04.03.2025
Journal article
The rural-urban divide in Europe
Abstract
The electoral relevance of social cleavages has been an object of analysis since virtually the inception of the concept in the 1960s. Although the scholarly attention devoted to each of Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) cleavages has varied a lot, with the rural-urban divide clearly lagging behind the other three, in recent times we attend to a renewed interest of the discipline in how geography and, more specifically, the type of habitat affects political attitudes and vote choice. The Special Issue seeks to offer systematic empirical evidence across countries and over time on the impact of rural-urban divides on electoral outcomes by relying on a variety of data and methods.