Date: 11 March 2024
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speakers: Professor Michael Kenny and Dr Davide Luca
Talk Title: ' Drifting apart? The urban-rural continuum and the evolution of political disenchantment across 30 European countries'
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College
The seminar series is supported by the Cambridge Journal of Economics and the Economics and Policy Group at the Cambridge Judge Business School.
Talk Overview:
Urban-rural polarisation in political disenchantment is argued to have grown and become a distinctive feature of contemporary Europe. Yet, to what extent do trends in urban-rural divides differ across countries? We address this question using individual-level data from around 270,000 respondents over the period 2002-2020. We find that, with the exception of Eastern Europe, where we do not find any clear urban density gap, patterns of urban/rural political disenchantment are markedly country-specific. For example, they are strong in France, the UK, Portugal, and Finland, but less so in the Netherlands, Italy, or Spain. We also show that the overall differences in levels of political disenchantment between the populations in different settings have grown since 2002, and particularly in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Speakers Overview:
Professor Kenny is the Inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Before he arrived in Cambridge, Michael held positions at: Queen’s University, Belfast; the University of Sheffield, where he was appointed Head of the Department of Politics; and Queen Mary University of London, where he was the inaugural Director of the Mile End Institute. He served on the Leverhulme Trust’s Advisory Committee (2010-2018), was co-director of the British Academy’s “Governing England” programme (2015-2018), and is currently a visiting Fellow at the UCL Constitution Unit and a member of the advisory board of the Constitution Society. He also serves on the scientific advisory panel for the ‘Behaviour Change by Design’ project funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the Management Board of the Centre for Sustainable Leadership, and is senior advisor to ‘The Science of Global Risk’ project funded by the Templeton Foundation. In 2021 he was made a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of the Social Sciences.
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/about-us/person/michael-kenny-2/
Dr Davide Luca is an Assistant Professor of Economic Geography. His research is interdisciplinary, cutting across Economic Geography, Political Economy, and Public Policy. Before joining Cambridge University, Dr Davide Luca was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and worked for the European Commission. He holds a PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he is a Visiting Fellow. More information about him can be found on his website: https://davideluca.com/.
https://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/directory/davide-luca