The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies

• Published date: 01 July 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231194060
• Author: Zack Taylor,Jack Lucas,David A. Armstrong,Ryan Bakker
• Date: 01 July 2024
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2024, Vol. 57(8) 1339–1374

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231194060

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The Development of the

Urban-Rural Cleavage in

Anglo-American

Democracies

Zack Taylor

1

, Jack Lucas

2

, David A. Armstrong II

1

,

and Ryan Bakker

3

Abstract

We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of

the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United

States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election

results, electoral district boundary f‌iles, and electoral district population

measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results

and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use

this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election

outcomes across countries and time. We f‌ind that the cleavage has widened

over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a

distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to

secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the signif‌icance of our

f‌indings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural

divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of

urban-rural cleavages.

1

University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

2

University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada

3

University of Essex, UK

Corresponding Author:

Zack Taylor, Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond

Street, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada.

Email: zack.taylor@uwo.ca

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

Keywords

elections, public opinion, and voting behaviour, legislative studies, political

parties, representation and electoral systems

Introduction

Conf‌lict between country and city is a def‌ining national political cleavage in

the 21st century. This conf‌lict routinely manifests as the geographic polari-

zation of party support on urban-rural lines. Surveying the American scene,

Rodden (2019, p. 106) describes recent elections as ‘battles between a party

that represents the downtown core and inner suburbs …and a party that

represents the sprawling exurbs and rural periphery of such cities’. Today,

urban-rural divides in election outcomes are evident in countries as diverse as

France, Poland, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom (Emanuele, 2017;

Marcinkiewicz, 2018;Rodr´

ıguez-Pose, 2018;Valero, 2022).

Societies are of course divided by many cleavages –religious, ethno-racial,

linguistic, socio-economic, and so on (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). More re-

cently, scholars have identif‌ied an emerging national cleavage that divides the

winners and losers of globalization and which is rooted in educational at-

tainment and attitudes toward immigration (Hooghe & Marks, 2022;Kriesi

et al., 2005;Teney et al., 2014). National urban-rural cleavages, and their

apparent widening in recent years, matter because they represent the terri-

torialization of political conf‌lict. Urban-rural political conf‌lict intensif‌ies as

cleavages and party support align with rather than crosscut the city-country

divide. In this context, politics polarizes geographically around competition

for policy attention and state resources. This effect is magnif‌ied when rep-

resentatives in national political institutions are elected from territorial dis-

tricts, as in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, France, India,

and other countries.

In this study, we examine the long-term development of the urban-rural

cleavage at the national level in three democracies: the United States, Great

Britain, and Canada. We do so over an extended period, beginning our

analysis early in the 20th century with the f‌irst election in each country in

which female suffrage was enabled. The result is a novel comparative per-

spective on the emergence and importance of the urban-rural cleavage.

Our analytic focus is on the lower house of the national legislature, which

in our three case countries is elected entirely from districts on a plurality basis.

We focus on the legislature for two reasons. First, election from districts,

rather than by proportional representation or party list, explicitly territorializes

political competition (de Miguel, 2017). Competing for support within

specif‌ic localities, the candidates must be responsive to local interests,

preferences, and conditions, and therefore urbanity (and rurality) will be more

1340 Comparative Political Studies 57(8)

strongly articulated through local district systems than they would be in, for

example, a party list proportional representation system. Second, doing so

enables cross-national comparison. Most analyses of the United States –the

country in which the analysis of the contemporary urban-rural cleavage is

perhaps most advanced (Rodden, 2019;Scala & Johnson, 2017)–focus on

party vote shares in presidential elections and use the county as their unit of

analysis. However, counties, which vary considerably in population, are not

units of national political representation and therefore not the targets of party

competition. Analysing elections to the House of Representatives permits

direct comparison to the other countries’lower houses.

The article unfolds in three parts. First, we review the literature on the

causes and effects of the urban-rural cleavage in district-based electoral

systems. We then describe our data collection and measurement strategy,

including our measure of the ‘importance’of the urban-rural divide in leg-

islative elections across countries and time. Finally, we summarize the urban-

rural divide in our case countries. Drawing on the framework that we outline

in the f‌irst part of the article, we combine our quantitative analysis with

secondary qualitative and quantitative research to offer descriptive vignettes

of the development of the urban-rural divide in each country. We conclude

with a discussion of the implications of our f‌indings for the comparative

historical study of the urban-rural cleavage.

Causes of the Urban-Rural Divide: A Developmental

Perspective

Urban-rural divides in party support and voting behaviour have been found in

diverse national contexts (de Dominicis et al., 2020;Emanuele, 2017;

Marcinkiewicz, 2018;Rodr´

ıguez-Pose, 2018;Valero, 2022). These divides

parallel substantial demographic and economic differences between cities and

national hinterlands (Young,2013 )in access to services (Cattaneo et al., 2021)

and in geographically divergent policy attitudes, levels of trust in government,

public health behaviours, and other phenomena (Callaghan et al., 2021;

Huijsmans, 2020;Kenny & Luca, 2021;Mitsch et al., 2021).

We know less about how these divides have developed over the long term.

Several studies have examined the historical development of urban-rural

divides or urban representation in national legislatures in Canada (Armstrong

et al., 2022) and the United States (Lieberman, 2009;Ogorzalek, 2018;

Rodden, 2019), but these studies are rare. Even less common are comparative

historical treatments of the urban-rural divide. Data availability limitations,

together with the challenge of developing approaches that enable comparisons

across diverse party systems and electoral institutions, have inhibited long-

term longitudinal and cross-national comparison.

Taylor et al. 1341