Rural but not radical right: The rural-urban cleavage in Norway

Abstract

Conventional wisdom claims that rural voters are politically mobilized by right-wing and culturally conservative forces, while urban voters are left-leaning and have progressive cultural views. Leveraging original survey data from Norway, our work challenges this dichotomy. We build on cleavage theory and recent research on place identitiesto develop a latent measure of rural attachment. Using regression analysis, we investigate how well this measure maps onto five different cultural attitudes, left- right ideology, and partisan voting. The findings show that people with rural identities are not more right-wing, reluctant towards immigration, or anti-environmental than their urban counterparts. Instead, the geographic cleavage relates to dissatisfaction with the way the central government treats rural areas, resistance to the EU, and voting for the agrarian Center Party. The findings from Norway therefore show that it is possible to mobilize rural identifiers without disparaging immigrants or adopting other radical-right stances. Our work suggests that the supply of political parties plays a decisive role in how rural identities are activated and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the urban-rural divide in advanced, multi-party democracies.