An analysis of Scots-Irish may help to explain why rural white voters in many areas of the South and West often share similar viewpoints, and why they differ from rural whites in areas like New England and the upper Midwest in their cultural beliefs and voting patterns.

Brandeis Professor David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion's Seed, "90 percent of the backsettlers [in Appalachia] were either English, Irish or Scottish; and an actual majority came from Ulster, the Scottish lowlands, and the [Scots-English] north of England...they established in the southern highlands [of the U.S.] a cultural hegemony that was even greater than their proportion in the population."

Only 1.5% of the U.S. population identified as Scots-Irish in the last census, but there are many more whose origins have been lost to history, and their influence is much stronger than their sheer numbers. Anecdotally, country music is the direct descendant of Scots-Irish folk music. Many Protestants who identify as Irish are likely of Scots-Irish descent: a very high number of Irish Protestants in the 1800s were of Scottish origins. Many Scots who came over in the early years of the Republic are Scots-Irish as well. Finally, the 2000 Census map of the concentration of the 7.2 percent of U.S. citizens who identify their ethnicity as "American" in the census very closely mirrors maps of Scots-Irish settlement patterns. Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), himself a proud Scots-Irishman, wrote in his book Born Fighting that approximately 10% of Americans, or 30 million people, are of Scots-Irish descent.

Unlike other ethnic groups in the U.S., the Scots-Irish do not overtly identify as an ethnic bloc in politics. As University of North Carolina professor emeritus John Shelton Reed put it, "You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if they know it they just [don't] acknowledge it. It's not something they really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don't think they are a self-conscious voting bloc."

Sen. Webb argues, "Few key Democrats seem even to know that the Scots-Irish exist, as this culture is so adamantly individualistic that it will never overtly form into one of the many interest groups that dominate Democratic Party politics." He blames former Vice President Al Gore's loss in 2000 on his losses in Tennessee and West Virginia, which he attributes to Gore's positions on gun rights.

Still, while the Scots-Irish may not participate in the same group politics that other ethnicities do, they still share many common cultural values that have held on in many parts of the country, especially the Appalachian South. Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen, psychology professors at the University of Michigan and University of Illinois, conducted an in-depth study in the 1990s examining what they dubbed the "Culture of Honor" prevalent in the South. In trying to find out why violence rates were significantly higher in the South, they discovered that white southerners tended to be much more likely to resort to violence to defend their property or honor than whites in other parts of the country. Their studies controlled for poverty rates throughout the region, as well as for other factors including weather (warmer areas tend to be more violent) and the legacy of slavery (areas with fewer blacks actually experienced more violence amongst whites, they found). This trend was not nearly as strong in the larger, more metropolitan cities of the South but was especially prevalent in the small, more isolated and culturally distinct small cities and towns throughout Appalachia and the rural South. These are the areas where the Hatfields and McCoys, the Turners and Howards (all Scots-Irish) feuded for years. The psychologists then ran a series of experiments where they antagonized both southerners and northerners, and found that southerners were much more prone to violence when slighted.