TY - JOUR
T1 - Do they feel like they don’t matter? The rural-urban divide in external political efficacy
AU - Horno, Rubén García del
AU - Rico, Guillem
AU - Hernández, Enrique
N1 - Acknowledgements
We thank the participants and discussants of the 2021 AECPA Conference, of the ‘The Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’ workshop at the Goethe University Frankfurt, of the Barcelona PhD Workshop on Empirical Political Science 2021 (winter) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, of the 2022 CES International Conference of Europeanists, of the NORFACE Governance Mid-term Conference, and of the Democracy, Elections and Citizenship seminars at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, as well as the West European Politics editors and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.
Funding
This work was funded by the NORFACE Joint Research Programme on Democratic Governance in a Turbulent Age [grant agreement no. 822166] and Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation [ref. PCI2020-111990], as part of the ‘The Rural-Urban Divide in Europe’ (RUDE) project. It was also funded by the Catalan Institute for Self-Government Studies (IEA), as part of the ‘The Rural-Urban Political Divide in Catalonia’ project [ref. PRE111/21/000004].
PY - 2023/10/24
Y1 - 2023/10/24
N2 - Rural areas have often been labelled by the literature as ‘left-behind’ areas or ‘places that don’t matter’, implicitly suggesting that residents of these communities feel neglected by political elites. This article studies the rural-urban divide in external political efficacy, which reflects individuals’ beliefs about the responsiveness of political elites, while also examining if compositional and contextual factors can explain such a divide. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, the results reveal a significant rural-urban gap in external efficacy, which is partly explained by differences in the sociodemographic characteristics of rural and urban dwellers, but not by disparities in their evaluation of the provision of basic public services. Notably, this rural-urban gap in external efficacy is substantively smaller in those countries with higher levels of electoral malapportionment that lead to an overrepresentation of rural areas in national parliaments.
AB - Rural areas have often been labelled by the literature as ‘left-behind’ areas or ‘places that don’t matter’, implicitly suggesting that residents of these communities feel neglected by political elites. This article studies the rural-urban divide in external political efficacy, which reflects individuals’ beliefs about the responsiveness of political elites, while also examining if compositional and contextual factors can explain such a divide. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, the results reveal a significant rural-urban gap in external efficacy, which is partly explained by differences in the sociodemographic characteristics of rural and urban dwellers, but not by disparities in their evaluation of the provision of basic public services. Notably, this rural-urban gap in external efficacy is substantively smaller in those countries with higher levels of electoral malapportionment that lead to an overrepresentation of rural areas in national parliaments.
KW - Rural-urban
KW - cleavage
KW - external political efficacy
KW - malapportionment
KW - political attitudes
U2 - 10.1080/01402382.2023.2261085
DO - 10.1080/01402382.2023.2261085
M3 - Article
SN - 0140-2382
VL - 46
JO - West European Politics
JF - West European Politics
ER -