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ABSTRACT
There is growing concern about a political divide between urban and rural places. Against this background, we evaluate the geography of regime preferences regarding a key aspect of democratic support, e.g. attitudes towards democracy and its authoritarian alternatives. We would like to find out whether possible rural-urban differences are due to different socio-economic situations, differing values or to the degree of political discontent of urbanites and rural dwellers. Using recent European Values Survey data from 32 European countries and over 30,000 respondents from 2017 to 2020, we show that rural residents are more supportive of authoritarian regimes than urban dwellers are. Moreover, our path analyses indicate that socio-economic and cultural differences between urbanites and ruralites are particularly crucial, while the political mechanisms cannot explain the spatial divide of regime preferences.
Acknowledgements
This article was written as part of a research project on the “Rural-Urban Divide in Europe (RUDE)”, which was generously founded by the European NORFACE network within the research programme “Democratic governance in a turbulent age”. We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments on previous drafts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Lago, “Rural Decline and Satisfaction”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”. With regard to political trust, Mitsch, Lee and Ralph-Morrow report that polarization between urban and rural Europe has actually increased over the past decade. We find the same for democratic support in recent years (results are available upon request).
2 e.g. Cramer The Politics of Resentment; Dijkstra, Poelman, and Rodríguez-Pose, “The Geography of EU Discontent”; Harteveld, van der Brug, and de Lange, “Periphery, Not Rurality?”; Jennings and Stoker “The Bifurcation of Politics”; Kenny and Luca “The Rural-Urban Polarisation”; Lichter and Ziliak “The Rural-Urban Interface”; Maxwell “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; McKay, Jennings, and Stoker “Political Trust in the ‘Places That Don’t Matter’”; Neal et al. “Rural Brexit?”; Scala and Johnson “Political Polarization Along the Rural-Urban Continuum?”
3 It should be noted that, building on Easton A Framework for Political Analysis, different types of diffuse and specific support can be identified. Thus, according to Dalton Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices and Norris “The Conceptual Framework of Political Support”, the concept of democratic support examined here must be analytically separated from political trust types as an approval of core regime principles and values. While the latter tends to the specific types of support, the concept analysed here is to be classified as diffuse support. Moreover, according to this conceptual clarification, satisfaction with democracy is to distinguish from democratic support, see Claassen, “Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive?”.
4 Tajfel and Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict”.
5 “Us Over Here Versus Them Over There,” 1059.
6 Tajfel and Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict”.
7 Norris, “The Conceptual Framework of Political Support”.
8 “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”.
9 A Framework for Political Analysis.
10 Claassen, “Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive?”
11 Kriesi et al. West European Politics; Lipset “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”; Rodríguez-Pose “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter”.
12 “It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid”.
13 Malka et al., “Who is Open to Authoritarian Governance”.
14 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Jacobs and Munis, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary US Elections”.
15 Sarsfield and Echegaray, “Opening the Black Box”.
16 Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies”; Norris, “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?”.
17 “The Signs of Deconsolidation”.
18 “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”.
19 A Framework for Political Analysis.
20 Claassen, “Does Public Support Help Democracy Survive?”; Dalton, Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices; Foa and Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”; Foa and Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation”; Inglehart, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”; Linz and Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies”; Norris “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?”; Zilinsky, “Democratic Deconsolidation Revisited”.
21 see for example Ceka and Magalhães, “Do the Rich and The Poor Have Different Conceptions of Democracy?”; Foa and Mounk, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”; Klingemann, Fuchs, and Zielonka, Democracy and Political Culture; Letsa and Wilfahrt, “Popular Support for Democracy”; Norris, “Is Western Democracy Backsliding?”; Zaslove et al., “Power to the People?”; Zilinsky, “Democratic Deconsolidation Revisited”.
22 “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments”.
23 Hooghe and Marks, “Cleavage Theory Meets Europe’s Crises”; Kriesi et al., West European Politics in the Age of Globalization.
24 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; de Dominicis, Dijkstra, and Pontarollo, “The Rural-Urban Divide in Anti-EU Vote”; Deppisch, Osigus, and Klärner, “How Rural is Rural Populism?”; Jennings and Stoker, “The Bifurcation of Politics”; Jennings and Stoker, “The Divergent Dynamics of Cities and Towns”; Kenny and Luca, “The Rural-Urban Polarisation of Political Disenchantment”; Kelly and Lobal, “The Social Bases of Rural-Urban Political Divides”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Maxwell, “Geographic Divides and Cosmopolitanism”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Munis, “Us Over Here Versus Them Over There”; Neal et al. “Rural Brexit?”; Rodríguez-Pose, “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter”; Scala and Johnson, “Political Polarization Along the Rural-Urban Continuum?”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”; Wuthnow, The Left Behind.
