The Great Global Divider? A Comparison of Urban-Rural Partisan Polarization in Western Democracies

• Published date: 01 February 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241237458
• Author: Twan Huijsmans,Jonathan Rodden
• Date: 01 February 2025

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2025, Vol. 58(2) 261–290

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140241237458

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The Great Global

Divider? A Comparison of

Urban-Rural Partisan

Polarization in Western

Democracies

Twan Huijsmans

1

and Jonathan Rodden

2



Abstract

This study is the first to measure urban-rural electoral divides in a way that

facilitates comparisons beyond majoritarian democracies of the UK and

North America. Based on national election results at the lowest available

geographic level in fifteen countries covering roughly five decades, we present

a measure for each election and political party, enabling comparisons over

time and between countries with different electoral and party systems. We

show that long-term increases in urban-rural divides have been most pro-

nounced in the US, the UK, and Canada, but these divides have also emerged

in several European multiparty systems in recent decades, largely because of

growing smaller parties with predominantly urban or rural support. Overall

urban-rural electoral divides remain lower in these systems due to continued

presence of mainstream parties with geographically diverse support. Our

1

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands

2

Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Corresponding Authors:

Twan Huijsmans, Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 166, 1001 NA

Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Email: t.m.huijsmans@uva.nl

Jonathan Rodden, Political Science, Stanford University, 616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA

94305-6104, USA.

Email: jrodden@stanford.edu

Data Availability Statement included at the end of the article

contribution paves the way for a comparative research agenda on causes and

consequences of urban-rural electoral polarization.

Keywords

urban-rural divide, elections, geographic polarization, political geography

Introduction

Political attitudes and vote choices are increasingly divided between in-

habitants of large cities and less densely populated areas within several

advanced industrialized democracies (Huijsmans et al., 2021;Kenny & Luca,

2021;Luca et al., 2023;Maxwell, 2019,2020;Rodden, 2010;Scala &

Johnson, 2017). The clearest evidence comes from the United States, where

national elections have turned into tense battles between the Democratic Party,

with its overwhelmingly urban support base, and a Republican Party that relies

on support from exurban and rural areas. Similar patterns are observed in

Canada and the UK (Rodden, 2019;Taylor et al., 2022). How this compares to

urban-rural divides in continental European democracies and beyond is

unclear. To date, no studies have operationalized urban-rural political divides

in a way that facilitates comparisons across a wide variety of countries with

different electoral and party systems. In this study, we present a measure that

facilitates such comparisons and use it to describe levels of urban-rural

electoral division over time for fifteen countries that use a variety of elec-

toral systems. For a more detailed understanding of the country-level dif-

ferences in urban-rural electoral divides, we further describe party-level

patterns that underly these country-level differences.

It is not yet clear whether a growing urban-rural electoral divide is a

common feature of advanced industrialized democracies. Beyond the clear

patterns in the US, the UK, and Canada, evidence from continental European

countries is scattered. Studies from a number of these countries show indi-

cations of geographic electoral divides, but these studies often analyze the

geographic concentration of specific parties (Dijkstra et al., 2020;Dvoˇ

r´

ak

et al., 2022;Evans et al., 2019), which provides little information about the

overall electoral urban-rural divide in multiparty systems. Recently, Haffert

(2022) more elaborately demonstrated an increasing urban-rural divide in

German elections, but its relative size is still difficult to compare to measures

of urban-rural divides in other countries, especially two-party systems like

the US.

There are reasons to anticipate high and increasing urban-rural electoral

polarization in many advanced industrial democracies. First, a non-economic

dimension of politics has gained salience in countries around the world since

262 Comparative Political Studies 58(2)