Rural-Urban Disparities: A Systematic Review of Political Science Research

Although the concept of rural-urban divides has been established for decades, at least since Lipset and Rokkan’s seminal work on European cleavage structures, interest has skyrocketed in recent years. This paper reviews 264 journal articles on the topic published since 2000, with the majority appearing after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016. We examine subject areas, method, operationalisation and geographical scope. Importantly, we investigate whether this revived research field has already produced findings that can be considered robust and where glaring research gaps can be identified. We find, first, that publications on rural-urban disparities are heavily biased towards the USA, while papers with a focus on other regions or comparative papers are only slowly catching up. Second, the research so far has produced very few robust findings which is, thirdly, also due to the highly diverse and often opaque operationalisation of what rural and urban are.