The Urban-rural Cosmopolitan Divide: Evidence from Switzerland

• In Event: Divisions and Cleavages in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

Urban-rural polarization may be the defining feature of twenty-first century political geography in Europe and North America. People in large cities are much more likely than people outside cities to embrace cosmopolitan values. However, while we know there is a deep geographic divide, we do not know why. I evaluate the two main possibilities - compositional effects and contextual effects - with panel data from Switzerland that offer three measures of cosmopolitan orientations: immigration attitudes, European unification attitudes, and support for Radical Right parties. My results provide strong support for compositional effects. Macro-economic trends lead people to sort unevenly across urban-rural areas according to educational and occupational profiles that correlate with cosmopolitan attitudes. There is also evidence of cultural sorting, as people who move to cities are more likely to have cosmopolitan attitudes regardless of education or occupation. There is very limited evidence that living in different geographic contexts affects cosmopolitanism. These results have several implications for understanding contemporary attitudinal divides and political geography.

Author

• Rahsaan Maxwell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill