The Rural-Urban Divide in Europe

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sigrid Roßteutscher
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440473521

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

Rising populism and polarization, coupled with declining democratic legitimacy, all point toward a crisis in European democracies. This crisis has a regional dimension: a political and perhaps cultural divide between rural and urban areas. The project examines whether and how urban/rural residency is related to divides in legitimacy beliefs, social identities, perceptions of injustice and threat, political and social attitudes and political behavior of European citizens. Core to this project is the notion that although this crisis has been identified and documented by numerous scholars, largely neglected is its distinctly geographic dimension: democratic challenges appear to be more pronounced amongst citizens in the rural periphery than amongst their metropolitan counterparts. A political divide, in other words, is opening up between rural and urban areas. Thus, this project seeks to examine and understand the geographic dimension of the current democratic crises in Europe. In order to reach this objective, the project continued analyzing available comparative secondary data.In addition to this, the project analysed the survey data collected at the end of 2022. Corresponding and ongoing working papers based on these analyses were presented at several conferences throughout the year, e.g. EPSA in Glasgow in June. These working papers are now being finalized and prepared for submission to peer-reviewed academic journals and for further presentation at leading academic conferences. At the core of our joint project is the understanding that political divides base upon identification with in-groups and demarcation from out-groups, i.e. place of living relates to distinct identities of rural and urban inhabitants. None of the available secondary data sources includes geographybased identity measures, nor related measures of perceived status threat and political representation. The project’s main contribution is an extensive set of items measuring these attitudes that is validated in five countries and five languages. Additionally, the project’s preliminary results speak to the role of identites and grievances in determining political attitudes an behaviour. During the course of 2023 all project members worked together extensively on the chapters of an edited volume on the rural-urban divide in Europe. Work on a book proposal, to be submitted to Oxford University Press, and will be concluded early 2024. The edited volume makes extensive use of our novel place consciousness measure and serves to present project results in a consistent format that is also accessible to the non-academic audience. Chapter drafts for the edited volume were presented in a poster session at the project’s final conference in Frankfurt to an audience of scholars working on rural-urban divides.

Publications

• "Comment le ressentiment nourrit le vote RN dans les zones rurale", The Conversation, 13 September 2023
  Kevin Brookes
  
• Do they feel like they don’t matter? The rural-urban divide in external political efficacy. West European Politics, 47(7), 1447-1472.
  García, del Horno Rubén; Rico, Guillem & Hernández, Enrique
  
• Immigration and Public Support for Political Systems in Europe. Perspectives on Politics, 22(1), 153-167.
  Claassen, Christopher
  
• Political behaviour in France: the impact of the rural–urban divide. French Politics, 21(1), 104-124.
  Brookes, Kevin & Cappellina, Bartolomeo
  
• The geography of autocracy. Regime preferences along the rural-urban divide in 32 countries. Democratization, 30(4), 616-634.
  Zumbrunn, Alina & Freitag, Markus