science data and tools used to better understand the biased political dynamics created by these factors.

Not only the bias itself, but the reasons for the bias were completely new to me and at times fascinatingly outlandish: who would have thought that railroad networks from the second industrial revolution during the 1800s could be used to predict regions with overwhelming support for Democrats?

The selected quotes after my review cover the content of the argument, so I’ll just note a few considerations for the organization and style of the book before you get fully infuriated by Rodden’s revelations.

Rodden makes a good descriptive case for Europe having less polarized parties than the US (367-370 [see quotes below]). However, there isn't enough conceptual or structural analysis to make a strong conclusion that the systems would always end up this way. Unlike most of Europe American system is locked into a two-party system, but as Rodden himself acknowledges, those two parties can accommodate a lot more difference and even internecine conflict, as compared to systems with more parties which can force candidates to toe the party line through no-confidence votes (71-73). It is not immediately clear on a conceptual level why either of these systems would end up with tighter coupling between individual views and their representatives. Granted, political and demographic inertia means Rodden’s merely descriptive observations are likely to remain true for the coming decades, but the point is not as strong as he would like it to be.

Another case of a potentially strong point left underdeveloped: Rodden relies on various pointillist “stalactite” graphs to show voter turnout, votes for party by districts, and distance from an important city center like Philadelphia. These graphs are interesting and information-dense, but aren’t intuitive enough to use for arguments about districting and winner-take-all dynamics. I’ve never seen similar graphs and I’ve studied political theory and social sciences and I worked in data visualization for a year.

The histograms showing ideological distribution of congressional districts are also not intuitive on a first look. Perhaps Rodden would have done better to spend less time reiterating the graphs' conclusions and more time assuring graph legibility (at the very least with an appendix). More graph exposition would be a great supplement to Rodden’s already laudatory use of myriad examples, public intellectual tone, and well-organized chapters.

While Rodden includes plenty of his own research graphs, sometimes he inexplicably opts for mere description of geometric concepts. For example, instead of displaying a map of egregious gerrymandering in Pennsylvania, he uses a few pages to describes it (see the quote for pages 241-243 below, or just check out this very helpful article with comparisons of before and after the redistricting was thrown out as unconstitutional).

Finally, the reader should know that I’m not well-versed in political science and so there could very well be gaps in Rodden’s literature review that weaken his case. However, insofar as he talks about the political theory and the economic development history I'm familiar with, Rodden seems spot on. And the dynamics of winner-take-all majoritarian democracies with urban-rural divide don’t require much background knowledge to understand. I doubt anyone could mount a convincing counter-argument given the simple 'vote-share vs. seat share' comparisons in the first few quotes below.

Even with my objections above, I still view Why Cities Lose as a masterpiece of pop-political-science. My objections are mostly minor ones about how the argument is framed, most of which is well-done anyway. And at any rate, Rodden’s no-nonsense writing style and unusual findings more than make up for any deficits, as you’ll see in the selected quotes below.

———
Infuriating Quotes
Note: Page numbers are from the Epub ebook version I downloaded after finishing the audiobook—which I don't recommend since the graphs loom large in Rodden's arguments.

“Remarkably, as of 2019, the Republican Party has controlled the Pennsylvania Senate for almost forty consecutive years, even while losing the statewide popular vote around half of the time. The Republicans have controlled the Ohio Senate for thirty-five years, during which time Democrats won half of the state’s US Senate elections and around one-third of the gubernatorial elections.” (11)

“If we add up the popular vote for every British parliamentary election held between 1950 and 2017, the Conservative Party has received around 41 percent of the votes cast, and Labour is only slightly behind with 40 percent. Yet the Conservatives have been in power for 63 percent of that period.” (18)

“The Australian Labor Party (ALP) and its competitors on the right have split the popular vote almost exactly down the middle since 1950, yet during that period, the right has been in power for 68 percent of the time.” (18)

“In Canada, in 2018, populist Doug Ford was elected premier of Ontario, with his Conservative Party receiving 60 percent of the seats in the provincial parliament, based on only 40 percent of the votes. ” (18-19)

“The experience of Britain and its former colonies, where electoral districts are drawn by independent commissions, belies the notion that the Democrats’ representation problem is merely a matter of gerrymandering. In fact, throughout the postwar period, underrepresentation of the urban left in national legislatures and governments has been a basic feature of all industrialized countries that use winner-take-all districts. And these countries have produced significantly more conservative policies in the long run than the countries that long ago adopted more proportional forms of representation.” (20-21)

