Globalization and the Hinterland: International Trade and the Rural–Urban Divide

The growing political divide between rural and urban regions is often attributed to rural deindustrialization and import competition in manufacturing. Yet this cleavage emerged in many countries well before rural industrialization, pointing to underlying economic forces that existing accounts have overlooked. We argue that comparative advantage in agriculture is one such force: rural voters are more likely to support protectionist parties and policies when local agriculture is uncompetitive, since this sector is often central to their communities’ economic and social life. Using a new harmonized dataset of surveys from 123 countries and extensive data on voting behavior in the European Union, we find strong support for our argument. An additional analysis exploiting exogenous subnational variation in agricultural competitiveness in the United States post-NAFTA further corroborates our findings: the political divide between rural and urban voters is pronounced in uncompetitive regions but negligible in those possessing a comparative advantage in agriculture.