Stereotyping along the Urban-Rural Divide: Comparative Evidence from Europe

• In Event: Population and Politics

Abstract

In recent years, political scientists have documented a re-emergence of the urban-rural divide in Europe’s political landscape. After several decades at the margins of cleavage politics, a growing body of literature has diagnosed a return of geography, pointing towards an increasingly polarized conflict between cities and the countryside. While existing studies have highlighted important differences in political behavior between urban and rural dwellers, how this conflict actually manifests itself in peoples’ minds remains largely unexplored. Crucially, this leaves the precise mechanisms that make place politically divisive unclear. Combining open-ended survey questions with a conjoint experiment fielded in nine European countries, this paper sheds light on the prevalent stereotypes individuals associate with people living in urban and rural areas. Expecting that individuals particularly stereotype ruralites as nationalists and urbanites as cosmopolitans, the results of this analysis have important implications for our understanding of how geography underpins existing political conflicts.

Author

• Sven Hegewald, ETH Zurich