Results of recent elections in the US and in Europe as well as results of direct democratic votes in Switzerland and other countries hint to the importance of the rural-urban divide in voting behavior. Scholars propose that this divide is even key to understanding the recent success of populist parties, movements and politicians in Western democracies. Against this backdrop, the aim of the proposed paper is to examine how the rural-urban divide in voting behavior has developed in Germany since the unification in 1990. Do we observe a gap in voting behavior between citizens living in rural and urban areas? How has this gap changed over time? Does the strong tie between the rural population and the Christian democrats still exist after the AfD has entered the political arena in 2013? And finally, does the rural-urban divide persist when other relevant cleavages (e.g. religious and socio-economic cleavage) are accounted for? To tackle these questions, the paper makes use of individual-level data taken from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) for the most recent federal elections (2009-2017) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) modules as well as single election studies for the period before 2009. A series of multinomial regression models is estimated to shed light on the development of the rural-urban divide in voting behavior in German federal elections.
