PIPE Workshop: Explaining Rural Conservatism: Technological and Political Change in the Great Plains

[Music] welcome to the political institutions and political economy pipe workshop at the bedrosian center here in the price school at the university of southern california i'm jeff jenkins the director of the bedrosian center and the price collaborative our workshop speaker today is ariata scupta ari is an assistant professor of political science at the university of california merced his research is on comparative political and economic history and development he focuses on three main topics democratization technological change and state capacity much of his work is on rural india including a book project on the political consequences of technological change other work examines the historical and organizational roots of why parties succeed or fail at incorporating new groups and democratizing societies he's currently building a lab on the political economy of agriculture and rural societies pairs ani's presentation today is entitled explaining rural conservatism technological and political change in the great plains following the presentation we'll have a formal discussant brian leonard from arizona state university to provide some comments during addy's talk if you have any questions please type them in the chat or q a box i'll be monitoring questions as the talk goes on and without further ado i give you adidas gupta um thanks so much for the kind introduction jeff and for having me at this seminar and thanks everyone here for attending and brian especially um for his comments want me to share my screen so this is a paper that's co-authored with eleanor ramirez a graduate student in our department at the university of california merced um the papers title is explaining rural conservatism political consequences of technological change in the great plains and what we're doing in this paper is kind of utilizing a natural experiment to study the roots of how rural america became so conservative and in particular to highlight the role of technological change in this process in the 20th century uh so let me begin with the question that this project addresses um which is the historical rise of rural conservatism okay so today in the united states uh as well as other capitalist advanced capitalist economies rural areas are conservative electoral strongholds so they're solidly conservative constituencies typically and especially given the institutional overrepresentation of rural areas in sort of political systems the countryside represents a critical source of support for right-wing parties in the case of the united states the republican party we kind of take that as granted um today but this is not always the case historically um and in fact in the past in the early 20th century the late 19th century u.s farmers often supported left-wing and populist parties and politicians okay um so what we ask in this project is given this historical context what explains the long-term rise of rural conservativism in the united states um and we think this is an important question that's critical for understanding a critical feature of contemporary politics which is you know the well-known rural urban divide so just to give you a sense of what of how politics in the great plains um the region that we're looking at in this paper was not always so conservative um i wanted to show this plot of the distribution of sort of the success of the populist party um the kind of left-wing populist agrarian party that emerged in the late 19th early 20th century in the united states um the populist party found some of its greatest successes in the great plains states like kansas colorado nebraska south dakota electing members of congress and governors from several of these states the populist party of course was fairly left away in its politics it called for a nationalization of the railroads uh various forms of redistribution the abandonment of the gold standard in favor of the silver standard and other policies intended to favor poor and indebted farmers so at one point in time the politics of the great plains were quite um you know there was space for fairly left-wing politics okay um so great plain states like nebraska produced several sort of well-known left-wing politicians uh perhaps most famously william jennings o'brien uh the famous populist leader from nebraska and this is a picture of him giving his famous kind of fiery cross of gold speech in 1896 fast forward about 100 years later nebraska is one of the most conservative states in the united states uh donald trump won there in a landslide in 2020 you might say these are both popular um but populist of completely different stripes left going in the case of brian and right wing in the case of trump okay another way of thinking about the long-term conservative transformation of rural areas in the united states particularly in the great plains is through county level data on the republican party's share of the two-party vote in two periods here in the left-hand side panel this is uh averaging uh the republican party's share of the vote in presidential elections between 1920 and 1940 and on the right-hand side is the average between 1980 and 2000. um so what you can see here is that uh the great planes have gone from a region that was mostly purple kind of um you know fairly centrist in its political orientation to one that looks fairly like a sea of red that is a deeply conservative region in presidential elections and in this paper we try to understand how this transformation came about in the 20th century we're not of course the first ones to puzzle over this question um perhaps the best known book which kind of addressed this question is this famous book by thomas frank which came out in 2007 i think entitled what's the matter with kansas um and in this book frank was kind of trying to understand uh why does a poor and rural state like kansas vote for the conservative republican party seemingly against the interests of poor voters in these rural areas frank's explanation hinges on the kind of culture wars and the role of polarizing social issues in distracting poor voters from issues of redistribution kathy kramer while she doesn't look at the great plains specifically she has this fantastic book on the politics of resentment which tries to understand the roots of rural conservatism in the u.s

