Bridging Rural-urban Individual Divides in Outlooks and Political Engagement

Polarisation between urban and rural areas is a key societal cleavage. Existing research finds that rural populations often hold more conservative views, while urban residents are generally associated with progressive positions on issues such as immigration, cosmopolitanism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights. Urban populations are also more likely to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change and support decarbonisation policies. However, critical questions about the causes and consequences of this observed divide remain unresolved. Is this division primarily attributable to compositional effects, that is, the uneven distribution of people with different demographic characteristics like education, age, and gender? Or does the context of place itself influence the formation of social, cultural, and political outlooks? If the latter, what place characteristics and specific mechanisms drive this contextual effect? Moreover, what strategies might mitigate the growing urban-rural divide, especially on contentious and highly topical issues such as migration, gender rights, and climate policy? By answering these questions, the BRIDGE project will significantly advance our understanding of urban-rural societal polarisation. BRIDGE innovatively asserts that urban-rural outlook polarisation originates from early-life environmental influences on individuals and is primarily shaped by the scale, density, distance, and diversity of social interactions in different settlements. Its signature transdisciplinary empirical approach will leverage causal inference research methods on longitudinal surveys tracking persons over the life course and Big Data from social networks such as Facebook, along with randomised controlled trials and in-depth qualitative fieldwork. The project will develop evidence-based strategies to mitigate polarisation on divisive topics and establish a global transdisciplinary research network to advance a comprehensive understanding of urban-rural divides.