The Geography of Autocracy. Regime Preferences along the Rural-Urban Divide in 29 Countries

Democracy is in crisis. While the causes of the dwindling support for democratic regimes have been widely analysed, hitherto no research has yet explored whether there is also a geographical component to this kind of democratic deconsolidation. In this paper, we evaluate the rural-urban divide of public preferences for democracy and its authoritarian alternatives. We would like to find out whether possible rural-urban differences are due to the different socio-economic situation, to different values or to the degree of political discontent of urbanites and rural dwellers. Using recent European Values Survey data on 29 European countries and over 30’000 respondents from 2017 to 2020, we show that rural residents are more supportive of authoritarian regimes than urban dwellers are. Moreover, our multilevel structural equation models indicate that socio-economic and cultural differences between urbanites and ruralites are particularly crucial, while the political mechanisms cannot explain the spatial divide of regime preferences.