Two Divides, One Territory: Democracy and Governance Across Europe’s Urban–Rural Gap

Recent debates on the urban–rural divide in Europe emphasize cultural polarization, populist voting, and declining democratic support outside metropolitan areas. Yet empirical findings on rural democratic dissatisfaction are mixed, and often point to relatively small urban–rural differences in satisfaction with democracy. This paper revisits the empirical foundations of the European urban–rural divide by distinguishing between two analytically distinct dimensions of political support: support for democracy as a regime principle and evaluations of governance and public service institutions. We argue that much of what is described as “rural discontent” reflects not a crisis of democratic legitimacy, but a territorially structured governance divide rooted in perceptions of uneven state performance. Using individual-level data from Wave 7 of the World Values Survey for European countries, we compare urban–rural differences across a broad set of attitudes toward democracy, political institutions, and public service–providing state institutions. The analysis focuses in particular on trust in governance-related institutions such as healthcare, education, the police, courts, and the civil service, alongside measures of satisfaction with democracy and trust in representative institutions. The paper advances three hypotheses. First, we hypothesize that urban–rural differences in support for democracy and satisfaction with democratic functioning are modest and heterogeneous across European countries. Second, we expect urban–rural divides to be substantially larger and more consistent for governance-related institutions and public services, reflecting perceptions of territorially uneven state capacity and service provision. Third, we hypothesize that these governance-related divides persist after accounting for individual socioeconomic characteristics, indicating a place-based cleavage that cannot be reduced to compositional differences alone. The empirical results support these expectations. While satisfaction with democracy shows relatively small and inconsistent urban–rural gaps, trust in public services and state institutions displays a clear and persistent rural disadvantage across much of Europe. These patterns remain robust when controlling for education, income, employment status, and other individual-level factors. The findings suggest that rural residents are not systematically less supportive of democracy, but are more skeptical of the state’s capacity and willingness to deliver governance outcomes across territory. By disentangling democratic support from evaluations of governance, this paper helps reconcile conflicting evidence in the literature on Europe’s “geography of discontent.” It contributes to research on territorial political cleavages by showing that the contemporary urban–rural divide in Europe is best understood as a governance divide, rooted in spatially uneven experiences of the state, rather than as a generalized rejection of democratic norms.