In the framework of the EUI Political Behaviour Colloquium, this seminar features a paper presentation by Professor Susanne Wallman Lundåsen (LiU).
It has been suggested that the rise of anti-immigration parties such as the Sweden Democrats could generally be understood as a consequence of expanding differences between cosmopolitan cities and what have been regarded as laggard rural or deindustrialized regions (Colantone & Stanig, 2018; Kitschelt, 1997). Previous research has argued that the processes of globalization have created winners and losers (Colantone & Stanig, 2018; Kitschelt, 1997). The losers are argued to be the residents of industrialized regions where their previous manufacturing industry has moved to China or elsewhere. Well-paid jobs in the industrial sector have either been replaced by jobs in the service sector that pay less or have resulted in higher levels of unemployment. An overall trend pointed to a general populist turn among voters in places located on the geographical outskirts (Huijsmans, 2022; Rodriguez-Pose 2018). Previous studies have suggested that Sweden could be on a similar path as the US, with voters in rural areas becoming significantly more inclined to vote for the Sweden Democrats (Mehic, 2019). At the same time, the notion of rural resentment has been coined to conceptualize the resentment of residents in rural areas toward cities and metropolitan areas (Cramer, 2016; Huijsmans, 2022; Munis, 2020). Therefore, I argue in line with previous contributions (e.g., Chou et al, 2021; McKay et al., 2021) that it is important to further investigate to what extent living in rural districts contributes to voting for Sweden Democrats.
The aim of the present study is twofold: first, to investigate whether living in a rural district within a municipality increases the individual level probability to support the political party Sweden Democrats, and second, to describe whether those who support the Sweden Democrats in rural/urban areas differ on important aspects. Many of the previous studies of within-country variation in voting for the Sweden Democrats have depended on district-level data (e.g., Dal Bó et al., 2018; Dancygier et al, 2022; Mehic, 2019); hence, they have tended to study how changes across and within electoral districts impact the aggregate level vote for Sweden Democrats.
In the present study, we take stock of the Trustbarometer survey with 13,667 respondents nested in 49 municipalities and approximately 1,800 districts to assess whether there is a context effect from living in a rural area and supporting the Sweden Democrats. We rely on register data from Statistics Sweden that classifies the district of residence of the respondents as being either town (central), town (non-central) or rural. Second, we can describe whether the voters of the Sweden Democrats in rural districts differ in any important aspects from those in urban districts. Results indicate that living in a rural area increases the likelihood of supporting the Sweden Democrats more in national elections. Furthermore, social isolation is a more important explanatory factor for voting for the Sweden Democrats among those who live in rural districts.
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