Pub Date : 2024-08-09DOI: 10.1177/00104140241271210
Maria Thürk, H. Klüver
Does supporting a minority cabinet harm a party’s electoral prospects? While minority governments have become more common in recent years, the electoral implications for parties supporting such cabinets remain unclear. Previous research suggests that support parties enjoy a favorable position, exerting policy influence while avoiding electoral losses associated with joining the government. However, we argue that this is only true for support parties without written agreements, as their support is less visible to voters. To test our argument, we compiled a novel dataset on the electoral performance of 563 parties in 304 elections across 31 countries since 1980. We estimate the effect of being a support party on subsequent electoral performance. Our findings indicate that parties which declare support perform better electorally than junior partners, while contract support parties do not. These insights shed light on the relationship between minority governments and electoral competition amidst growing party system fragmentation.
{"title":"Hitting the Sweet Spot? The Electoral Consequences of Supporting Minority Governments","authors":"Maria Thürk, H. Klüver","doi":"10.1177/00104140241271210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241271210","url":null,"abstract":"Does supporting a minority cabinet harm a party’s electoral prospects? While minority governments have become more common in recent years, the electoral implications for parties supporting such cabinets remain unclear. Previous research suggests that support parties enjoy a favorable position, exerting policy influence while avoiding electoral losses associated with joining the government. However, we argue that this is only true for support parties without written agreements, as their support is less visible to voters. To test our argument, we compiled a novel dataset on the electoral performance of 563 parties in 304 elections across 31 countries since 1980. We estimate the effect of being a support party on subsequent electoral performance. Our findings indicate that parties which declare support perform better electorally than junior partners, while contract support parties do not. These insights shed light on the relationship between minority governments and electoral competition amidst growing party system fragmentation.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141924573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-09DOI: 10.1177/00104140241269876
Susanne Garritzmann, Nadja Wehl
Education is one of the strongest predictors of political participation at the individual level. However, the association between education and participation varies across countries, which previous studies attribute mainly to institutions like electoral systems. Drawing on policy feedback and political socialization theories, we suggest an alternative explanation: education policies generate powerful and lasting policy feedback effects in adolescence, which continue to influence patterns of participation among adults. More concretely, we argue that policies aimed at de-stratifying secondary education (i.e., promoting more comprehensive models of education) are associated with a decrease in political inequality. We empirically investigate our argument in Germany, where education policies vary across sub-national units (Länder) and over time. We leverage this variation by combining data on Land-level policies with data on individual’s participation. Our results show that de-stratifying education policies have reduced in inequality in various forms of political participation, interest, and efficacy, but not in turnout.
{"title":"How Education Policies Shape Political Inequality: Analyzing Policy Feedback Effects in Germany","authors":"Susanne Garritzmann, Nadja Wehl","doi":"10.1177/00104140241269876","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241269876","url":null,"abstract":"Education is one of the strongest predictors of political participation at the individual level. However, the association between education and participation varies across countries, which previous studies attribute mainly to institutions like electoral systems. Drawing on policy feedback and political socialization theories, we suggest an alternative explanation: education policies generate powerful and lasting policy feedback effects in adolescence, which continue to influence patterns of participation among adults. More concretely, we argue that policies aimed at de-stratifying secondary education (i.e., promoting more comprehensive models of education) are associated with a decrease in political inequality. We empirically investigate our argument in Germany, where education policies vary across sub-national units (Länder) and over time. We leverage this variation by combining data on Land-level policies with data on individual’s participation. Our results show that de-stratifying education policies have reduced in inequality in various forms of political participation, interest, and efficacy, but not in turnout.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141923036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-09DOI: 10.1177/00104140241269843
Chengyuan Ji, Xiao Ma
This study explores the sources of regional favoritism in government-invested infrastructure projects. We built an original county-level dataset that matches the biographies of 1614 retired communist revolutionaries with information on the expansion of China’s state-directed high-speed railway program. Our findings indicate that a surviving revolutionary makes his birth county significantly more likely to receive the central government’s approval for railway investment. This pattern is robust after accounting for a wide range of alternative explanations and a natural experiment design that exploits variations in the timings of revolutionaries’ natural deaths. Additional evidence suggests that the empowering effect of the retired revolutionaries stems most likely from their assistance in their birth counties’ bottom-up lobbying of the central government. Their moral authority as the founders of the regime helps boost local requests for investment in the eyes of central policymakers. Our findings highlight a bottom-up intergovernmental dynamic that translates personal influence into policy benefits.