and the way in which it's connected to a distinctive kind of rural identity that views city folk and government in kind of adversarial terms the deeper question though is how did that kind of rural identity or sense of rural consciousness actually puts it emerged in the first place when seemingly didn't exist in the early 20th century um and we are going to argue that technological change played an important role in this process so existing explanations for the rise of rural conservatism often emphasize the culture wars or identity-based political polarization especially since the 1970s and 1980s other explanations for example jonathan robin's book on why cities lose kind of treat agriculture as the backwards sector in the economy that's left behind by technological change in the knowledge economy in cities which leads to the emergence of kind of liberal and cosmopolitan politics in urban areas but leaves the countryside behind as a kind of conservative residual sector what we argue is that major you know major technological changes took place in the 20th century in the agricultural sector too and these new technologies made new politics the countryside in particular technological change made agriculture increasingly capital intensive and it kind of changed the class structure of farming from small family farms to increasingly large scale capital intensive farms um you know which uh i'm the term agribusiness and that the growing economic and political power of these agribusiness interests in rural areas has played an important role in the conservative transformation of rural political preferences okay um and i'm just previewing what i'll you know talk about in greater depth now um empirically what we do to study or test this argument is to exploit a historical natural experiment um which is opposed to our introduction of new irrigation technologies in the great plains namely improved groundwater pumps based on the adaptation of automobile engines as well as center pivot irrigation a method of irrigating large circular fields with a rotating arm what these new technologies did is that it enabled farmers to profitably irrigate otherwise arid land in the great plains but this was a technology that primarily benefited counties with access to groundwater as a result of overlap with the ogallala aquifer a major aquifer in the region okay so this provides a kind of natural experiment and an opportunity to study the evolution of politics across counties that were differentially impacted by this postcard technological shock using a different disc design as well as spatial matching so we're only comparing counties along the boundary of this overall aquifer using this design i'll show that this technological shock played a large role in the region's long-term conservative electoral shift in different types of elections we'll also look at geocoded survey data from you know contemporary surveys and show that even today uh contemporary policy preferences systematically differ between people who live just inside the aquifer where capital intensive agriculture thrives because of this post-war technological shock compared to people just outside okay so with that let me um just jump into the context here um which is you know how did technology and politics co-evolve in the great plains in the 20th century okay um so the great plains basically refers to this geographical region a broad expanse of grassland that stretches in the south from texas all the way up to the dakotas it was first extensively settled by family farms as a result of the homestead act of 1862 which encouraged families to settle and develop agricultural land west of the mississippi river with a promise of property rights if they could show proof of having developed the land the great plains is a naturally arid region with fairly volatile precipitation and so it's not well suited in the absence of irrigation to intensive farming intensive farming combined with drought in fact resulted in the well-known dust bowl of the 1930s a period of drought and dust storms which basically caused agricultural collapse and mass outmigration okay if we're looking at the politics of this region prior to world war ii i would characterize it as eclectic and on the whole centrist tending to mirror national trends for example during the period of national republican party dominance in the 19th century the great plains tended to vote republican too especially because of the republican party's support for the westward expansion of the railroads towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century left-wing politics found great success in the great plains in particular in the form of the populist party as well as fdr's new deal one of the core constituencies of which um were the small family farms these precarious homesteads and small producers who benefited a lot from the system of agricultural safety nets that the new deal created so this is what a kind of typical farm you know in the great plains prior to this technological shock that i'm talking about might have looked like labor was supplied primarily by the household to the extent that there was irrigation it was primarily from these windmill pumps right which were not suitable for provide providing irrigation on a large scale it provided just about enough water for the household and livestock um and uh generally these farms were not particularly profitable these lands were fairly marginal and not very productive okay but following world war ii uh a two interrelated set of innovations transformed agriculture in the great plains okay um the first was the replacement of the windmill pump with petroleum-powered groundwater pumps so deep well pumps that are powered by uh petroleum and natural gas engines which can for the first time efficiently large lift large volumes of water from aquifers in the great plains um so initially this was based on the adaptation of automobile engines to the task of lifting groundwater the second closely related innovation was the invention of center pivot irrigation in 1940. this is a sprinkler-based system of distribution of water from a central well across extremely large circular fields with a rotating arm which could be up to a kilometer in diameter or perhaps even more sometimes okay um so it was invented in 1940 patented in 1952 and spread widely across the great plains from the 1950s onward if you fly across the great plains you'll see these big circular irrigated fields that's the result of center pivot irrigation these two innovations had dramatic consequences they turned parts of the great plains into highly industrialized water and capital intensive farming based on the cultivation of water intensive props like corn animal feedlots which often use a lot of water often the equivalent of a small size city as well as related agricultural industries like meatpacking plants you know which um you know are kind of downstream in the supply chain from um feedlots um and uh farms which provide um hay and things for animals and so these two innovations basically turned a region that had been aired into one of the most industrialized and productive in the world okay so this is just some imagery of what these new technologies that i'm talking about look like on the left hand side this is the patent for frank zeibach's center pivot irrigation a central well to which a rotating arm is connected and it distributes water across a circular field this is an image of a typical kind of petroleum powered pumping system in this case based on a rebuilt v8 automobile engine in 1988 and so with the introduction of these new technologies right farming takes on a scale far greater than had previously existed in this region so we're no longer talking about small unproductive family farms we're talking about highly mechanized large-scale farms with the market value of which is often quite high um so this is what a center