How did rural areas become conservative electoral strongholds in the US and other advanced capitalist economies? This paper argues that technological change transformed not only agriculture but rural political preferences during the twentieth century. It studies a natural experiment: the post-WWII introduction of improved groundwater pumps and center-pivot irrigation, which enabled farmers to irrigate otherwise arid land in the Great Plains. These innovations mainly benefited counties overlying the Ogallala aquifer – a pattern we validate with computer-vision estimates of technology diffusion using satellite imagery. Difference-in-difference analyses exploiting this differential impact indicate that technological change played a large role in the region’s long-term conservative electoral transformation. Additional tests, including comparison of individual policy preferences inside/outside of the Ogallala aquifer, support the hypothesis that this was due to increasingly capital-intensive agriculture and the growing power of agribusiness interests which benefit from conservative economic policies. The findings demonstrate how new technologies made new politics in rural America.
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Dasgupta et al. (2020) studied this question.