Is Rural Discontent a Driver of Disruptive Politics? A Global Analysis

The recent rise of extreme and disruptive political parties and candidates – especially on the right – is commonly linked in popular discourse with support from marginalised and disaffected rural communities. This association has been affirmed by some analyses of individual elections, yet in other cases analysis has shown no clear correlation. To date, no systematic analysis of the relationship between rural discontent and votes for disruptive political parties across multiple countries and elections has been completed. This paper addresses this gap by presenting research on this question undertaken as part of a larger ERC/UKRI project on ‘Rural Discontent, Spatial Justice and Disruptive Politics’. The presentation draws on quantitative analysis of the significance of votes in rural constituencies for disruptive parties in 71 liberal democracies globally across over 300 elections since 2000; combined with more targeted qualitative analysis of policy and campaign materials for selected parties to examine discursive strategies to frame and exploit rural discontent. Emerging findings indicate a mixed picture. There are few cases where rural votes alone sufficient to propel disruptive parties to national significance, and in many cases disruptive parties draw primarily on urban votes or obtain similar levels of support in rural and urban areas. However, rural areas can be important to disruptive parties in three ways: as solid ‘heartlands’ (as for Donald Trump in the USA), as key battlegrounds (as for RN in France), and as frontiers into which urban-origin parties have extended their voter coalition (as for Vox in Spain and PVV in the Netherlands). Understanding these patterns and how they reflect different national political cultures and/or the relative extremism and ideological positioning of parties can provide valuable insights into the geographies of extremist and disruptive parties and into their political potential.