pivot irrigation system looks like you can get a sense of just how massive um these installations are okay okay and so with the growing capital intensity of agriculture came a change in the kind of class structure of rural areas so these are a couple of quotations from studies of the great plains the first is the study of haskell county in kansas where sociologists visited this county in 1965 shortly after the introduction of these new education technologies and they noted that farming had become agribusiness and business considerations were dominant throughout the thinking of the farm community the average size farm of 1200 acres represented a considerable capital outbreak outlay and rising operating costs were all but eliminating the marginal farmer in 1965. the environmental historian john opie has a fantastic book on the ogallala aquifer he also kind of makes the same point as irrigation brought prosperity to the high plains smaller farmers were pushed out of the way the shift from the family farm towards large-scale centralized agribusiness operations can be compared to the demise of my pond neighborhood grocery stores after world war ii as supermarkets became commonplace okay and with this changing kind of structure of the agricultural sector came big changes in rural political preferences um and so elena elena and i uh identified kind of three interrelated mechanisms through which the emergence of capital intensive agriculture and agribusiness in the great plains made rural politics increasingly conservative um the first is opposition to regulation uh of on the part of these new interests these large-scale farms are intensive users of land and water there's often toxic runoff that comes off of feedlots and other large-scale agricultural operations and so agribusiness often finds itself in opposition to environmental regulation as other as well as other forms of land use regulation and as a result it tends to favor a small government and that makes it a natural ally of the pro-business republican party's kind of anti-regulation orientation as farmers have become become more prosperous and agribusiness operators too they've taken on the kind of standard political preferences of wealthy and business oriented voters which is to prefer pro-business tax and spending policies for instance they're going to prefer lower taxes less redistribution they're also going to favor an agricultural subsidy system that is less oriented around safety nets for small producers and one that tends to uh and they tend to prefer a system that concentrates subsidies in the largest producers um something we might worry about as well you know wealthy farmers and agribusiness operators are going to be a relatively small minority in rural areas we argue though that the spread of capital intensive agriculture led to a conservative transformation of rural political culture that kind of transcended just wealthy farmers the reason for this was the outsized kind of economic and cultural influence of farmers in rural areas in the great plains and so basically what center pivot irrigation and these new ground water pumps did is they created a post-war economic boom which sustained the kind of entire livelihoods of rural communities which depended on it so even if you're not a wealthy farmer or you're not someone who owns an agribusiness operation you may never nevertheless you know out of a sense of linked fate to kind of internalize their interests too and all these things together um led to an increasingly conservative political orientation and the growing success of the conservative republican party in elections okay so let me kind of illustrate these points to the lens of a single county in rural kansas haskell county which is a county just inside the boundaries of the ogallala aquifer it's an interesting county because rural sociologists have been revisiting this county to conduct rural community studies over a 50-year period that spans the period prior to the introduction of these new technologies as well as the period following the introduction and in these kind of ethnographies you can see how politics have changed in a conservative direction with the spread of these new irrigation technologies okay so the first uh sociologist to visit uh haskell county in the study on the left was earl bell who in 1942 found a county that had been hard hit by the dust bowl which was poor and precarious and which he described as being characterized by a gambling mentality because no one could tell whether the rains were going to fail or arrive in a given year so it was kind of a boom and bust kind of economy and in this kind of precarious and poor context attitudes towards government were fairly favorable um he noted that everyone interviewed was unanimous of the opinion that as one man said if it had not been for the government program we would not be here now we simply could not have made it okay fast forward 20 years 25 years later another sociologist revisits haskell county but this time irrigation technologies have arrived and are widespread in the county and agribusiness has now spread um throughout the county farming is increasingly prosperous uh it no longer depends on rainfall because it's powered by groundwater and this leads to a total shift in attitudes among farmers the haskell county operator believed that he has won through his present day success by virtue of his own efforts if the government will remove its many controls he can grow abundantly all that the country needs and receive good prices for his produce so there's a shift in belief about success as being linked to luck versus effort as well as a kind of corresponding shift in attitudes towards the government as a valuable source of safety nets to something that's a hindrance fast forward another three decades in the 1990s a team of sociologists found that basically today anti-government attitudes are widespread in haskell county agribusiness is dominant and when people residents were asked about problems facing the community the two most frequently mentioned issues were increasing taxation and loss of control to the state and federal governments so this kind of characteristic anti-government mentality that is so uh representative of contemporary rural consciousness in kathy kramer's work so you can see how politics and political culture evolved in haskell county alongside these technological changes this is a picture of the county seat of haskell county in 1954 this is aerial imagery and you can see that this is an early stage where uh irrigation is yet to be widespread although perhaps it was just beginning to spread this is what haskell county looks like in 2006. you can see

