Urban-Rural Policy Disagreement in Canada, 2000-Present

Abstract

The urban-rural political divide is large and growing in many countries, but the sources of this widening divide are not well understood. Recent research has pointed to policy disagreement as one possible mechanism for this growing divide; if urban and rural residents hold increasingly dissimilar policy preferences, this disagreement could produce ever-widening urban-rural electoral divides. We investigate this possibility by creating a synthesized dataset of 784 policy issue questions across eight distinct national election studies from 2000 to present in Canada (N=4.67 million), combined with a measure of the urban or rural character of every federal electoral district in Canada’s history. This dataset allows us to measure urban-rural policy disagreement across a much larger range of policy issues and over a much longer time period than has previously been possible. We find strong evidence of urban-rural policy disagreement across a range of issues, and especially in areas of cultural policy, including gun control, immigration, and Indigenous affairs. We further find strong support for the “progressive cities” hypothesis; in nearly all policy domains, urban residents support more left-wing positions on policy issues than rural residents. However, we find no evidence these urban-rural policy divides have grown since 2000. Urban-rural policy disagreement, while large and meaningful, cannot explain ever-widening urban-rural political divides in our case country.