Recent accounts of American politics focus heavily on urban–rural gaps in political behavior. Rural politics research is growing but may be stymied by difficulties defining and measuring which Americans qualify as “rural.” We discuss theoretical and empirical challenges to studying rurality. Much existing research has been inattentive to conceptualization and measurement of rural geography. We focus on improving estimation of different notions of rurality and provide a new dataset on urban–rural measurement of U.S. state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2020, Political Behavior, 845–864) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2017, The Journal of Politics, 45–59) survey data to show rural self-identification is not well-captured with objective, place-based classifications, suggesting a rethinking of theoretical and empirical accounts of rural identity. We conclude with strategies for operationalizing rurality using readily available tools.

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: State capacity is a key concept for research in public policy and political science. Despite its importance, there is no broadly accepted measure of state capacity in the existing literature, and frequently used measures of capacity have not been examined for their validity. We begin with an explicit definition of state capacity -the state's ability to implement public policy -and connect this definition to a measurable outcome of state capacity -the state's taxation of income. We show that this measure, income taxes as a percentage of total tax revenue, is a useful indicator of state capacity and meets higher standards of measurement validity than other tax-based indicators. We also compare our measure to the most common existing indicators of state capacity to show that income taxation is a better theoretical and statistical measure of states' effectiveness in policy implementation.

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Latin America's largest federations have significantly reduced their levels of income inequality in recent years, perhaps reflecting a structural change toward egalitarianism. However, we argue that the political geography of federalism in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico strongly shapes preferences against centralized redistribution likely to promote equity in the long term. While federalism does not necessary lead to lower redistribution in theory, the geographic spread of income and malapportioned political institutions limit egalitarianism in these nations. These dynamics help explain why fiscal structures are distinct in Latin American federations as compared to federations in high-income countries. First, we show that the territorial structure of inequality and malapportionment are associated with lower redistributive effort in the global context and that the Latin American federations have extreme values for both variables. Second, using a new data set of income distributions within and across Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico over time, we demonstrate that the conditions that favor fiscal transfers from the national to subnational governments are consistently strong, but conditions are rarely favorable for centralized policies to equilibrate national income. Unequal income patterns are reinforced by legislative malapportionment, which encourages interregional transfers to regions and limits the political voice of more populated and unequal regions that would benefit from centralized redistribution.Las federaciones más grandes de América Latina han reducido significativamente sus niveles de desigualdad de ingresos en los últimos años, lo que quizás refleja un cambio estructural hacia el igualitarismo. Sin embargo, este estudio argumenta que la geografía política del federalismo en Argentina, Brasil y México moldea fuertemente las preferencias en contra de la redistribución centralizada que promueve la equidad a largo plazo. Aunque, en teoría, el federalismo no necesariamente reduce la redistribución, la distribución geográfica de los ingresos y la representación desproporcionada de las instituciones políticas limitan el igualitarismo en eses países. Estas dinámicas ayudan a explicar las estructuras fiscales son distintas en las federaciones de América Latina en comparación con las federaciones de países desarrollados. Primero, se muestra que una estructura territorial de desigualdad y la inadecuada distribución política están asociadas con un menor esfuerzo redistributivo en un contexto global y que las federaciones de América Latina tienen valores extremos de ambas variables. Segundo, utilizando una nueva base de datos sobre la distribución dentro y a través de las regiones de Argentina, Brasil y México a lo largo del tiempo, se demuestra que las condiciones que favorecen las transferencias fiscales desde el nivel nacional a los gobiernos subnacionales son consistentemente propicias, pero las condiciones son raramente favorables para que las políticas centralizadas equilibren los ingresos nacionales. Patrones d...

Political scientists are increasingly interested in the geographic distribution of political and economic phenomena. Unlike distribution measures at the individual level, geographic distributions depend on the “unit question” in which researchers choose the appropriate political subdivision to analyze, such as nations, subnational regions, urban and rural areas, or electoral districts. We identify concerns with measuring geographic distribution and comparing distributions within and across political units. In particular, we highlight the potential for threats to inference based on the modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), whereby measuring concepts at different unit aggregations alters the observed value. We offer tangible options for researchers to improve their research design and data analysis to limit the MAUP. To help manage the measurement error when the unit of observation is unclear or appropriate data are not available, we introduce a new measure of geographic distribution that accounts for fluctuations in the scale and number of political units considered. We demonstrate using Monte Carlo simulations that our measure is more reliable and stable across political units than commonly used indicators because it reduces measurement fluctuations associated with the MAUP.

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