Does place and connection shape attitudes on policy favouring rural areas? Unpacking the rural-urban divide in Australia

Recent North American and Western European research reports a distinctive rural vs urban dynamic in political behaviour. In this paper, we test the role of geography in the policy attitudes of Australians to items favouring rural areas. Exploiting data from the Australian Cooperative Election Survey, we examine whether populations differ in their policy preferences. We innovate conceptually by deploying an additional measure – rural connection – to tap the relationship that people have with geographical spaces that extend beyond place of residence. While place taps direct relations with geographical location (by living there), connection taps an indirect relationship, arrived at by having once lived or having friends or relatives who live in a rural place. Our analysis shows that existing findings of the role of place broadly hold in the Australian case, as do our new measure of connection. This adds weight to the development of place- and connection-based arguments for policy attitudes.