Mobilizing the countryside: rurality, turnout and postal voting

Election campaigners report greater difficulties in campaigning in rural than in urban constituencies, because of the larger distances involved in traveling around rural seats. Similarly, rural voters can live further from their polling stations than their urban counterparts, increasing the costs of voting. Yet studies of turnout often report higher turnout in rural than in urban seats. We investigate this apparent paradox by examining rurality and constituency turnout at British general elections between 2010 and 2019. Although the costs of in-person voting are greater in rural areas, postal voting is no more common in the countryside than in the town. Instead, much of the rural-urban differential in turnout is explained by the socio-economic make-up of local electorates. Groups who are generally more likely to participate are relatively over-represented in more rural areas, and when this is taken into consideration, some, but not all, of the “rural advantage” in turnout can be accounted for. Other things being equal, turnout remains higher in rural areas even when we control for socio-economic and political conditions, and it cannot be explained away by greater uptake of postal voting. Far from facing a democratic deficit, Britain’s rural areas are relative hotspots of electoral participation.