When the State Feels Far Away: Territorialized Trust and the Urban–Rural Divide in Europe

A growing literature links rural political discontent in Europe to cultural backlash, populism, and declining democratic support. This paper advances a different interpretation by focusing on the territorial dimension of state presence and authority. Rather than treating the urban–rural divide as a generalized attitudinal gap, we argue that it reflects differential experiences of the state as a territorially embedded set of institutions. In particular, trust in institutions associated with the physical presence of the state should vary systematically across urban and rural space. Using individual-level data from Wave 7 of the World Values Survey for European countries, the paper examines urban–rural differences in trust in a range of state institutions. We distinguish between institutions that signal territorialized state presence—such as the police, courts, civil service, and healthcare system—and institutions that are more abstract or nationally mediated, such as parliaments, political parties, and democratic regimes. This distinction allows us to assess whether rural distrust is concentrated in institutions through which citizens most directly experience the state in everyday life. We advance three hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that rural residents exhibit systematically lower trust in territorially embedded state institutions than urban residents. Second, we expect these gaps to be larger for institutions associated with service delivery and enforcement than for representative or regime-level institutions. Third, we hypothesize that these differences persist after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics, indicating that they reflect place-based experiences of state presence rather than individual disadvantage alone. The analysis supports these expectations. Trust gaps between urban and rural respondents are consistently larger for the police, courts, healthcare, and civil service than for democratic institutions or political actors. These patterns remain robust when accounting for education, income, employment, and demographic factors. The findings suggest that rural discontent is closely linked to perceptions of a retreating or unevenly present state, rather than to ideological alienation from democracy or politics per se. By foregrounding territorialized trust, this paper contributes to research on the geography of discontent and to theories of political cleavages that emphasize the spatial organization of state authority. It aligns with work highlighting the political consequences of uneven state penetration and service provision, and shows that contemporary urban–rural divides in Europe are deeply rooted in how citizens encounter the state across territory. The paper thus reframes rural political discontent as a problem of territorial governance and state presence, rather than of democratic legitimacy.