What´s the Matter with Madrid?

In recent times, a rural-urban divide in political attitudes and voting behavior has emerged in European established democracies. In a nutshell, inhabitants of cities are usually found to be more left-wing than citizens that live in rural areas. Among urban areas, the capital city of the country is one of the most (if not the most) progressive places in every European democracy except for one: Madrid. By using data from the first ten waves of the European Social Survey, this paper is making the following contributions. First, we show that the political attitudes of the people living in the capital of European democracies are consistently more liberal than the attitudes of the people living in the rural areas of the country with one single exception: Spain. The effect exists irrespective of the specific considered issue, albeit it is significantly weaker in the case of economic redistribution. Second, we examine with data from the Spanish Center for Sociological Research: a) the temporal evolution of this pattern; and b) the mechanisms that account for it.