Urban-Rural Policy Disagreement in Canada, 2000-2023

• In Event: Urban-Rural Divides in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

As post-war urbanization has led to dramatic demographic, economic, and cultural differences between urban and rural places in Canada and other countries, scholarship has expressed normative concerns about the so-called “urban-rural divide.” This scholarship has often focused on geographically patterned policy disagreement; in other words, to the extent that urban-rural differences create a need for new forms of representation or institutional reform, these needs are a priority because urban-rural differences reflect distinct – and, in some cases, worryingly diverging – policy preferences (Hirschl 2022). However, we know little about urban-rural attitudinal differences outside of a few specific policy domains, such as immigration (Huijsmans 2022, Maxwell 2019), along with a very general understanding that urban places tend to be more ideologically progressive than rural places (Luca et al. 2022).

In this paper, we use over-time Canadian Election Study data on policy attitudes across dozens of distinct policy issues (N>100,000), combined with a new measure of district urbanity for all Canadian federal electoral districts (Armstrong II et al. 2022), to systematically examine the character and timing of urban-rural policy disagreement in Canada. We focus on the period since 2000 when urban-rural divides in Canadian federal elections have grown most sharply. We show that the emergence of urban-rural policy divides has been an important component of urban-rural electoral divides in recent Canadian politics and differ profoundly across policy domains. Urban-rural policy disagreement is substantial in some policy domains, such as environmental policy and immigration, but entirely absent in others. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for research on the relative importance of context, composition, and elite activation in the development of urban-rural electoral divides in Canada and other countries.

Authors

• Zack Taylor, University of Western Ontario

• Sophie Borwein, University of British Columbia

• Jack Lucas, University of Calgary

• Tyler Matthew Romualdi, University of Western Ontario (Western University)

• Katharine McCoy, The University of Western Ontario

• David A. Armstrong, University of Western Ontario