In the last few years, we have witnessed of renaissance of the traditional rural-urban divide. Increasingly, we have seen that a lot of scholars have appealed to this cleavage to explain the rise of the Populist Radical Right Parties as well as new rural parties. Parallel to this phenomenon has been the emergence of what is known as “place-based resentment” (Munis, 2022). Defined by Huijsmans (2022) “a perception of unfair socioeconomic, cultural and political inequality between the own area and other areas”, is an expression of polarisation from a geographical perspective. In this line, the division is established between people living in municipalities of the same typology as ours (in-group) versus those living in other municipalities (out-group). In general, resentment has not been symmetrical but more on the part of people living in rural areas against those living in cities (Borwein and Lucas, 2023; Cramer, 2016).

Most of these studies have focused on the Netherlands, the United States or Canada. We selected Spain as a case study. A country particularly favourable because of its large territorial imbalances between rural areas and cities as well as a large number of rural municipalities. To address this issue, we use the indicator proposed by Munis constructed with data obtained from a survey carried out by the Research Project: "Geography, polarization and the rural-urban divide in the XXI century" funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of the Government of Spain.

This research aims to find out whether place-based resentment has had any effect on voting behaviour. We also study whether there is a significantly different impact on voting depending on whether it is rural resentment or urban resentment. Furthermore, thanks to the geolocation of the survey, we can take contextual controls on the municipality in which respondents reside.

References
Borwein, S., y Lucas, J. (2023). Asymmetries in urban, suburban, and rural place-based resentment. Political Geography, 105, 102904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102904
Cramer, K. J. (2016). The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226349251.001.0001
Huijsmans, T. (2022). Place resentment in ‘the places that don’t matter’: Explaining the geographic divide in populist and anti-immigration attitudes. Acta Politica. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-022-00244-9
Munis, B. K. (2022). Us Over Here Versus Them Over There…Literally: Measuring Place Resentment in American Politics. Political Behavior, 44(3), 1057-1078. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-020-09641-2