Drifting further apart? Europe's trends of urban-rural political polarisation should not be overstated

Abstract

Urban-rural polarisation in political attitudes is widely argued to have become a distinctive feature of many Western democracies. Yet, have urban-rural gaps grown over time, as is often suggested? And, if so, do trends in this regard differ across countries? We address these questions leveraging individual-level data from over 300,000 respondents from the European Social Survey over the period 2002-2020 in 25 countries. Overall, we do find evidence of moderate divergence in outlooks between more urban and more rural publics, examining in particular trust towards the EU and views on migration. We also find that there is divergence in terms of feelings of trust in relation to the political system and levels of satisfaction with democracy since the early 2010s, most likely because of the financial and sovereign debt crises. But these gaps have significantly reduced more recently. Furthermore, trends are heterogenous across countries. Overall, this paper demonstrates that value polarisation along the urban density divide should not be over emphasised as divergence between urban and rural Europe is more moderate than in the US, and very issue-based and country-specific.