these big green circles uh the center pivot irrigation that's our kind of storyline about how you know technological change made rural areas so conservative so let me turn now to how we test the argument empirically okay so the key source of identification in our empirical strategy is that the new irrigation technologies which arrived after world war ii uh required access to groundwater the main source of which in the great plains was the ogallala aquifer one of the largest aquifers in the world which spans eight of the ten great plain states okay so counties have different degrees of overlap with the ogallala aquifer and what this means is we can compare election outcomes before and after the postwar technological shock across counties with more versus less aquifer coverage in a difference in differences frameworks where we're exploiting cross-sectional variation in aquifer coverage together with time variation arising from the post-war production of this new technology and we're going to look at electoral data that spans the period 1920 to 2000. in presidential gubernatorial and senate elections um to further augment the empirical strategy we're going to do some spatial matching uh where we're going to in our preferred specifications limit the sample to counties along the boundary of the ogallala aquifer within a certain buffer um either 100 or 200 kilometers around the outer boundary of the aquifer and also control for state and time state time period fixed effects um so what this means is our estimates are going to be driven by overtime comparisons among spatially proximate counties within the same state with different levels of aquifer coverage comparing before and after the technological shock yeah so i'll illustrate um this with a few pictures okay um the first thing to sort of establish though is that uh technology adoption really was somewhat discontinuous around the boundaries of the oglala aquifer and so in order to validate that we used tools from computer vision and machine learning to take satellite imagery of the great plains and detect these signature circular cropping patterns in satellite imagery and so what we did is we trained a convolutional neural network which is a machine learning algorithm to detect center pivot irrigation systems um in the rectangular grids which characterize property parcels in the american west through the public land survey system okay so in order to train this model we used an existing manually annotated data set that a team of researchers at the university of nebraska assembled over many decades where they hand counted from satellite imagery individual circles of central pivot irrigation in the case of nebraska so they would count and make a note of the latitude and longitude points of these circles that gives us a big training data set where we can feed our convolutional neural network different snippets of satellite imagery uh where it's labeled uh this snippet contains three circles this snippet contains one circle the snippet contains two circles and so forth so we have about 160 000 training images which we train this convolutional neural network with so that we can feed it new images out of sample you know outside of nebraska and in multiple years and it'll learn to predict and count how many center pivot irrigation systems there are in each of these grids okay so this is what this kind of looks like in the case of haskell in the year 2000 uh haskell is divided into many plls plss sections these rectangular grids and in each grid our algorithm is able to predict the number of center pivot irrigation systems in each section typically ranging from one to four we can then aggregate we can do this for the entire state of kansas for example we do this for the whole great plains in every year from 1985 to the year 2000 um what this shows us is the year 2000 in kansas and for all of the hundred thousand or so sections in kansas uh the number of center pivot irrigation systems in each of these pixels each pixel is one of these plss sections so blue indicates more green and blue indicates more center pivot irrigation red indicates none what you'll see is that center pivot irrigation is overwhelmingly concentrated within the boundaries of the ogallala aquifer which are seen here in light blue we can aggregate this up to the county level and normalized by land area so we get a measure of central pivot irrigation systems per thousand square kilometers here we can see at the county level too that counties with greater overlap with the ogallala aquifer have systematically higher levels of technology adoption yeah there's a lot of work uh to say that basically we think that our identification strategy is plausible okay um so we also want to uh refine the empirical strategy further right um it doesn't just suffice to compare counties with more or less uh overlap with the ogallala aquifer um because you might be comparing counties that are far away from one another right we might think that comparing a county all the way up here in northeast kansas might be fundamentally different than one in the south west right for you know a number of reasons which lead to systematically different kind of trajectories in their voting patterns so what we do in our preferred specifications is prune the sample to counties within a certain uh buffer distance of the outer boundary of the ogallala aquifer this ensures that there are different this analyses we're comparing spatially proximate counties within the same state we do this with 200 kilometer buffers as well as 100 kilometer bathrooms this is just to give you a sense of the counties that are going to be that we're going to be comparing um in our empirical analysis yeah and so we can get a sense of the empirical strategy here from a simple scatter plot what this scatter plot shows in the left-hand side panel is counties in the great plains in the 200 kilometer buffer sample on the x-axis is county level aquifer coverage sheriff county lands that overlaps the the ogallala aquifer and on the y-axis is the republican party's share of the two-party vote in presidential elections uh in the pre-technological shock period 1920 to 90 for the average here and in the post-ecological shock period 1980 to 2000 period here in both cases we're partially out state uh fixed effects so we're comparing uh we're partially out state-specific means of both axes okay so if we look at the left-hand side panel what this is telling us is that uh prior to the post-war technology shock there was no association between aquifer coverage and conservative voting in presidential elections for illustrative purposes the counties in kansas are shaded in black so within kansas counties with more aquifer coverage were no more conservative than counties with less so hassell county is pretty middle of the road in its politics as far as republican party voting goes in this period in the post-shock period though we see this large positive association that emerges so county like haskell right which benefited a lot from this post for irrigation technology shock uh is by the 1980s to 2000 period one of the most conservative counties in kansas um compared to other counties with less irrigation coverage um and we argue that this is possibly because of the post-war technology shock that disproportionately benefited these countries with greater overlap with the aquifer so this is just to show you that in pictures we can also turn to regression estimates which basically just estimate ols regressions uh where county level aquifer coverage interacted with a post technology shock dummy variable and we have a prayer