Where does populism breed? Unpacking the rural-urban divide in Germany.

Voting behavior and political attitudes in Western democracies increasingly reveal strong spatial patterns that are rooted in geographic inequalities serving as breeding grounds for populism. But what describes these places where people defy the political status quo and populist attitudes manifest? Previous research focuses mainly on the rural-urban divide locating political polarization in remote and sparsely populated areas (Gimpel et al. 2020; McKee 2008, Schoen 2019). Additionally, the study of left behind places highlights economic decline and hardship as main drivers of the spatial divide (Broz, et al. 2020; Ford & Goodwin 2014; Rodríguez-Pose 2018). Both approaches lack an investigation of the role the provision of public services and infrastructure play in explaining the rural-urban gap. I argue that it is necessary to develop a more fine-grained understanding of the rural, possibly left behind areas to investigate where populist attitudes exist and how they can be prevented – both from a theoretical and methodological perspective. According to the political performance framework, citizens expect from the welfare state to provide social services and infrastructure (Dalton 2004; Kumlin 2017). Place-based context conditions can serve as low-intensity information cues to evaluate if the status quo meets citizens' expectations. After all, citizens are involuntarily exposed to the state of their neighborhood in their daily lives (Baybeck 2005). Consequently, a lack of public services and infrastructure in their neighborhood should fuel political resentments and populist attitudes. This paper builds on a case study of the German state for two reasons. Firstly, the manifestation of a rural-urban divide in the electoral success of the right-wing populist party 'AfD' in 2017 set off a public debate, but empirical studies are sparse and come to mixed results (Förtner et al. 2020; Hillje 2018; Schröder 2018). Secondly, the theoretical framework asks for survey data that are linked to detailed geographic context information on a small spatial grain. This study draws from such unique data by pooling georeferenced addresses of respondents of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) 2017 and the German General Social Survey (GGSS) 2018. Thus, the number of sampled municipalities can be maximized and linked with economic performance indicators, the provision of health services, public transport, retail, and internet access. Additionally, the respondents' location allows to control for even more fine-grained information within municipalities on the sociodemographic context and the distance to the closest urban center. This paper can showcase how spatial linking techniques advance political methodology to understand political polarization by drawing from and incorporating an array of different data sources. The empirical analyses will improve our understanding of the drivers of the rural-urban divide in populist attitudes and advise policymakers how to counteract outbursts of populism by providing sufficient public services and infrastructure.