Beyond urban bias? Urban-rural inequalities and popular protest in Africa

Abstract

This article discusses the recent rise in protests in Africa from within the framework of Urban Bias Theory. It focuses on the often-made claim that higher rates of protest in urban areas disproportionately shift the attention of policy makers towards concerns of relatively advantaged urban populations. The article contrasts these assertions with evidence that wealthier rural producer regions also often have high propensities for protests. Building on these insights, it proposes a revised set of predictions that connect urban–rural protest differentials to local economic wellbeing through a U-shaped relationship: whereas urban populations have a mobilization advantage over rural inhabitants at the lowest and highest ends of local economic development, these advantages diminish at middling-to-higher levels of economic wellbeing, where protest propensities of rural producer regions are most likely to converge with those of urban areas. The article provides empirical support for these expectations based on Africa-wide subnational data and multi-country census records. The results hold in a range of robustness tests, using alternative data sources and model- and variable-specifications. The article speaks to the special issue’s central concern with place-based analysis, highlighting the need to study evolving forms of political contestation across the entire spectrum of places. It also provides novel micro-level evidence on the link between economic wellbeing, urbanization, and non-electoral forms of political mobilization that was often underdeveloped in earlier formulations of Urban Bias Theory.