period corresponding to the 1920 to 1940 average in elections and a post period corresponding to the 1980 to 2000 average in elections in presidential senatorial and gubernatorial elections um don't be daunted by this like sea of coefficients i'll just interpret this preferred specification right here okay this is uh the sample with a 200 kilometer buffer and state year fixed effects what this difference in difference coefficient right here is telling us is that a county with complete aquifer coverage compared to a county with no aquifer coverage experienced about a 9.5 percentage point increase in the republican party's share of the two-party vote in presidential elections from the pre to the post-technology shock period a pretty large effect in the case of elections to the senate this is a 7.6 percentage point relative increase uh and in the case of gubernatorial elections this is 6.3 percentage might increase um we're estimating two types of standard errors which address spatial and temporal autocorrelation so we have calmly standard errors here and clustered standard errors here which adjust for clustering within state years and within counties over time and here we're also only using the set of counties that have the same boundaries over this entire period um 1920 to 2000 okay so these are pretty big coefficients right a 9.5 percentage

point swing in a presidential election is a big boost to the republican party's electoral performance um something that's interesting about these coefficients is that a cross-specification um the effect tends to be bigger on conservative voting uh the technological shock seems to lead to a bigger conservative shift in more national than in more local elections so a bigger swing in presidential than in gubernatorial elections um this is plausibly we think uh because the democratic party perhaps is better able to adjust its platform in more local elections to win over kind of the farmers and rural voters in a way that's less possible in national elections where the two parties platforms are more sharply polarized but that's our kind of working hypothesis yeah was this plausibly due to greater uptake of irrigation technology in place counties with greater aquifer coverage um yes um what this is showing us here is that count a county with complete aquifer coverage compared to a country with no october coverage experienced about a 14 percentage point increase in the share of irrigated farmland from the pre-shock to the post-shock period um compared to a county with no aquifer coverage a big impact so irrigation did spread much more widely in these areas as they were becoming more conservative we can look at the number of centre pivot irrigation systems per thousand square kilometers as counted from satellite imagery same story in a county with complete aquifer coverage compared to one with no aquifer coverage in the same state within 200 kilometers of this boundary uh from the pre to the post shock period you see an additional 21 central pivot irrigation systems per thousand square kilometers which is um a huge number relative to the sample mean something we might be concerned about is the timing of these effects um is this is this conservative shift which took place in counties with greater overlap with the ogallala aquifer is this something that actually emerged with the post-war technology shock or were they always already kind of drifting in a conservative direction potentially violating the parallel trends assumption in difference and differences designs to look at this we basically take a full county year county election year panel data set from 1910 to 2000 and we interact the aquifer coverage variable um with decadal dummy variables uh and leave out the 1930s as the reference category so we look at cross-sectional associations between aquifer coverage uh in different decades relative to the 1930s the decade prior to the introduction of the new technology um and what we seem to see is that in presidential senate and gubernatorial elections there is little kind of trend or association between aquifer covered in conservative voting and the decades prior to the post-war uh irrigation technology shock but it's precisely in the 1940s and 1950s that this big positive relationship between aquifer coverage and conservative voting tends to emerge and this corresponds exactly to this uptick in irrigation so this is measured from agricultural sentences this is the association with decadal association between aquifer coverage and the percentage of irrigated farmland which increases as we would expect only once technologies become available to harness the groundwater so something we can look at is different channels here um so this is measured from agricultural and population censuses all variables are scaled by one plus or minus one standard deviation of their in-sample values so we can get a sense of comparative magnitudes so let's look at some different potential channels this is exactly the same thing looking at the association between aquifer coverage and different outcomes in different decades over time relative to the 1930s the first is the average value per farm in thousands of inflation adjusted dollars we see that there's no association between aquifer coverage and the value of market value of farms but this big spike that emerges following the 1940s at its height in the 1970s the typical farm was almost 500 thousand dollars more valuable in a county with complete aquifer coverage than in a typical farm in a county with no oxford coverage uh the density of farms the relative density of farms also increases following this post-war technology shock so if you multiply these two things the value per farm at the farms for a thousand acres you basically find that following this post-war irrigation technology shock the economic value of agriculture greatly increases in places with greater overlaps with the ogallala aquifer it's becoming more capital intensive um by contrast we don't see evidence for other potential channels like um you know the percentage of the population employed in agriculture does increase in relative terms but it's not a huge effect we might think that these places are becoming more rural you know as agriculture is intensified in these areas but that's not really the case population density decreases by a minuscule amount you know in places with more aquifer coverage relative to less and in places with greater coverage we actually see a relative increase in urbanization um the number of people living in the percentage of the population living in cities due to the emergence of small towns and areas of intensive agriculture so this is not just the story of depopulation or increasing virality is it a story about just the increasing kind of religiosity of these areas that's making them more conservative that doesn't really seem to be the case either here we look at the number per capita church membership um and here we do see a small uptick you know beginning in the 1970s the one that is small and not statistically significant okay so what i want you to take away from that is uh testing channels seem to suggest that this is a