Do urban and rural areas vote differently everywhere, or do they only do so in advanced industrial democracies? More broadly, where, why, and how does this geographic cleavage manifest? To answer these fundamental questions of contemporary electoral politics, Noah Dasanaike introduces the Small-Area Global Elections archive (SAGE), a dataset of geocoded, granular election results covering 104 countries, 8.2 million unique places, and 10 billion votes. Using novel measures of party ideology and 1.3 billion buildings to quantify urbanicity and rurality, he finds only marginal average urban-rural polarization over the previous two decades. However, these results mask substantial heterogeneity: countries on nearly every continent violate the conventional expectation of urban-left rural-right. First globally, then in a large-scale test of voting behavior across Europe, Dasanaike finds that the geographic dispersion of structural economic conditions, namely agrarianism, industrialization, and knowledge agglomeration, partially explains the ideological disposition of cities vis-à-vis the countryside.
The Graduate Student Research Workshop is a seminar for graduate students at Harvard University and MIT to present their research to peers and faculty with an interest in European studies. This student-run, student-centered workshop welcomes presenters at any stage of their research from any social science discipline.
To join the seminar mailing list, please contact the seminar chairs. Papers will be distributed to participants via email in advance, and the schedule of upcoming workshops will be updated here throughout the academic year.
