How Human Values and the Rural-Urban Divide Interact to Shape Voting Behaviour

While the relevance of values and value orientations have for long been at the forefront of political sociology, Shalom Schwartz’ encompassing conceptualisation of basic human values and their interrelatedness has only recently started to inspire political science research. Recent empirical studies demonstrate, for instance, that some of Schwartz’ values are politically more consequential than others and that citizens are as much influenced by their value dispositions as are elected officials. To be sure, the extent to which human values will contribute to a better understanding of political involvement still needs to be explored. In this vein, this paper investigates the role a set of pre-selected human values, i.e. power, security, tradition and universalism, plays in voting for political parties along the ideological spectrum by combining the Manifesto Project’s content analysis of over 1’000 political party programmes with individual-level voting data from all nine waves of the European Social Survey. To advance this realm of research even further, we also examine the relevance of the re-emerging rural-urban divide in democratic societies and scrutinize, in particular, the manifold interactions between our set of human values and place of residence in a comparative perspective. At first, our comparative analyses with around 130’000 observations from 14 countries reveal a clear trend to vote for left-leaning parties in the aftermath of the financial and economic crisis with a right-wing uplift in 2018 and a tendency for rural areas to favour conservative parties. Second, human values depict only minor changes over time, yet are fairly differently distributed over urban and rural zones, with power and universalism showing the smallest and security and tradition demonstrating the largest differences across places of residence. Third, the analyses, which control for country- and time-fixed effects, strongly suggest the impact of place, with living in big cities and in the countryside on the opposite ends of the dependent variable, and human values with a particularly strong impact of universalism. Finally, the follow-up inspection of interaction effects provides a more nuanced picture which underlines the importance of place for human values to affect voting behaviour, yet simultaneously calls for caution not to embrace pre-emptively a seemingly simplistic rural-urban divide in this regard.