Cosmopolitan Cities Against Nationalist Hinterlands: The Group-Based Foundations of the Urban-Rural Divide

Several recent studies have documented a return of the urban-rural divide in political behavior. Building on a long tradition of group-based thinking in political science, one explanation of this divide conceptualizes place as a marker of group membership. However, the precise mechanisms linking place-based groups to politics remain unclear to date. In response to this, this paper highlights the importance of perceptions of group alignments along the urban-rural divide, suggesting that urban and rural residents view each other as fundamentally antagonistic social groups. Analyzing data from a pre-registered conjoint experiment with 9,000 respondents in nine European countries reveals that rural individuals are generally seen as Eurosceptic, anti-immigrant, working-class, less educated, and older, while urbanites are perceived as Europhile, pro-immigrant, upper-middle-class, university-educated, and younger. These perceptions, in turn, contribute to affective polarization between urbanites and ruralites. Similar to affective polarization between partisans, these antagonisms could eventually undermine people’s ability to compromise and thereby threaten the stability of democratic political systems altogether.