25 Tajfel and Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict”.
26 Munis, “Us Over Here Versus Them Over There,” 1059.
27 Kenny and Luca, “The Rural-Urban Polarisation of Political Disenchantment”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”.
28 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; de Dominicis, Dijkstra, and Pontarollo, “The Rural-Urban Divide in Anti-EU Vote”; Deppisch, Osigus, and Klärner, “How Rural is Rural Populism?”; Kenny and Luca, “The Rural-Urban Polarisation of Political Disenchantment”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Rodríguez-Pose, “The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”; Wuthnow, The Left Behind.
29 e.g. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Gordon, “In What Sense Left Behind”.
30 Kaufmann, “It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid”; Kelly and Lobao, “The Social Bases of Rural-Urban Political Divides”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”.
31 Dijkstra, Poelman, and Rodríguez-Pose, “The Geography of EU Discontent”; Gordon, “In What Sense Left Behind”; Kriesi et al., West European Politics in the Age of Globalization; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Scala and Johnson, “Political Polarization Along the Rural-Urban Continuum?”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”.
32 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Przeworski, Crises of Democracy.
33 Howe, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”; Lipset, “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”. Such rhetoric is often used by populist-authoritarian parties that seek to appeal to the “losers” of globalization by promoting nativist values and skepticism towardss globalization, see Mudde and Kaltwasser, Populism in Europe and the Americas; Rooduijn, “The Rise of the Populist Radical Right”.
34 Kaufmann, “It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid”. Kaufmann investigates the UK 2016 Brexit vote and finds that rural-urban differences in the voting pattern are not primarily explained by the rural population feeling threatened in their socio-economic status and neglected with their material concerns, but rather that voting behavior is mainly explained by personal values.
35 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Gordon, “In What Sense Left Behind”; Jennings and Stoker, “The Divergent Dynamics of Cities and Towns”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”; Wuthnow, The Left Behind.
36 “Who is Open to Authoritarian Governance”.
37 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Jacobs and Munis, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary US Elections”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Scala and Johnson, “Political Polarization Along the Rural-Urban Continuum?”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”; Wuthnow, The Left Behind.
38 Stein, Buck, and Bjørnå, “The Centre-Periphery Dimension and Trust in Politicians”.
39 Jacobs and Munis, “Place-Based Resentment in Contemporary US Elections”.
40 Sarsfield and Echegaray, “Opening the Black Box”.
41 EVS, “European Values Study 2017”.
42 Of the 34 countries in the EVS dataset, Great Britain and the Netherlands have to be excluded due to missing data.
43 “National Identity Between Democracy and Autocracy”.
44 The democracy – autocracy preference scale has been established and has found increasing use in literature as a measure of diffuse support for democracy, see Erhardt, Wamsler, and Freitag, “National Identity Between Democracy and Autocracy”. This scale is called a preference scale because it implicitly compares support for democracy with support for authoritarian alternatives, even though it does not directly measure an order of preference for different regimes. The EVS also includes the item d) having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country. However, as Erhardt, Wamsler, and Freitag “National Identity Between Democracy and Autocracy” we exclude this item from the analysis because expert rule can occur in democracies and need not necessarily be undemocratic.
45 An exploratory factor analysis (not shown here) indicates that the items load onto a single factor (factor loadings: democracy 0.58, strong leader −0.80, army −0.80).
46 We are aware that the size of the town where the interview was conducted is only a proxy for urbanity. A small town could be located in between two large cities in a densely populated region. However, we are more interested in the rural-urban cleavage than in the center-periphery cleavage. The only alternative spatial data in the EVS are the NUTS regions, but we decided against them as they are too large and do not cover spatial differences accurately enough.
47 Nemerever and Rogers, “Measuring the Rural Continuum”.
48 We re-calculated the regression models with alternative codings of the urbanity variable, i.e. dichotomous variables with varying cut-off values. This did not change our findings substantially (results are available upon request).
49 Kenny and Luca, “The Rural-Urban Polarisation of Political Disenchantment”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Maxwell, “Geographic Divides and Cosmopolitanism”.
