Are cities ever more cosmopolitan? Studying trends in urban-rural divergence of cultural attitudes

Many scholars and pundits have argued that there is a growing urban-rural divide in political attitudes in the US and Europe. However, it is an empirical question whether and how differences in political attitudes between urban and rural areas have changed over time. In this study, we investigate the urban-rural divergence in cosmopolitan-nationalist attitudes in the Netherlands over the last four decades. We focus on attitudes towards issues of immigration, multiculturalism and European integration. We use individual-level survey data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (1994–2017) and the Cultural Changes Study (1979–2016). We find consistent support for divergence on cosmopolitan-nationalist issues between inhabitants of more- and less-urbanised municipalities over the last decades in the Netherlands, also when controlling for sociodemographic composition. This divergence is mostly due to the fact that the attitudes of people in the larger cities differ increasingly from people living in other parts of the country. Trends in smaller towns and villages are very similar to those in the most rural areas.