Abstract
A popular explanation for the recent success of right-wing populist candidates, parties and movements is that this is the “revenge of the places that don't matter”. Under this meso-level account, as economic development focuses on increasingly prosperous cities, voters in less dynamic and rural areas feel neglected by the political establishment, and back radical change. However, this premise is typically tested through the analysis of voting behavior rather than directly through citizens' feelings of political trust, and non-economic sources of grievance are not explored. We develop place-oriented measures of trust, perceived social marginality and perceived economic deprivation. We show that deprived and rural areas of Britain indeed lack trust in government. However, the accompanying sense of grievance for each type of area is different. Modeling these as separate outcomes, our analysis suggests that outside of cities, people lack trust because they feel socially marginal, whereas people in deprived areas lack trust owing to a combination of perceived economic deprivation and perceived social marginality. Our results speak to the need to recognize diversity among the “places that don't matter,” and that people in these areas may reach a similar outlook on politics for different reasons.
Highlights
Political scientists often view electoral politics in geographical terms
One key contribution has come from economic geographer Rodríguez-Pose (2018), who argues that as economic development focuses on increasingly prosperous cities, voters in declining and lagging-behind areas feel neglected by the political establishment, and back radical change
Alongside a measure of the area’s perceived economic deprivation, our survey incorporates an adapted measure of an area’s perceived “social marginality.”. These are used in two ways: we explore the association between these place-based grievances and communotropic trust, and we model each grievance as an outcome of context. We address another important question: what resentments are associated with feelings of distrust in the “places that don’t matter”? We contend that there will be a difference in which resentments dominate: as people from economically lagging areas see their areas as both economically deprived and socially marginal, whereas people from rural areas will tend to focus on the social marginality of their area
Summary
Political scientists often view electoral politics in geographical terms. a longstanding challenge for the discipline remains: understanding how the places where people live shape political attitudes and behaviors. Given the discordance between the results of these alternative studies in the UK-context, and the relative lack of focus on urban-rural divides in political trust more generally, further investigation is needed We address this gap by testing two key hypotheses relating to place and trust: H1: The higher the proportion of routine jobs in an area, the lower the level of communotropic trust. These aspects of their environment and worldview may leave them feeling less central in this vision of contemporary British society, even if they harbor no specific resentments toward urban Britain per se, while residents of densely populated, diverse cities may feel the opposite, compared to other rural areas and even many towns While these sentiments—a divide in cultural custom or outlook—may be less intensely felt than American rural resentment, it is an important empirical question whether social grievances accompany the political in the UK context. We replicate our analysis with single-level models and find no substantive differences, increasing our confidence in our findings
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