Crossing the Density Divide: Party Systems and Urban-Rural Coalitions

• In Event: Regional Inequality in the Knowledge Economy in Europe and North America

Abstract

Election outcomes are increasingly divided between large cities and less-densely populated areas in many advanced industrialized democracies. Long-term increases in urban-rural electoral divides have been most pronounced 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 newer parties with predominantly urban or rural support. However, a crucial difference between majoritarian and proportional democracies is that in multiparty systems, parties with a geographically concentrated support base are seldom able to govern alone. They must often form coalitions with mainstream parties that draw support from both urban and rural areas, or even with parties on the opposite side of the ‘density divide’. Multi-party systems therefore encourage geographically heterogeneous governing coalitions, and thus relieve the pressure towards an over-arching urban-rural conflict in government formation. We examine this hypothesis by analyzing the Urban-Rural Electoral Divides (URED) dataset, and show that although urban-rural electoral polarization is on the rise in many countries, the impact for urban-rural polarization in the government’s support base is mitigated in multi-party democracies. In contrast with Britain and its majoritarian former colonies, elections in most of continental Europe are not pitched battles between urban and rural coalitions.

Authors

• Jonathan Rodden, Stanford University

• Twan Huijsmans, University of Amsterdam