Our place in politics Urban-rural political divergence and how place affects political attitudes

Several consequential elections across advanced industrialized democracies have sparked the idea of a revival of urban-rural political divides, supported by empirical evidence from primarily the US and other majoritarian democracies. This geographic divergence is argued to have important consequences for the functioning of these democracies, but we currently lack understanding of how these divides, and their underlying explanations, compare to countries with other political-institutional contexts. In this dissertation I first broaden the perspective by comparing urban-rural political divergence in election outcomes across a large group of Western democracies over a period of five decades. Second, I show in the specific context of the Netherlands how political attitudes of inhabitants of more- and less-urbanised areas have evolved over the last decades. Third, I show to what extent, and how, place affects political attitudes of inhabitants, by focusing on the interplay between objective spatial inequalities and perceptions of these economic, cultural and political inequalities between places.