Two worlds of trust: urban-rural divides in developing and developed countries

The urban-rural divide has been traditionally proposed as a significant political cleavage and in recent times interest in this dimension has intensified, with studies suggesting that rural people are low-trust populists while urban-dwellers tend to be higher-trust defenders of the status quo. However, this argument is based almost entirely on evidence from advanced industrial democracies (and theories appropriate to such societies), while scattered survey evidence from developing countries suggests the opposite may be true. In this paper, I use the World Values Survey to test whether development has a moderating effect on the rural-urban divide. At high levels of human development, we observe similar levels of trust in government between urban and rural respondents, while at low levels, we observe substantially higher trust among rural respondents. This pattern holds for several trust outcomes, confidence in government, parliament, and parties, and is robust to country-level fixed effects, potential demographic confounders (such as education, age and income) and to social trust. Furthermore, the rural-urban gap in less developed countries increases with the level of democracy in the country. These findings challenge the literature on urban-rural divides in advanced industrial democracies, while opening the door for further explanation of the trust gap in the developing world and of its implications.