“to a surprising extent, votes for Democrats today are still concentrated in the triple-deckers, apartment buildings, and workers’ cottages built in close proximity to the factories, smelters, warehouses, ports, rail hubs, and canals of the late nineteenth century. In much of the United States, a map of the nineteenth-century railroad network is a map of Democratic voting today.” (22)

“[One] way of disentangling geography and gerrymandering is to draw a complete, alternative redistricting plan. Better yet, one can use a computer algorithm to draw hundreds or thousands of such plans, ignoring partisanship and focusing only on drawing compact, contiguous districts with equal population. We can then look at a large number of alternative Pennsylvania redistricting plans, each with fifty relatively compact districts and equal populations. Like redistricting commissions and state legislatures, we used precincts as the building blocks in developing such plans, and then examined the partisanship of each district we created by simply summing up the precinct-level votes.
Even when we draw four hundred separate districting plans in this party-blind way, we discover that Democrats almost always end up with a terrible geographic support distribution.” (231-232)

“No matter the level of statewide partisanship, Democrats live in more homogeneous partisan neighborhoods than Republicans.” (263)

Summary of recent, unconstitutional gerrymandering in Pennsylvania (241-245):
“Furthermore, the gerrymandered 2012 plan looks nothing like the nonpartisan simulated plans.
…
“The original districting plan from 2012—now thrown out by the court—had artfully prevented the emergence of Democratic seats outside of urban Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.
…
“[Pennsylvania Republican’s] gerrymandering strategy involved concentrating Democrats in one meandering, noncompact northern district that included Scranton and parts of Wilkes-Barre, and then reached over to the Easton area. This cleared the way for the careful construction of surrounding Republican districts. One artful district circumvented the Democratic precincts of Scranton, reaching from the easternmost point in the state all the way to the center of the state. Another managed to link the Republican suburbs of Wilkes-Barre with the eastern suburbs of Harrisburg, well over a hundred miles away.
…
“Republicans complained bitterly that the new map was too favorable to the Democrats. Yet the results showed once again the powerful role of geography. In spite of a truly historic 10 percentage-point swing in the vote share in their favor from 2016 to 2018, and receiving over 55 percent of the votes cast, Democratic candidates won only half of the seats in 2018. ”

A dynamic that needs revisiting given the rise of Trump and nationalist-populist Republicans challenging the old guard:
“The problem of negotiating between extremists and moderates is not unique to the Democrats. On the other side of the spectrum, of course, rural extremists might also be able to gain control of the platform of the Republican Party. But this has not been nearly as big a problem for the Republicans—at least in congressional elections—since those districts have not been very far away from the median district. As a result, the districts of successful incumbent Republicans who have ascended to leadership positions are also likely to be closer to the median district.” (316)

“In sum, the concentration of leftists in cities in the Commonwealth countries has had two detrimental effects for parties of the left over the course of the postwar period: an inefficient distribution of support across districts within parties and a costly divide across parties.” (351)

The existence of both more extremist and more moderate, centrist “parties are a crucial antidote to American-style urban-rural polarization throughout Europe. Because of the greater diversity of policy platforms from which they can choose, relative to Americans, voters in proportional democracies can find a party that comes closer to their own mix of policy preferences on different issues. In some cross-country surveys, respondents have been asked to place themselves, as well as the parties, on a simple numerical ideological scale. On average, European voters in proportional democracies see themselves as much closer to their most proximate party than do Americans. Moreover, they also see themselves as closer to their nonpreferred parties than do Americans. Many Democrats view Republicans as ideologically extreme, and vice versa. In fact, Americans perceive their parties as ideologically further apart than respondents in any other wealthy democracy.4 In other words, the American two-party system is, in an important respect, more polarized than the multiparty systems of Europe.” (367-368)

Do proportional representation systems eliminate all mismatch between votes and seats?
“Elections do have winners and losers . . . and except for rare cases like Austria’s grand coalitions, we should not expect to see that cabinets will be perfect reflections of the partisanship of the legislature. In the long run, because of the frequent victories of the Social Democrats, Swedish cabinets have been, on average, to the left of the Swedish parliament, and because of the success of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), German cabinets have been to the right of the German parliament. If we aggregate all European proportional representation systems in the postwar period, this cancels out. The partisanship of the average European government in the postwar period is neither right nor left, and summing all postwar cabinet seats by country, we see that parties of the right have had the edge in about half of the PR countries, and parties of the left in the other half.” (370)

