ABSTRACT
Rural states have more than 56 percent of their population living neither in central cities nor in suburban areas. Urban states have less than 52 percent living outside central cities and suburban areas. Both in the South and the non-South, rural states differ from urban states in that, expectedly, the urban states have higher proportions of white-collar workers. Region specifies when rural and urban differences predict the percentage of blacks in the population of a state. In the South urban and rural states alike have close to a 20-percent black population. Political culture is to a state what ideology is to an individual. There are two more or less established ways of looking at government structure. One is to ascertain the power relationship between levels of government, in this case between the states and their localities. The other is to assess the power relationship between the legislative and the executive branches of the state governments.
