Consciousness of Place in Different Places and Political Trust

• In Event: Trust & Politics

Abstract

The rural-urban divide is a popular explanation offered to account for the success of right-wing populist candidates, political events such as Brexit, or political trust in Europe (Mitsch et al. 2021; McKay et al. 2021). The aim of this paper is to document this divide for the French case and to investigate its potential causes by analysing how place-based resentments and economic deprivation relate to political trust. The latter is often put forward to account for this rural-urban gap, as rural dwellers are thought to feel economically left behind and to consequently have less trust in political institutions. Yet there are some who argue that the rural-urban divide is far more than a proxy for economic disparities and resentments related to them and that in fact place-based identities as well as various kinds of place-based resentments (i.e., respect for culture, political representation, attributions of public resources), a concept coined “consciousness of place” by Katherine Cramer (2016), are separate, salient determinants of political behavior. It is possible that both arguments offer important insight into the dynamics driving the rural-urban divide, and that place-based identity, place-based resentments and local economic conditions interact to shape political behavior.

In this paper, we explore this possibility using newly collected, representative French online survey data (4,000 respondents). Amongst other things, this survey gives us a subjective measure of place of living, a place based-resentment indicator, and allows us to measure the feeling of geotropic economic deprivation. We assess the effect of place-based identities and resentments on political trust and also assess how contextual economic factors compound or negate these effects. First, based on our individual data, we map place-based identity, three dimensions of place-based resentment, and political trust in France. Secondly, we construct a series of multilevel models in STAN (a Bayesian programming language), which first assess the impact of economic deprivation, consciousness of place, andplace-based resentment on political trust. . We will also examine how these effects vary across places of living. We then incorporate place-based identities into the structure of the model and treat more traditional determinants of political trust (i.e, socio-economic status, political interest, etc.) as random effects, to assess whether placed-based identities alter the basic dynamics behind the formation of political trust.

References
Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago Studies in American Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

McKay, Lawrence, Will Jennings, and Gerry Stoker. ‘Political Trust in the “Places That Don’t Matter”’. Frontiers in Political Science 3 (2021).

Mitsch, Frieder, Neil Lee, and Elizabeth Ralph Morrow. ‘Faith No More? The Divergence of Political Trust between Urban and Rural Europe’. Political Geography 89 (2021).

Authors

• Kevin Brookes, Sciences Po Grenoble

• Michael William Webb, University of Florida

• Sonja Zmerli, Sciences Po Grenoble UGA