story about the effect conservative shift being driven by the spread of capital intensive agriculture as opposed to some potential alternative channels okay finally we can look at contemporary policy preferences to study the political legacy of this post-war irrigation technology shock okay we can't provide temp sort of time series evidence on this since we don't have good high resolution data on policy preferences prior to their irrigation technology shocks the 1940s but we do have a lot of data from the cooperative congressional election surveys which are uh carried out with thousands of respondents every year from 2006 to 2020 which asks respondents in nationally representative samples about their policy preferences on a range of issues this gives us a good number of respondents living around the ildawala aquifer and the great plains and so we can compare the reported contemporary policy preferences of people living just inside the ogallala aquifers versus those living just outside and we will look at preferences concerning the three well three different issues regulation tax and spending policies and then issues that we might think of as pertaining to the culture words okay so this is just to show you uh what we're comparing here where we can geocode respondents down to the zip code level and we're going to compare the reported policy preferences of individuals living in zip codes outside versus inside of the ogallala aquifer controlling for year and for survey waves and year fixed effects and again we're going to look at different specifications which prune the sample to increasingly small bandwidths around the outer boundary of the aquifer okay so we're comparing people just inside versus just outside okay since we're you know running out of time i won't belabor this um but let me just summarize what this table says it basically shows that people living just inside the ogallala for are systematically more conservative in their reported policy preferences than people living outside they're more likely to oppose environmental regulation more likely to support repealing the affordable care act more likely to support um not finding employers for hiring undocumented labor more likely to support banning immigrants from access to public public services more likely to oppose taxes more likely to oppose more likely to support cutting the welfare state um something that's pretty interesting is on cultural issues there are also some differences um especially when it comes to abortion so they're more likely to support never giving a woman with the right to choose to have an abortion beyond a certain period in her pregnancy when it comes to background checks for guns or affirmative action the differences seem to be smaller so the big differences in economic policy preferences which are systematically more conservative among people living inside the boundaries of the ogallala aquifer where this technological shock had the biggest impact but there seemed to have been also some spillover onto some cultural issues which is interesting um and perhaps a feedback effect of the increasing conservatives of these areas and republican party messaging okay um so i know that's a lot of information i've given you so let me just conclude with what i think are some of the big picture takeaways i think in this paper we offer a new explanation for the rise of rural conservatism that doesn't hinge on sort of distraction by cultural issues but is instead perfectly consistent with economic self-interest what we find is that the post-war technology shocked revolutionized agriculture and the great plains making it increasingly capital intensive and contributing to the emergence of new upwardly mobile farmers and agribusiness interests the growing economic and political power of these interests in rural areas we argue has contributed to conservative transformation overall political preferences and in this way new technologies made new politics in the great plains um we obviously look at a specific case one that's important because you know kansas and the great plains has been so central to this debate but we also think that you know you can see analogous dynamics in other parts of the country um in california central valley in the midwest as agriculture has increased in scale and become increasingly capital intensive um it's become increasingly conservative in its political orientation i would even conjecture this is a story that potentially extends beyond the united states to other advanced capitalist economies uh but i'd be happy to talk about these kind of external validity issues in the discussion um so with that i'll end here and thanks so much for your attention okay thanks adi that was extremely interesting from my perspective anyway uh so as i said uh initially we have a formal discussant uh brian leonard from arizona state all right thanks jeff and thank you audie i really enjoyed uh having the opportunity to to read this paper and kind of a good reason to engage with it deeply it was a really fun paper to read and really well written and touches on a lot of my interest in both land use and water so and economic history so it was a pleasure um i think what i'll do is i'll just kind of briefly summarize how i saw the paper and then and then try to offer a few comments so uh in my mind the kind of key motivating research question right is trying to understand why rural areas tend to be strongholds of conservatism today and that question is particularly interesting given the historical context in the paper uh that this hasn't always been the case right so why why is it that we have this association between rural areas and conservatism now when it didn't used to be the case and then this paper is going to focus specifically on the role of technological and economic change in affecting political preferences within rural areas and we'll get into this in a moment but i think there's a kind of a key distinction between the level at which these two research questions are operating so what this paper is going to do right just in a nutshell just to summarize again is compare political preferences before versus after certain agricultural areas are exposed to a big major productivity shock the time series variation for that shock is going to come from the invention of gas ground water pumps and center pivot irrigation and then the cross-sectional variation is going to come from whether you have access to this massive aquifer or not and the key finding of the paper is that counties with aquifer overlap became more conservative after this technology shock and that these same areas see important productivity shocks in agriculture that are associated with the more intensive use of two key inputs which would be water and the capital that's necessary to extract that water and we'll talk about that more a little bit later so in terms of contributions of this paper um i think it offers some really nice new insights on the political consequences of technological change and productivity shocks in agriculture and i think this is potentially really interesting because sort of in in my neck of the woods in the world of