“[D]uring the postwar period, governments headed by parties of the left have been more common in countries with proportional electoral systems than in countries with majoritarian electoral systems.9 While PR systems have been evenly split, two-thirds of governments formed during the postwar period in majoritarian democracies were parties of the right or center-right.10 This striking pattern cannot be explained by some bias in favor of the left associated with proportional representation or by a special fondness for parties of the left among European voters. Nor can it be explained by an unusual admiration for parties of the right among voters in majoritarian democracies. In fact, aggregating over the period from 1945 to 2005, according to the classifications of the expert surveys, left-of-center parties received slightly more votes than right parties in all of the majoritarian democracies but Japan and New Zealand.11 The best explanation for the poor performance of left parties in majoritarian democracies lies in their struggle to transform electoral support into seats in the legislature and to form governments.” (372-373)

“Political competition in proportional democracies creates incentives to cater to the national median voter, whereas competition in majoritarian democracies focuses on the median district. Recall that when leftists are asymmetrically concentrated in urban districts, the median district is more conservative than the national median voter.” (381)

“Growing regional inequality means that a small number of metropolitan areas with large knowledge-economy sectors produce tax revenues that subsidize the rest of the country. While Hillary Clinton won fewer than 500 counties and Donald Trump won more than 2,500 in 2016, according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data, the Democratic-majority counties were responsible for over two-thirds of federal income taxes collected in 2014. The recent Republican tax reform attempted to offset some of the revenue losses from tax cuts by eliminating deductions used by residents of overwhelmingly Democratic metropolitan areas with high state and local taxes and expensive real estate. Future Democratic administrations will likely attempt to shift the tax burdens back onto a different group of wealthy taxpayers in suburbs and exurbs of red states. Again, the policy uncertainty generated by the politics of geographic sectionalism creates distortions and inefficiencies, not to mention strong emotions. (402-403)

"the main goal of [districting / election] reformers is not to reduce urban-rural polarization, but to enhance fairness. As described in previous chapters, the most recent round of redistricting was led by unified Republican state legislatures in a number of pivotal states. And without a doubt, districts drawn by Republican legislators have made things considerably worse for the Democrats in recent years. However, in the past, Democrats like Phil Burton in California have also been leaders in the craft of gerrymandering. To many reformers, the answer seems simple: remove the politicians from the process, forbid them from considering partisanship when drawing districts, or find ways of getting Democrats and Republicans to offset each others’ efforts at partisan gain.
A key insight of this book, however, is that Democrats end up inefficiently distributed across districts even when commissions, divided governments, court-appointed special masters, computer algorithms, or even Democrats themselves have drawn the districts. ” (413-414)

Rodden also casts doubt on the common refrain that Republicans and Democrats are self-sorting geographically on the basis of politics:
“However, there is a growing mound of evidence showing that Americans are not, on the whole, sorting according to partisanship in a way that leads to ever-increasing geographic polarization. First of all, it is simply not plausible that the phenomenal increase in the correlation between population density and Democratic voting documented in this book can be explained by residential moves of Democrats and Republicans to like-minded locations. A recent empirical study of voter registration records demonstrates that “partisan bias in moving choices is far too small to sustain the current geographic polarization of preferences.”7 Much of the relevant movement was not by people across space, but by party platforms across issues. In the 1970s, rural and exurban social conservatives had no strong reason to prefer Republican candidates. Nor did computer programmers, laboratory scientists, physicians, or other educated professionals have reasons to prefer Democratic candidates. Over time, the parties adopted polarized platforms on new issues, and voters gradually sorted into different parties.” (420)

[Mannie Liscum · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Jonathan Rodden’s “Why Cities Lose” is a tremendous piece of scholarly work; written concisely and accessibly for a lay audience without sacrificing any of the facts and figures (quite literally) that might oft mire down a book like this. As an academic I was enthralled by the data Rodden expertly presented and analyzed. His presentation of text and data is clear. He explains the way data were collected and how he interprets them, while also providing them for the reader to interpret independently. This is how ‘science’ is done!!!