{"title":"Revolutionaries for Railways","authors":"Chengyuan Ji, Xiao Ma","doi":"10.1177/00104140241269843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241269843","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores the sources of regional favoritism in government-invested infrastructure projects. We built an original county-level dataset that matches the biographies of 1614 retired communist revolutionaries with information on the expansion of China’s state-directed high-speed railway program. Our findings indicate that a surviving revolutionary makes his birth county significantly more likely to receive the central government’s approval for railway investment. This pattern is robust after accounting for a wide range of alternative explanations and a natural experiment design that exploits variations in the timings of revolutionaries’ natural deaths. Additional evidence suggests that the empowering effect of the retired revolutionaries stems most likely from their assistance in their birth counties’ bottom-up lobbying of the central government. Their moral authority as the founders of the regime helps boost local requests for investment in the eyes of central policymakers. Our findings highlight a bottom-up intergovernmental dynamic that translates personal influence into policy benefits.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141925231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-08DOI: 10.1177/00104140241271166
Jad Moawad, Daniel Oesch
The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980–2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one’s parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class.
{"title":"The Myth of the Middle Class Squeeze: Employment and Income by Class in Six Western Countries, 1980–2020","authors":"Jad Moawad, Daniel Oesch","doi":"10.1177/00104140241271166","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241271166","url":null,"abstract":"The public debate portrays the middle class as the big losers in recent decades, while people above and below seemingly fared better in terms of employment and income growth. This narrative is both conceptually and empirically flawed. Based on the Luxembourg Income Study 1980–2020, we show for France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US that middle-class employment expanded, while the working class shrank. The middle class also experienced consistently larger income gains than the working class over the past four decades. The disposable real incomes of working-class households in France, Germany or the US grew by less than half a percent per year, compared to 1% or more for the middle class. Cohort analysis also shows that the promise of doing better than one’s parents held for the middle class, but vanished for the working class.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141927987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-08DOI: 10.1177/00104140241271123
Mathilde M. van Ditmars, Rosalind Shorrocks
The “modern” gender vote gap – where women are generally more supportive of left parties than men – is established in many Western democracies. Whilst it is linked to societal changes, and in particular the transformation of gender roles and relations, scholars still grapple with its underlying mechanisms. This paper tests one mechanism currently untested in existing accounts: that women’s specific experiences in less traditional social statuses – in employment, education, or out of marriage – drive their support for the left. Analyses using German, Swiss, and English panel data do show differences in left party support between men and women, and amongst women, according to these social statuses. However, we do not find evidence that these occur because of these experiences directly. Rather, our findings indicate that left-leaning women self-select into certain life trajectories. This suggests that women’s shifting political views due to societal change have corresponding changes in individual life choices.
{"title":"Social Change and Women’s Left Vote. The Role of Employment, Education, and Marriage in the Gender Vote Gap","authors":"Mathilde M. van Ditmars, Rosalind Shorrocks","doi":"10.1177/00104140241271123","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241271123","url":null,"abstract":"The “modern” gender vote gap – where women are generally more supportive of left parties than men – is established in many Western democracies. Whilst it is linked to societal changes, and in particular the transformation of gender roles and relations, scholars still grapple with its underlying mechanisms. This paper tests one mechanism currently untested in existing accounts: that women’s specific experiences in less traditional social statuses – in employment, education, or out of marriage – drive their support for the left. Analyses using German, Swiss, and English panel data do show differences in left party support between men and women, and amongst women, according to these social statuses. However, we do not find evidence that these occur because of these experiences directly. Rather, our findings indicate that left-leaning women self-select into certain life trajectories. This suggests that women’s shifting political views due to societal change have corresponding changes in individual life choices.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141927637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-08DOI: 10.1177/00104140241269894
Paloma Aguilar, Fernando de la Cuesta, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Francisco Villamil
Research on civilian victimization usually treats all civilians as a unitary group. But not all civilians are the same, nor are they killed for the same reasons. This study highlights a form of wartime civilian victimization that is little understood, even if pervasive across conflicts: violence against local leaders. We argue that this category of civilians are pre-emptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support. Local leaders with greater mobilization capacity are more likely to be killed. We test this argument using original data on clergy killings during the Spanish Civil War. Results show that clerics were more likely to be killed in municipalities where their capacity for mobilizing people against the Republic was higher, making themselves a potential threat to local armed actors. This study highlights the need to disaggregate the category of civilians, which has suffered from conceptual and empirical overaggregation.