environmental and resource and ag economists a lot of folks are spending a lot of effort thinking about the relationship between climate change and agriculture and productivity and how technology might mediate the relationship between climate and productivity and so i think also bringing in kind of the political consequences of productivity shocks and agriculture and thinking about the political economy of technological change could be really important as we think about like what is climate change going to mean for agriculture moving forward i also think um that this paper in particular relates to this new and emerging literature that tries to grapple with or understand the historical foundations of the modern political landscape in america and i didn't see that connection as discussed as much in the paper but to me this was like a really obvious connection so two papers i would mention that we'll come back to in a moment um are this kind of now infamous paper by bosnian co-authors about frontier culture and rugged individualism the sort of part two paper shows that these places that have uh sort of more frontier experience in the 19th century have less stringent covid policy today and less compliance with those policies so there's this clear link between historical experience and modern politics and then there's a new working paper by uh samuel bazi and other co-authors looking at southern migration so migration of white southerners out of the south and how that maps onto rural conservatism today and i'll come back to that paper in a moment but i think that this paper uh connects to those uh in this nice sort of trying to understand the historical foundations of our modern political landscape so i want to offer kind of three broad comments or maybe sets of comments with some sub points to them um and we if we run out of time in the in in the third one that's okay um first i want to kind of challenge maybe a false equivalence between rural versus urban and agricultural and think through what that means second i want to talk a little bit more about sort of the specific findings in the context of agriculture and what those might mean and then three i want to offer some potential alternative explanations for the core finding and let me say that i think the core finding in this paper this change in conservative attitudes uh associated with being on versus off the aquifer before versus after the advent of groundwater pumping is a really nice and really robust result uh that comes through really cleanly but here was something that i kind of struggled with as i read the paper so the underlying thing we're trying to understand right if we just sort of put politics on our standard left right spectrum we've got you know liberal or left-leaning politics and then we've got this continuum down to more right-wing politics and the key motivating question so this was research question number one right is why is it that today in america and in many sort of developed countries there's this association between rural areas and conservative politics or this rural urban divide that folks talk about so that's kind of the motivating question in the paper but then the identifying variation in the natural experiment is going to compare or find the key result of the paper is going to be that places that had access to the aquifer experience this conservative shift relative to places that didn't have access to the aquifer right but i think this creates a little bit of a challenge or for me a little bit of a disconnect because at the end of the day this identifying variation that's driving the empirical exercise is essentially going to be orthogonal to this rural urban divide right so this is borrowing from figure seven in the paper or maybe i guess it's figure eight in the paper uh and as audi just told us there's not really any impact on population density and there's sort of a late and small increase in urbanization but it comes several decades after sort of the initial findings on rightward shifts in politics so if i were to redraw this figure i would sort of draw it this way which is to say in this paper the identifying variation is sort of aquifer access versus not pre versus post and that's what maps on to the difference in politics but in this paper that's basically orthogonal to the rural urban divide so what i would say is that this paper is telling us something about how the transition to high-value agriculture from low-value agriculture has political consequences which to me is a different question than what explains the rural urban divide in politics and audi to his credit and co-author recognized this in the paper so this is pulled from page 33 of the paper um you know basically saying this this doesn't really tell us you know that this isn't driven by differences between rural and urban areas it's more about understanding technological change within agricultural areas and to me this was just a little bit i think based on reading the introduction i was expecting to see more of a rural versus urban story i don't think that's what this paper is about and i think that's okay but i think maybe repackaging it so that you don't fail to deliver on that promise another way of sort of characterizing it would be with this kind of sort of two by two you could think about having counties that are more urban and more rural and you could think about having counties that have access to the aquifer versus not and i think mostly this paper kind of lives in the second column which is finding that places that transition to high value agriculture become more conservative within rural areas relative to places that don't make that transition that don't become as conservative so given that i want to think about the importance of agriculture in explaining sort of this core finding in the paper so this paper looks at several agricultural outcomes there's increases in the fraction of a county that's irrigated there's increases in the number of center pivots there's increases in farm values and there's increases in the number of farms this is closely related to two papers in the economics literature um that i think you should take a look at and i think could be really helpful um so this edwards and smith paper in 2018 is addressing sort of a broader question about increases in water access in the mid 20th century but i would say about half of their results are focused on essentially this exact pre-post 1940s on versus off aquifer comparison they measure things like land value and crop value in slightly different ways that i think are maybe more natural to economists that might actually help you with uh some precision in your results so instead of looking at the average value of a farm for instance they look at land value per acre they actually have a measure of irrigation capital per acre like a monetized measure so there's some things there that i think that i think could really help you but at the end of the day the upshot is the same which is that being over the ogallala aquifer results in a large in this major positive productivity shock for agriculture right uh a related more recent paper that's an interdisciplinary