Rodden presents a clear history of how the industrial revolutions (first and second), as well as the current post-industrial knowledge-based global economies gave rise to and reinforced urban-rural divisions in the US, Canada and Europe. This is not always a straightforward history but Rodden takes the reader through with deft. Beyond the establishment and reinforcement of the urban-rural divide, Rodden shows how the urban environ has become synonymous with the Labor/left/Democrats, while the rural areas have become strongholds for the conservatives/Republicans in politics. But the meat of Rodden’s exploration has to do with the analysis of data associated with these facts and how it plays out to ultimately limit the political reach and success of the left; hence ‘Why Cities Lose.’ Rodden provides clear evidence for how electoral systems that are winner-take all, as exist in the US, Britain and Commonwealth countries, puts the left at a disadvantage because of their concentration to urban centers. In winner-take all systems the rural, exurban, and conservative suburban areas have disproportionate electoral power at state and national levels. Rodden explains, with lots of evidence, how and why this is the case and discusses how parties of the left can/do combat this structure feature of modern political societies. Though the thesis reflects mostly on the power failings of one side of the political spectrum, Rodden’s is not a partisan analysis or presentation. As I would tell my students, “the data are what the data are” and they require no spin of partisanship. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to the political junky, especially one wanting to understand winner-take all electoral systems and right/conservative dominance of them in highly industrialized societies. 5 hearty stars!!!”

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The point of the book is true in that the structure of first-past-the-post electoral districts makes it nearly impossible for the urban left to be represented in government but the author spends comparably little time evaluating alternatives to this structure, instead focusing on silly ideas like New Labour or Third Way Democrats instead of increasing turnout or making elections fairer by abolishing districts and instituting true democracy. He also routinely asserts that populism is right-wing and liberalism is left-wing, both of which are incorrect (liberalism being a centre-right ideology and populism really being the agrarian socialism of the old Plains rather than the exurban fascism of the Trump era). He also focuses far too much on the parliamentary systems of Commonwealth countries, which America does not have. Overall the book is fairly boring and could be a longish blog post rather than a book.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing work of political geography. It has fresh ideas, and gave me a new perspective on understanding majoritarian English speaking democracies. I don’t use this term lightly, but this is a MUST READ for people interested in why Rural and exurban areas are over represented in the English speaking world’s politics

[Tony Mush · Rating 2 out of 5]

“A key argument of this book is that cities lose only when this type of geographic polarization is combined with an old-fashioned system of winner-take-all electoral districts like the one in the United States and in the British Commonwealth. Moreover, this geographic conflict is sharpened in the United States by a uniquely rigid two-party system. In countries with proportional electoral systems and multiple political parties, the introduction of issues like abortion and immigration, and the nationalist anti-elite backlash to globalization, do not encourage political elites to organize so clearly into only two mutually hostile, geographically defined camps. And in those countries, political geography does not undermine the representation of urban voters. In the United States, elections have unfortunately come to be viewed as winner-take-all battles between different sectors of the economy and dissimilar ways of life.”


“Because progressive voters are concentrated in cities, the median voter in the United States as a whole is to the left of the median district. If the Democratic Party wants to win the national popular vote, it must appeal to the national median voter. However, if the Democrats want to win a congressional majority, they must appeal to the median congressional district. 1 By promoting a progressive, urban policy agenda, Democrats can put themselves in a reasonable position to win the national popular vote. But under normal conditions, they would need a somewhat more conservative platform to appeal to the pivotal districts and win control of Congress.”

“This creates a dilemma for the Democrats. If they court the median national voter in pursuit of the presidency, they can end up with a policy reputation that allows them to win a majority of the national popular vote, but that reputation will be too “urban” for the pivotal congressional districts. The high profile of presidential elections often helps give the urban purists the upper hand over suburban pragmatists in the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, resulting in consistent victories in the national popular vote, but deep challenges in winning control of Congress. The other side of the coin is that in recent years, Republican legislative incumbents have crafted a party reputation that allows them to consistently capture the relatively conservative median congressional district. Given the consistent overrepresentation of rural states in the US Senate, a recurring Electoral College advantage, and low turnout among urban voters, the Republican Party has had few incentives to move its platform to the left.”

“proportional representation creates no systematic bias in favor of either the right or left. This may seem unremarkable on its own, but the contrast with majoritarian democracies is striking. In every industrialized parliamentary democracy with majoritarian electoral institutions, averaging over the postwar period, the legislature has been well to the right of the voters, and in most cases, the cabinet has been even further to the right.”


“The surest way to reduce the level of urban-rural polarization is to begin to “unbundle” the urban and rural packages offered by the two parties. This could be achieved if new parties gained prominence, or if existing parties adopted different strategies.”

