Urban-rural divides have become an important research topic in political science in recent years. A growing literature argues that rural voters’ perception of unequal political representation contributes to the emergence of this divide. According to this literature, rural voters harbor the feeling that they “don’t matter” to political elites. Numerous studies report that rural voters feel less represented by politics and perceive a lower political efficacy than urban voters. So far, however, no study has investigated to what extent this perception corresponds to actual inequalities in representation. Do policymakers really represent urban voters better than their rural counterparts? The answer to this question is theoretically not self-evident.

Duration:
01 April 2025 - 31 March 2029

Research Team:
Prof. Dr. Lukas Haffert (Head of project)
Paul Ruholl

Urban-rural divides have become an important research topic in political science in recent years. A growing literature argues that rural voters’ perception of unequal political representation contributes to the emergence of this divide. According to this literature, rural voters harbor the feeling that they “don’t matter” to political elites. Numerous studies report that rural voters feel less represented by politics and perceive a lower political efficacy than urban voters. So far, however, no study has investigated to what extent this perception corresponds to actual inequalities in representation. Do policymakers really represent urban voters better than their rural counterparts? The answer to this question is theoretically not self-evident. On the one hand, rural voters’ perceptions have an intuitive plausibility, given that political, economic and media power are concentrated in big cities. On the other hand, institutional rules such as majoritarian electoral systems or federalism can lead to an outsized electoral influence of rural voters.

Against this background, this project’s main goal is to answer the question if the rural resentment over political representation has a factual basis. To do so, the project connects the literature on urban-rural divides with the literature on unequal representation. It adopts existing research designs that have been used to study class-, income-, or education-based differences in political representation and applies them to the urban-rural divide.

In a first work package, the project studies inequalities in the representation of policy preferences. To do so, it collects data on urban and rural voters’ preferences regarding specific reform proposals from existing representative surveys. Using data on reform implementation, the project then studies how the preferences of urban and rural voters are related to actual policy outcomes. In the second and third work package, the project studies inequalities in the representation of priorities. Here, the question is which issues make it to the political agenda. The project will again use existing survey data on the priorities of urban and rural voters. It will then link them to data about parliamentary agendas to see whether there is a bias in voters’ impact on the policy agenda. To do so, it will use both existing comparative datasets and collect original data on parliamentary speeches in a single case. The equal or unequal representation of rural and urban voters is an important question for both theoretical and political reasons. Theoretically, the answers obtained by this project will sharpen our understanding of rural resentment. Is the rise of rural resentment a direct response to objective disadvantages in the political process? Or is there little connection to such objective factors, so that we should rather seeks its roots in public discourses, the media, or the strategies of skillful political entrepreneurs? Moreover, the answers obtained will have political importance for the question of what to do about this resentment. If inequality in representation is real, a better representation of rural interests may not only be normatively desirable but may also be able to reduce rural resentment. If there is no inequality in representation, by contrast, a better representation of rural interests may be neither normatively fair nor politically effective.

Finally, the project will also generate important new insights for the broader literature on inequalities in representation. An important debate in this literature concerns the mechanisms that drive such inequalities. Studying representation from the angle of political geography can shed new light on potential institutional mechanisms, given that representative democracies institutionally privilege the representation of geographically defined interests. Geographic representation is thus a crucial test case for the impact of institutional rules on the equality of representation.

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Duration:
01 April 2025 - 31 March 2029

Research Team:
Prof. Dr. Lukas Haffert (Head of project)
Paul Ruholl

Project Type:
Third-party funded project