St Catharine's Political Economy Seminar - ‘Drifting apart? The urban-rural continuum and the evolution of political disenchantment across 30 European countries’ - Professor Michael Kenny and Dr Davide Luca

Mon 11 March

Ramsden Room

The next St Catharine’s Political Economy Seminar will be held on Monday,11 March 2024. Professor Michael Kenny and Dr Davide Luca will give a talk on “Title: Drifting apart? The urban-rural continuum and the evolution of political disenchantment across 30 European countries”. The seminar will beheld in the Ramsden Room at St Catharine’s College from 6.00-7.30 pm. All are welcome. The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.

Talk Overview
Urban-rural polarisation in political disenchantment is argued to have grown and become a distinctive feature of contemporary Europe. Yet, to what extent do trends in urban-rural divides differ across countries? We address this question using individual-level data from around 270,000 respondents over the period 2002-2020. We find that, with the exception of Eastern Europe, where we do not find any clear urban density gap, patterns of urban/rural political disenchantment are markedly country-specific. For example, they are strong in France, the UK, Portugal, and Finland, but less so in the Netherlands, Italy, or Spain. We also show that the overall differences in levels of political disenchantment between the populations in different settings have grown since 2002, and particularly in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.