Annual Report 2021

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Urban vs. rural
Changing identities and their ramifications
Prof. Dr. Markus Freitag

“The project aims to reveal the causes underlying the current crisis of democracy and propose some possible ways to overcome them.”

POLITICS AND ADMINISTRATION

European research project launched

The Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern has a long tradition of researching the urban-rural divide. The importance of this work is emphasized over and over again, particularly with respect to voting research.

 

2021 marked the launch of RUDE (The Rural-Urban Divide in Europe), an international, multi-year research project being conducted jointly with five other universities. Within the scope of this project, researchers will examine the differences in the attitudes of both urban and rural populations as well as their consequences with respect to the political developments of democratic societies.

Place of residence influences political attitudes

Researchers will examine how the identities of urban and rural populations have changed over the past few decades and what that means for democracy. The Swiss team will also investigate the special role played by metropolitan areas.

The project will additionally include a comparative study on social identities and political attitudes in all European countries as well as representative population surveys and experiments in the five participating countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Spain.

Collaboration with five European universities

RUDE is being promoted by NORFACE (New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Cooperation in Europe) as part of the Horizon 2020 program entitled “Democratic governance in a turbulent age”. Funding for the project amounts to around CHF 1.5 million. In addition to the University of Bern, the RUDE project is being carried out with participation from the Goethe University Frankfurt (D), the Autonomous University of Barcelona (ESP), Université Grenoble Alpes (F) and the University of Glasgow (UK).

Did you know?

“In Swiss politics, the urban-rural divide is most obvious when it comes to matters related to agricultural policy, foreign policy and migration policy. It can also be found anyplace where dissimilar values clash, like on the topics of gender equality and abortions, for example.”

The Institute of Political Science

The Institute of Political Science is one of the foremost political science institutions in Switzerland and is a leader in Europe according to the CHE Excellence ranking. We are home to excellent basic research and commissioned research with real-world relevance. The core messages of both are components of the “Social Sciences” bachelor’s degree program as well as the “Political Science” and “Swiss Politics and Comparative Politics” master’s degree programs. Teaching and research are focused on Swiss politics, comparative political sciences, European politics and environmental politics as well as on hiring and behavioral research within the framework of political sociology. We also offer numerous services for the public, including the Année Politique Suisse and the Comparative Political Data Set. The department performs anthropological and paleopathological analyses and samples remains to perform radiocarbon dating, stable isotope and paleogenetic analyses in the laboratory. The resulting data is the basis for interdisciplinary studies of nutrition, mobility, disease burden, population genetics, and relationships of past populations.

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