Why Some Places Don’t Seem to Matter : Socioeconomic, cultural and political determinants of place resentment

Recent research from several advanced democracies shows that inhabitants of rural and peripheral places feel that their area is disadvantaged by political elites and disregarded by inhabitants of other areas. These place-based feelings of resentment are strongly related to political attitudes and behaviours, which suggests the importance for policy makers to address place-based resentment by investing in the so-called “places that don’t matter”. However, it remains unclear why place resentment is relatively high in rural areas, and to what extent it can be explained by socioeconomic, cultural and political spatial inequalities. This study investigates to what extent regional indicators of spatial inequality can explain individuals’ place-based feelings of resentment, by analysing geocoded individual-level survey data collected in the Netherlands that are linked to indicators of the socioeconomic, cultural and political context of the residential area. The results of the multilevel regression models show that inhabitants feel stronger place resentment when socioeconomic deprivation in the municipality is higher, and when the cultural distance from the residential region to the centre of the country is higher. The multilevel SEM model shows that these contextual indicators can to a large extent (around 50%) explain why feelings of place resentment are stronger in more peripheral areas. This provides cues for how policy makers can address this form of resentment, and the findings could likely be generalized to other European countries where geographic, economic, cultural and political inequalities between regions are larger.