… Places commonly differ in terms of the composition of the people who reside there. No one is arguing about that fact. The question is whether composition is all there is, or whether place has an independent effect. Are two people, identical in their demographic profiles, likely to vary in their political behavior if one lives in a rural local and the other in an urban one? Investigating such a question has been difficult given the sample sizes of most surveys. … We get around this limitation in by drawing upon pooled Gallup monthly surveys across a sixteen-year period to reach a sample size of over 100,000 respondents, including thousands of rural voters. CONT.
James G. Gimpel, Nathan Lovin, Bryant Moy & Andrew Reeves, Political Behavior
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