Is there a link between population density and voting habits?

I think Deeg has got it. The less contact you have with other people, the easier it is to ignore them.

I realize that this John Stuart Mill quote is somewhat inflamatory, but it is also a reflection of the sentiment listed above - that in outlying areas, people are less inclined to value intellect, education, and rationality. Yes, yes, a bit of a gross generalization, but rooted in some measure of truth that is alluded to in **Ambushed’s **post. And it overlays some of the generalities of voting patterns that the Red/Blue dichotomy sometimes reveals.
“While it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, most stupid people are conservative.”

I think actually it a fundamental division that occurs in ALL human societies, between urban and rural culture. Rural people view city dwellers as either effete and pampered elitists, or ghetto dwelling thugs with no values. Urban people view countryside dwellers as dumb peasants or pampered aristocrats.

It goes all the way back to the birth of civilisation, the word itself is derived from the latin for “city deweller” implying that those who did NOT dwell in cities were , by definitino, uncivilised.

Yes, the main national newspapers could be bought (or subscribed to) out in the countryside. But they don’t have local news pages -what happened in your village, only “big” news. Do UK newspapers have different local pages for different regions, or no local pages at all, or do they cover all local news for the entire country? How do people get the local news?

There are local newspapers. In many areas they’re actually not so local apart from the front and rear couple of pages.

Here in southeast Michigan (USA), the big regional papers have separate local sections that are distributed in the localities to which they pertain. We have no national newspapers for making a comparison, unless you include USA Today (too small to count, I think; 3/4 of the circulation has to be hotels and motels).

[Sociologist]

We as individuals tend to think we do our own thinking.

To a rather large extent, we do not; we rake through memes that match other memes that we’ve absorbed; the waves and tides of new thought as entertained by the species at large ripple through generations. Very few individuals come up wtih large-scale composite mental structures in their head that no one else shared. And when they do, they are generally unable to communicate much of it. It’s just not how thought within our species actually plays out.

[/Sociologist]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying you are but a passive puppet of your social environment. I’m saying that the role of the individual in critiquing and giving more energy to this meme or that association, however critical it may be to the process, just isn’t how we tend to think of it, which is the individual taking in all of the raw data and concepts and drawing totally independent and unique conclusions from it.

OK with that in mind: the memes of our species’ various cultures over the last 10,000 or so years have largely developed in an agrarian and patriarchal and scarcity-driven environment. The patriarchal and scarcity parts go hand in hand with a general trend towards seeking control, and towards the end implementing social mores of the sort that we modern sophisticates find tightly constraining and overly restrictive, not to mention sexually polarized and adversarially poised between the sexes. OK, c’mon, you do know that that description fits most of our agrarian history, or at least you should.

Well, the background of everyday life, symbols, tasks, language patterns, repeated tasks, etc etc etc, that most closely resemble those in which those behavioral patterns arose would still be agrarian, or rural, with small town or county or parish events, community interchanges, etc… it’s not by any means exactly & precisely akin to how we lived in 1303 but it’s still a more old-fashioned world with more of those roles rituals rules and overtones, including the everyday langauge to describe it.

And the 10+ century moralities that we now think of as sociallly conbservative political perspectives are part of that. Fit into it. Resonate within it. Get amplified by it. Or at least considerably more so than they fit / resonte with / get amplifed by city life and city events and urban lifestyles.

City people are more closely packed and in some ways more intimate, but more briefly so with a greater expectation of real privacy via anonymity rather than cloistered isolation. It’s a world lest driven by the anticipation of how others will view you, more driven instead by the anticipation of what strategies will bring you personal happiness and success and fulfillment. It is as pragmatic as the other, but it is a much more personal and local pragmatism, with far less to do with concerns for behavioral mores held as “moral standards” by others. Thus, old societal memes have far less effect, far fewer real teeth. To the extent that moral codes and ethical constraints and concerns seem to spill directly over into personal satisfaction and actualization and individual price, they may hold considerable sway, but there’s a heckuva lot more freedom to ditch the ones that mostly, actually, don’t. And in the urban metropoolis we learn from each other these newer fresher less baggage-encumbered values, these societal rules, and to the extent that we do care about each others’ opinions, the matrix of those opinions are themselves, therefore, different.

The agrarian world as our species knew it started to end in the 1800s with the industrial revolution, and for quite some time now has not been the modal human experience of how things are. Its rules and conclusions and wisdoms do not match our personal experiences. But we think in long slow waves, and we did human civ according to these principles from the time language and permanent dwellings were the new going thing up until more people in our culture had flown in an airplane than had milked a cow. That’s a long time for memes to get embedded and we are conservatives — we are! — and we move away from the obsolete only slowly and tenatatively.

We are postpatriarchal but still very very much in the shadow of who we have been.

All politics is local, and all political thinking is related to what goes on locally, where you can define “local” as various degrees of proximity to your own household. Rural people aren’t necessarily “stupid” because they vote conservative, but rather (in general) their causes are best met, and similarly for traditional liberals in high density areas.

The Founders knew all this, and it’s why we elect national-level politicians in the way we do. Unfortunately we’ve adopted the “all politics is national” mindset, which tears the country apart. Rural folk want to impose values on city slickers, and then the reverse. We suburbanites are left picking the lesser of both evils.