A new $590,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture will help fund an ongoing project to survey county governments across the U.S. to better understand the challenges they face in providing services and enacting policies that improve economic growth and well-being in rural communities.
Paige Kelly, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences, is collaborating on the project with Amanda McMillan Lequieu, assistant professor of sociology at Drexel University and the National Association of Counties.
This will be the fifth wave of the survey, which was administered for the first time in 2001 by Linda Lobao, distinguished professor emeritus of rural sociology, sociology and geography at Ohio State.
"This survey has been a key source of information about how rural local governments versus ones in urban areas provide services," Kelly said. "County-level governments are the largest providers of social and economic development services in rural areas, so it's important to capture how those populations experience local government, including the types of services and opportunities that they're able to provide."
These include public services such as public safety, health services and infrastructure, as well as social services such as childcare, elder care and mental health support, among others.
Kelly explained that because funding can be so competitive on the county level, many people's experiences with their local government are shaped by where they live.
"A long-term trend we've seen is, since the 1980s, local governments have been tasked with providing and doing a lot more over time - and typically with fewer resources," Kelly said. "Especially in rural counties, you might have a local government that has only one or two part-time employees, but they're expected to provide the same level of services as these metropolitan counties that have thousands of employees."
For this new phase of the study, the researchers will administer a survey to approximately 3,000 county governments across the country. It will include questions about public services, economic development strategies, public involvement in policymaking and more.
"The survey also asks about the challenges they face in providing services and economic development," Kelly said. "Whether that's a loss of revenue from the federal or state government, or even pressure from taxpayers to reduce taxes, we're looking at some of the barriers that they face in promoting development and also promoting the well-being of their residents through the services that they provide."
After the researchers complete this wave of the survey, they will analyze the data to examine how policy has changed over the past 25 years and assess which factors have affected county-level policy development. They also will conduct case studies of rural county governments, which they haven't done in previous waves.
"We'll be looking at examples of rural counties that have been successful in maintaining services despite a more limited capacity and studying how they managed to do that," Kelly said. "While the survey is very good at getting at what is going on, the case study should help us illuminate how."
She added that the goal is to develop policy recommendations for how local governments can better manage some of these dynamics.
"We hope to contribute to policy debates about the importance of local governments," Kelly said. "Additionally, the goal is to gain insight about how rural local governments - and the farmers, neighbors and other residents they support - can thrive in the contexts of both stressors and supports."
This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture and Hatch Appropriation under Project 2026-67023-46012. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the funders.