{"title":"Mobilization Capacity and Violence Against Local Leaders: Anticlerical Violence During the Spanish Civil War","authors":"Paloma Aguilar, Fernando de la Cuesta, Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Francisco Villamil","doi":"10.1177/00104140241269894","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241269894","url":null,"abstract":"Research on civilian victimization usually treats all civilians as a unitary group. But not all civilians are the same, nor are they killed for the same reasons. This study highlights a form of wartime civilian victimization that is little understood, even if pervasive across conflicts: violence against local leaders. We argue that this category of civilians are pre-emptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support. Local leaders with greater mobilization capacity are more likely to be killed. We test this argument using original data on clergy killings during the Spanish Civil War. Results show that clerics were more likely to be killed in municipalities where their capacity for mobilizing people against the Republic was higher, making themselves a potential threat to local armed actors. This study highlights the need to disaggregate the category of civilians, which has suffered from conceptual and empirical overaggregation.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141926683","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-23DOI: 10.1177/00104140241259458
Christopher Claassen, Kathrin Ackermann, Eri Bertsou, Lucas Borba, Ryan E. Carlin, Amnon Cavari, Sirianne Dahlum, Sergiu Gherghina, Darren Hawkins, Yphtach Lelkes, Pedro C. Magalhães, Robert B. Mattes, M. Meijers, Anja Neundorf, Dániel Oross, Aykut Öztürk, R. Sarsfield, Darin Self, Ben Stanley, Tsung-han Tsai, A. Zaslove, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister
Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national samples to evaluate these rights and institutions. We find considerable heterogeneity across countries in how our items cohere, especially in less developed contexts. Yet, those items that are more weakly connected with general support for liberal democracy tend to reveal the influence of political events and actors, arguably indicating weaknesses in political cultures. We further identify a concise subset of seven items that provide a reliable and valid measure of support for liberal democracy across our different samples.
{"title":"Conceptualizing and Measuring Support for Democracy: A New Approach","authors":"Christopher Claassen, Kathrin Ackermann, Eri Bertsou, Lucas Borba, Ryan E. Carlin, Amnon Cavari, Sirianne Dahlum, Sergiu Gherghina, Darren Hawkins, Yphtach Lelkes, Pedro C. Magalhães, Robert B. Mattes, M. Meijers, Anja Neundorf, Dániel Oross, Aykut Öztürk, R. Sarsfield, Darin Self, Ben Stanley, Tsung-han Tsai, A. Zaslove, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister","doi":"10.1177/00104140241259458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241259458","url":null,"abstract":"Much of what we know about public support for democracy is based on survey questions about “democracy,” a term that varies in meaning across countries and likely prompts uncritically supportive responses. This paper proposes a new approach to measuring support for democracy. We develop a battery of 17 survey questions that cover all eight components of liberal democracy as defined by the V-Dem project. We then ask respondents from 19 national samples to evaluate these rights and institutions. We find considerable heterogeneity across countries in how our items cohere, especially in less developed contexts. Yet, those items that are more weakly connected with general support for liberal democracy tend to reveal the influence of political events and actors, arguably indicating weaknesses in political cultures. We further identify a concise subset of seven items that provide a reliable and valid measure of support for liberal democracy across our different samples.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141813199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-19DOI: 10.1177/00104140241252082
Mihail Chiru
While scholars of clientelism have long recognized that party organization characteristics influence the capacity of parties to pursue clientelism, the consequences of clientelism for party organization remain underexplored. This article examines how clientelism influences one salient aspect of party organization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), internal democracy, arguing that in parties pursuing clientelism, selection processes are less competitive, and leader domination over party bodies is necessary, as is limiting the influence of rank-and-file members on organizational and policy issues. Longitudinal analyses corroborate the hypothesized negative relationship for a sample of CEE parties and for a larger sample of parties outside the region. While single-shot and relational clientelism are both negatively associated with intra-party democracy, the latter has a stronger impact. The statistical analyses are complemented by a qualitative account of how clientelism and weak intra-party democracy fit in with the CEE parties’ origin, ideological orientation, and broader organisational strategies.