environmental research letters journal they find that having access to groundwater storage i.e being over the ogallala uh makes places more resilient to drought in the late 20th century so when you have a drought uh places that are sitting over the ogallala so you see smaller declines in yields and acreage and things like this and this leads to this long-run diverging trend between these two regions so to kind of bring all that together again there was a tension here for me which is that the sort of historical narrative in the first half of the paper was the story about how technological change and being over the aquifer led to large-scale business-like farms and that these larger uh sort of more profitable farms uh lead to this shift in political preferences to me that's a little bit at odd with what the empirical evidence both in this paper and in the edwards and smith work actually shows which is that so so if i take the result from this paper uh kind of the key results or one of the key results in figure seven uh is that being over the aquifer is associated with having uh larger increases in farms per acre so if we flip that relationship around that means there are smaller farms because if you hold acreage constant which is you know you've got county fixed effects in here so we're holding differences in acreage between counties constant you're actually seeing more small farms that's equivalent to seeing more center pivots uh and so ultimately what you're finding is that there are smaller at least in terms of acreage but more valuable farms and in general this is pretty consistent with kind of what we find in agricultural economics which is that there's this inverse relationship between aridity or i guess a positive relationship between aridity and farm size so more arid areas tend to have larger farms places where you can water more intensively the efficient scale of farming is actually smaller so to me they still leave us with a little bit of a puzzle which is why are these areas that are characterized by more and higher value farms characterized by more conservative political preferences and one question that i had that i wonder if you can get out with the empirics at all is whose preferences are changing is it the farmers themselves and we maybe we have more farmers and these farmers are more profitable and their preferences are changing is it the winners preferences in other words or are there folks that are somehow losing out from this sort of consolidation or business like you know farms becoming more business like are there losers and is it more of a conservative backlash to that change i think trying to understand that might be really interested interesting um i really liked sort of the survey-based evidence at the end of the paper linking to pro-business policy and thinking about how that might map onto these changes um but i wanted to suggest sort of three possible kind of alternative explanations or alternative mechanisms let's say that you might be able to explore at relatively low cost i think so the first relates to common fuel resource governance and how that sort of maps onto the variation you're looking at the second is this recent paper by bosnian co-authors on the southern migration and then the final one is one you mentioned in the paper sort of in the narrative history which is exposure to new deal programs so i'll try to run through these very very quickly um and then hopefully we can have uh plenty of time to talk about it so one key difference between these places that are over the aquifer versus not and what happens with the shock is that you get this massive collective action common pool resource problem as a result of groundwater pumping so it's a classic you know everybody shares the same aquifer i'm going to stick my straw in and then drink your milkshake milkshake it's a classic problem right um where management does exist in these areas and there's not a lot of groundwater management but where it does exist at least according to eric edwards who's sort of my groundwater guru it's pretty bottom-up there's not a lot of top-down policy to manage these aquifers it's closer to kind of bottom-up ostromy type arrangements that then get codified into uh formal local political institutions i think this could be really interesting and i asked some of my sort of more awesome focused friends and this was the closest thing i could come up with to this in the literature there's this paper in the jpe in 2020 that finds that places that have more communal values are associated with uh more conservative politics particularly in rural america and so i guess what i'm wondering here is if perhaps there's this story where exposure to this common fool dilemma which is a big deal i mean highlighting you know highlighted by the farm values that you're looking at in this paper like this is the big deal in this region is this commonal resource dilemma uh some places then sort of are forced to develop these communal institutions to manage this dilemma and could that be associated with a rightward shift in policy this is armchair theorizing about politics from an economist so i realize uh you know we're kind of making it up as we go but it might be worth looking into and and one thing that i think that could be really neat about this and lend it to some pretty nice tests is that edwards 2016 finds that the benefits of adopting management really vary based on the sort of exogenous geologic characteristics of the aquifer so within the aquifer there's areas that are more connected where your neighbor's behavior affects you more and places where recharge occurs more rapidly so adopting institutions could have uh sort of a larger benefit so there might be some really nice sort of exogenous variation in the extent of the collective action problem within the aquifer that would allow you to explore this as a possible mechanism the second one i wanted to mention is this new paper by bosnian co-authors on what they call the other great migration which is a bunch of white southerners sort of leaving the south in the early 20th century two things struck me as interesting as i was reading this paper reading your paper and reminded of this paper one is that their kind of key explanatory variable is the share of white southerners living in a county in 1940 so the timing is pretty similar the other if we just do like a quick kind of eyeball ocular regression here is that if i kind of focus in on the great planes it's at least suggestive that some of the areas that are over the aquifer might actually have a larger share of white cell members i'm not sure why that could be it might have something to do with in migration or out migration before versus after the dust bowl i'm not particularly sure but this just struck me as th this was sort of the other paper that was looming large in my mind as trying to explain rural conservatism in modern america and so i just wondered if there's some sort of relationship here and the timing is also somewhat suggestive last sort of uh hair brained alternative mechanism and then

2022-01-18 15:37

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