50 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Kaufmann, “It’s NOT the Economy, Stupid”; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Wuthnow, The Left Behind.
51 Even though authoritarianism might seem close to our dependent variable, it is empirically and conceptually distinct from attitudes towards democratic/authoritarian regimes, see Dunn “Enemies of Democracy?”. In this regard authoritarianism can be defined as “social attitudinal or ideological expressions of basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy”, see Duckitt and Bizumic, “Multidimensionality of Right-Wing Authoritarian Attitudes,” 842.
52 An exploratory factor analysis (not shown here) indicates that the four items of moral values all load on a single factor with factor loadings of at least 0.74.
53 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment; Mitsch, Lee, and Ralph-Morrow, “Faith no More?”; Schoene, “European Disintegration?”. Regrettably, indicators of political efficacy are not included in the EVS 2017–2020.
54 Kenny and Luca, “The Rural-Urban Polarisation of Political Disenchantment”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”. We apply listwise deletion of missing data, as it is a preferred method for handling missing observations and offers more advantages than pairwise deletion, see Allison, Missing Data. This leads to a small bias in our sample compared to all respondents in the EVS. In this regard, comparing the values of the socio-demographic variables of the observations included in our regression models on the one hand and the excluded observations due to listwise deletion on the other, the deviations are nowhere greater than 23% of a standard deviation. The largest deviations are with regard to education, income and liberal values, with those in our sample being slightly more educated, and having higher incomes and more liberal values than in the EVS sample as a whole (each about 21–22% of a standard deviation). As the deviations between the included and the excluded observations are relatively small, we conduct listwise deletion.
55 Castanho Silva, Bosancianu, and Littvay, Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling.
56 We replicate our linear regression analysis for the difference method using regional-level fixed effects instead of country-level ones and find substantially the same results (see table A16 in the Supplemental Appendix). However, there is a large number of excluded regions due to missing values or a lack of variance in one or more of the main variables, which is why it is not possible to replicate the path analysis with regional fixed effects. Due to this systematic exclusion of certain regions, we opt for country-level fixed effects in the paper.
57 We also re-calculated the regression models including the squared self-placement on the political left-right scale (results available upon request). However, the coefficients were not statistically significant and did not change our results substantially, which is why we opted to leave the squared self-placement on the left-right scale out for our structural equation models.
58 The coefficients in our models indicate quite small effect sizes, which may cast doubt on the substantivity of the reported relationships. However, “as is the case with virtually any effect size, relatively small effect sizes may be substantively important, whereas relatively large ones may be trivial, depending on the research context”, Preacher and Kelley, “Effect Size Measures for Mediation Models,” 108. Especially considering our study works with observational data rather than experimentally manipulating or abstractly indexing it, even objectively small effect sizes can indicate important and substantial relationships.
59 Van Der Weele, “Mediation Analysis”.
60 Table A1 in the Supplemental Appendix shows the results of Models 3–6 with the inclusion of our three controls sex, age and political left-right position. The controls do not change the results in a relevant way.
61 A structural equation model including all four items of the moral values index (not shown here) reveals that the justification of divorce and especially homosexuality are the strongest mediators, while the justification of abortion and particularly euthanasia have a lower explanatory power.
62 We re-calculated the full model separately for Eastern and Western Europe (see tables A14 and A15 in the Supplemental Appendix). Our results reveal mainly the same effects in Eastern and Western Europe. However, the total effect of urbanity is larger in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe, while the mediators explain a slightly larger part of the effect in Western Europe. Concerning the individual mediators, income only has a mediating effect in Eastern Europe. While the ethnic conception of nationhood is a stronger mediator in Western Europe, moral values are more important in Eastern Europe.
63 Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Maxwell, “Geographic Divides and Cosmopolitanism”.
64 Lago, “Rural Decline and Satisfaction with Democracy”; Maxwell, “Cosmopolitan Immigration Attitudes”; Maxwell, “Geographic Divides and Cosmopolitanism”.
65 “The Bifurcation of Politics,” 373.
66 Nemerever and Rogers, “Measuring the Rural Continuum”.
67 Beynon, Crawley, and Munday, “Measuring and Understanding the Differences”.
68 Cramer, The Politics of Resentment.
69 Bishop, The Big Sort.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alina Zumbrunn
Alina Zumbrunn is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Markus Freitag
Markus Freitag is professor of political sociology and political psychology at the Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Switzerland.