How Rural is Rural Populism? On the Spatial Understanding of Rurality for Analyses of Right‐wing Populist Election Success in Germany*

Abstract

In this article, the authors take up the thesis of the narrative that the support for right-wing populist election successes is located in rural areas. For the case of the German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) the authors propose a complex definition of rurality, and perform a quantitative small-scale analysis of the national election results in Germany in 2017. They examine the potential connection between a high share of votes for the AfD and the rurality of a municipality. The results show that in eastern Germany, the fairly rural municipalities have comparatively high AfD vote shares, whereas in western Germany, the fairly rural and the non-rural municipalities have similar AfD vote shares. Therefore, it appears that the thesis that rural areas are the source of the support of right-wing populism applies to some, but not to all rural areas of Germany. *The authors thank Miriam Hils-Cosgrove and Dina Führmann for language editing as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

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