[Russell Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This turned out to be a much more quantitative work of political science than I expected it to be, and strongly comparative to, and of course in a lot of ways those are virtues. For me, since I simply was unable to follow some of the math which Rodden was making use of, parts of the book dragged. But I was often really fascinated by, and really wanted some deeper conceptual analysis of, certain historical and political claims he made. Basically, Rodden argues that cities, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, became significantly oriented around workers' movements and parties, which in time became entrenched in parts of the city where the housing of industrial workers was to be found, as well as along railway lines and other features of the industrialized urban landscape. What this leads to, though, is a much-remarked upon result, one that Rodden provides an enormous amount of data is support of: those who vote for liberal or socialist or otherwise "urban" parties are concentrated in a way that those who vote for conservative or "rural" parties are not. Rodden is able to show that this concentration, while it was taken multiple forms and involved multiple different populations over the past century and a half (immigrant workers crowding together, poor African-Americans and Hispanics moving into cheap inner city or older suburban homes, left-leaning young people moving into those same older dense neighborhoods as they gentrify, etc.), nonetheless abides, so much so that there are multiple points in Rodden's argument where he really would have benefited from bringing in some social theory, and asking just what it is about the quality of "dense" living which seems to entrench certain ideological preferences so effectively. Anyway, having established this, Rodden is able to show that the density of Democratic-voting populations is not easy to deal with, outside of--as many European countries wisely did at the beginning of the 20th century, but the Anglophone countries did not--doing the obvious thing and shifting to proportional representation. So long Democrats crowd together, and so long as there are both legal and cultural arguments against carving up cities like slices of pizza (one of the interesting consequences of Rodden's data is that it suggests that the long-standing ire many liberals and progressives have about gerrymandering is really entirely irrelevant to actual voting results), then single-member plurality voting--that is, voting based of geographic jurisdictions--is always going to serve urban voters poorly. There is a good deal more in the book beyond that, and some of it is rather fascinating, but overall, Rodden has an excellent journal article here, which he lays out in book form. It's worth reading, but a solid, lengthy summary review could work just as well.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Democrats can often easily win presidential popular votes and statewide elections in several states, their voters are so inefficiently distributed across state legislative and congressional districts that even though they often win a larger percentage of votes in legislative elections, they don’t win a majority of seats. This is a vestige of the old industrial revolution and the concentration of liberal voters in urban areas. This geographic concentration of liberal voters combined with successful partisan gerrymandering by Republican-controlled legislatures results in an entrenched conservative control of several state legislatures and also of Congress, unless a major scandal in the Republican party produces a wave election for liberal candidates (e.g., 2018).

This pattern holds for all majoritarian democracies of the old British Commonwealth that use single-member, plurality legislative elections. European democracies that have instituted proportional representation and multimember legislative districts have seen the liberal parties do much better at translating votes into seats. These facts point to the need for electoral reform in the United States and other former Commonwealth democracies.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 - This book makes a convincing case that the urban-rural divide is the key political divide in the country. It also examines how this came about and why it seems to be growing. One takeaway is that any urban political party in a winner-takes-all election (Labour in UK; Democrats here) faces a deep structural disadvantage because they waste so many votes. That is, cities are so overwhelmingly Democratic that they waste votes by winning by huge margins in cities and then losing by closer margins in more rural areas. That's why a state like PA and WI can have GOP controlled legislatures even though they don't win a majority of votes. It's not a happy picture - if current trends continue, GOP can continue holding political power without needing to win a majority of voters for the foreseeable future.

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was attracted to this book because I am creating a rural politics course and I need a solid book to discuss the relative power of rural communities. While the book does cover some really good points, there are ultimately far too many graphs and repetition for this to work in my class.

This book is very much written for an audience of other political scientists and they are who will find this book the most fascinating.

[Oscar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I disagree with some of the assumptions underlining the arguments of the later chapters of the book, especially with respect to ideological voting in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. That said, the central argument and the data Rodden brings to bear on rural/urban political polarization are fascinating and convincing. I especially enjoyed the comparative chapters with data from the UK, Canada, and Australia and the discussion of PR versus FPTP.

[Adam Richardson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative, but heavy, reading. Rodden masterfully takes on the issue of the political divisions we experience today by looking at both current and historical data and voting patterns both in the United States and abroad.

