Place Character and the Local Welfare State: Counties' Social Services and Public Provisions Across Rural and Urban Communities

ABSTRACT

Relatively little attention has been given to rural local governments' social safety net and public service provisions. We develop a framework to explain how the character of communities influence social and other public services provided by local governments and why rural–urban differences may exist. Theoretically, our framework links conceptualizations of place character with welfare state theory. We illustrate our framework using original primary data collected for 1086 counties spanning the USA. The character of communities varies along economic, sociopolitical, and governmental lines. These same factors influence the services that county governments provide, with results for sociopolitical factors and local government capacity tending to follow welfare state theory. But contrary to views of a binary metro‐nonmetro divide: big‐city metro counties diverge most from others, especially remote rural counties, and possess characteristics that make them much better equipped to protect the local social safety net even as they engage in competitive economic development; suburban metros are closer to their nonmetro counterparts in service provision and governance; and counties overall face operating pressures. Our findings indicate that future work should consider spatial inequality in the social safety net across graduations of rural–urban communities and whether gaps with big‐city metros are intensifying.