{"title":"Clientelism, Party Organization and Intra-party Democracy","authors":"Mihail Chiru","doi":"10.1177/00104140241252082","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241252082","url":null,"abstract":"While scholars of clientelism have long recognized that party organization characteristics influence the capacity of parties to pursue clientelism, the consequences of clientelism for party organization remain underexplored. This article examines how clientelism influences one salient aspect of party organization in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), internal democracy, arguing that in parties pursuing clientelism, selection processes are less competitive, and leader domination over party bodies is necessary, as is limiting the influence of rank-and-file members on organizational and policy issues. Longitudinal analyses corroborate the hypothesized negative relationship for a sample of CEE parties and for a larger sample of parties outside the region. While single-shot and relational clientelism are both negatively associated with intra-party democracy, the latter has a stronger impact. The statistical analyses are complemented by a qualitative account of how clientelism and weak intra-party democracy fit in with the CEE parties’ origin, ideological orientation, and broader organisational strategies.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141820705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-18DOI: 10.1177/00104140241259461
Chase Foster, Kathleen Thelen
Competition law is a constitutive institution in capitalist markets, establishing the rules for when interfirm coordination is allowed and where competition is required (Paul, 2020). Yet comparativists have spent decades debating the varieties of capitalism framework—which places the issue of coordination at the center of the distinction between capitalist types—while paying virtually no attention to cross-national variation in antitrust rules. This article develops an original theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between competition law and the organization of capitalism. We go beyond the usual binaries (coordinated vs. liberal market economies, “restrictive” vs. “permissive” antitrust regimes) to disentangle two dimensions of the law that fundamentally shape patterns of coordination and competition both across regulatory jurisdictions and over time. Applying our framework to analyze the evolution of American and European competition law, we show how a comparative coordination rights framework can be used to conceptualize key institutional changes within contemporary capitalist systems.
{"title":"Coordination Rights, Competition Law and Varieties of Capitalism","authors":"Chase Foster, Kathleen Thelen","doi":"10.1177/00104140241259461","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140241259461","url":null,"abstract":"Competition law is a constitutive institution in capitalist markets, establishing the rules for when interfirm coordination is allowed and where competition is required (Paul, 2020). Yet comparativists have spent decades debating the varieties of capitalism framework—which places the issue of coordination at the center of the distinction between capitalist types—while paying virtually no attention to cross-national variation in antitrust rules. This article develops an original theoretical framework to conceptualize the relationship between competition law and the organization of capitalism. We go beyond the usual binaries (coordinated vs. liberal market economies, “restrictive” vs. “permissive” antitrust regimes) to disentangle two dimensions of the law that fundamentally shape patterns of coordination and competition both across regulatory jurisdictions and over time. Applying our framework to analyze the evolution of American and European competition law, we show how a comparative coordination rights framework can be used to conceptualize key institutional changes within contemporary capitalist systems.","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141824725","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-07-01Epub Date: 2023-08-04DOI: 10.1177/00104140231194060
Zack Taylor, Jack Lucas, David A Armstrong, Ryan Bakker
We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election outcomes across countries and time. We find that the cleavage has widened over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of urban-rural cleavages.
{"title":"The Development of the Urban-Rural Cleavage in Anglo-American Democracies.","authors":"Zack Taylor, Jack Lucas, David A Armstrong, Ryan Bakker","doi":"10.1177/00104140231194060","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00104140231194060","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We provide a mixed-methods, comparative analysis of the development of the urban-rural electoral cleavage in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States from the early 20th century to the present. Using aggregate election results, electoral district boundary files, and electoral district population measures, we construct a new comparable dataset of district election results and urbanity for the lower house of the legislature in each country. We use this dataset to measure the importance of the urban-rural divide for election outcomes across countries and time. We find that the cleavage has widened over time in each country, each arrived at its current urban-rural divide via a distinct developmental trajectory, which we interpret with reference to secondary literature. We conclude by discussing the significance of our findings for theories of both the causes and consequences of urban-rural divides and discuss the implications of our work for the comparative study of urban-rural cleavages.</p>","PeriodicalId":10600,"journal":{"name":"Comparative Political Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11142886/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48421659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}