The Changing Demography of Rural and Small-Town America
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The Changing Demography of Rural and Small‑Town America Tim Slack1 · Leif Jensen2 Received: 19 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The rural United States is sometimes viewed as a paragon of stability, but demographic change has been a constant. Rural and small-town America is diverse, dynamic, and relational to (rather than separate from) urban places. Dominant demographic trends in the rural U.S. over recent decades include depopulation (driven by population aging and youth out-migration), increasing ethnoracial diversity (especially as linked to Hispanic population growth), and in-migration to select areas associated with metropolitan adjacency (i.e., exurban growth), retirement destinations, and natural amenities. This special issue of Population Research and Policy Review assembled a group of papers focused squarely on the changing demography of rural and small-town America in the early twenty-first century that address issues of broad interest to demographers: population growth and decline, fertility, mortality, migration, ethnoracial composition, and economic inequality. The prospect is for a rural America marked by ever more diversity and inequality within and between places. Our hope is that these articles, and the broader spectrum of scholarship on rural demography they represent, will inspire the next generation of research in this area. Keywords Rural demography · Fertility · Mortality · Migration · Population change The contemporary United States is a decidedly urban nation. For more than a century the increasing concentration of the U.S. population in the metropolis and the spatial expansion of cities through suburbanization have comprised “a master * Tim Slack [email protected] Leif Jensen [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, Louisiana State University, Stubbs Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA
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Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education, The Pennsylvania State University, Armsby Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA
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demographic trend” (Lichter and Ziliak 2017, p. 16). Today, not only are metropolitan areas the context in which most Americans reside, they are the centers of power for economic, political, and media interests. The net result is that most people’s lived experience, the popular definition of social issues, public policy, and media portrayals of American life are all urbancentric. In part, this is why the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump came as a surprise to so many, when he garnered disproportionate support from the millions of Americans who continue to live and work outside the nation’s major cities. Trump’s strong performance in rural areas—which are typically Republican strongholds—combined with especially pivotal votes in smaller Rust Belt cities, allowed him to edge out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College (Monnat and Brown 2017). Flyover country had demanded notice. This special issue of Population Research and Policy Review addresses this national b
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