Thin or thick? Populist and radical right politics across European cities, suburbs, and countryside

Abstract

AbstractThe surge of populist and radical right phenomena reshaped European political geography. Yet the connections between places of residence and populist or radical right politics tended to be neglected until recently. This paper addresses the gap by exploring how residency relates to support for populism and the radical right in contemporary Europe. Focusing on the distinction between ‘cities’, ‘towns–suburbs’, and ‘countryside’, I conduct an individual-level investigation of populist and radical right votes and attitudes across different residential contexts. The analysis is based on European Social Survey data (2020–22) from 23 countries, in both Western (WE) and Central–Eastern (CEE) Europe. The key finding is that the cleavage between cities and suburban–rural areas is much more related to the thick ideological underpinnings of the radical right—authoritarianism and nativism—than the thin, purely populist, dimension. Nativism particularly is stronger the more rural the place of residence, irrespective of the individual’s socio-economic profile, political orientations, the extent to which their region is left-behind, and whether they live in WE or CEE. Hence, future research on the geographical polarization of politics may turn its attention to the radical right, more than to populism per se.