The use of statistical data is extensive, and may overwhelm the average voter looking to understand our divisions. For those who are actively involved in the politics of today, this is a very informative book.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of the book is a (fairly dry) journey through the history of how the urban-rural divide came to be. If you're interested in electoral factors (e.g. gerrymandering, electoral systems, political geography), skip to Chapter 5 and onwards. Probably informative for someone with no background in the issue at all, but I honestly just found it kind of boring.

[Ceil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well documented insights. Like so much of what feels urgent today, the polarized points of view that feel unique to our age have been part of, and a result of, our history from the beginning. Winner-take-all voting plus a 2 party system give us the most dangerous of all possible worlds as far as the tensions we see now.

[Mike Stolfi · Rating 3 out of 5]

So historically the problem goes beyond gerrymandering & for those who believe in "the rational man" it looks like the data points more towards geographical convenience than planned development these days. The comparisons w/the U.K. & Australia are telling.

[Topf · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read a couple of chapters because I was not interested in the US specifically but in reading a bit about the history of the rural urban divide as a general phenomenon. It was very informative and helpful!

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fantastic topic and an important problem, but does a poor job of getting its main points across.

This book honestly feels a bit like a Frankenstein of academic papers collated together.

I'd love to read another book with the same title but by a different author.

[Pinko Palest · Rating 2 out of 5]

basically, its a book of fanciful graphs, with some brief historical and sociological analysis in between. It would have been much better if it was the other way round, since the topics covered are fascinating. The fanciful graphs much less so

[Jim Twombly · Rating 5 out of 5]

An evidenced-based discussion of our current politics, from a different point of view. (see a forthcoming review in Choice Magazine)

[Sasha Degtereva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good

[Steve Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting analysis but too repetitious for four stars.

[Jonathan Cervas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Read this book to understand how representation of affected by where people live, and why liberals are harmed by single-member districts characterized by the US political system.

[Virginia Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

learned loads from this

[Rachel Bergsieker · Rating 2 out of 5]

Woof. The content was interesting but presented too academically for me.

[Drew Penrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very important book for understanding the root of a lot of political dysfunction in the United States and other countries with winner-take-all voting rules.

[Ari Rickman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense but interesting, this book is still worth a read five years after it came out. However, the reader of the early 2020's might be better off starting with the book's last chapter. In that last chapter, Rodden addresses the left-ward shift of American suburbs in the age of Trump. I understand why he waited until the end to discuss what for him, writing in 2019, was a relatively recent phenomenon. I also imagine that Rodden might have been worried that the Trump-era trend of increasing Democratic margins in the suburbs would undermine his thesis; that Democrats struggle to win districts even when they win more votes because they are inefficiently clustered in a few urban districts where they win by large margins while losing a greater number of suburban and rural districts by relatively close margins.

If Trump drives the suburbs toward the Democrats, this geography problem (the whole point of the book) might disappear. Rodden acknowledges this fact in the last chapter, but he provides some excellent comparative analysis from other winner-take-all democracies (like the UK and Cannada) to show that parties of the left often fail to remain popular outside of urban cores for long. Even if Democrats dominate a wide range of suburbs during the Trump era (which seems only partially true so far), Rodden reminds us that the party will likely eventually struggle again outside of large cities and their inner-most suburbs.

In general, I enjoyed the comparative sections of the book very much. Learning about the winner-take-all Anglosphere and the proportional representation (PR) systems in Europe was interesting in its own right and helped me better understand the US system - frankly more than the many clever but difficult to understand statistical analyses.

I do wish Rodden had spent a little more time on Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in Australia. I understand that RCV would be less effective than PR at directly solving the problem of urban parties winning more votes than seats; PR allows parties to win seats in proportion to the number of votes they receive regardless of where those voters are located while RCV does not. But RCV does have several advantages, chief among them that it appears much more feasible to implement in the US. Indeed, two states (Maine and Alaska), and some cities (including NYC) already use it.

In theory, RCV would make it easier for more than two parties to exist - including some which may be left or center-left and able to compete in suburban and rural areas where Democrats historically struggle. In theory, this would likely help ease the deep urban-rural polarization Rodden correctly identifies as a threat to America's stability. For all these reasons I wish Rodden had discussed RCV a little more in depth - does RCV work in practice, in Australia or elsewhere, as well as it does in theory?

Ultimately, an informative academic read.

[Jaylani Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish there was a Canadian version of this book that focuses on urban-rural divide in politics.