Research

Overview

The core of my research explores how people’s experiences in the contexts of their daily life shape their perceptions of politics and society. Having grown up in the countryside while studying and working in large cities, I have always been interested in how local context shapes political outlooks. By studying this, I try to answer broader questions about how structural inequalities between groups feed into political polarization and declining support for liberal-democratic institutions.

This agenda has three closely related strands, described below. My PhD dissertation, “Our Place in Politics: Urban-rural political divergence and how place affects political attitudes” (University of Amsterdam, 2023), laid the groundwork for this work — read it here.

1. Geographic political divides in comparative perspective

I study how geographically based political divides — most notably between urban and rural areas — have developed across political-institutional contexts, and how they relate to other socio-political divides. This work shows large variety in trends and levels of urban-rural divides across 19 European and Anglo-Saxon democracies.

Part of this work involved building the Urban-Rural Electoral Dataset (URED), a party/election/region-level dataset covering urban-rural electoral polarization in 19 countries, with Jonathan Rodden (Stanford University). It is one of several outputs of this strand of research; the dataset and codebook are available on the OSF project page.

The figure below is generated directly from the published URED data and updates automatically — it always reflects the latest available elections.

Figure 1: Smoothed urban-rural electoral divide by country (hover a line to highlight it). Note: lowess-smoothed trends; Germany reflects proportional-vote results only.

Related works:

• Huijsmans, T., & Rodden, J. (2024). The Great Global Divider? A Comparison of Urban-Rural Partisan Polarization in Western Democracies. Comparative Political Studies, 58(2), 261–290.
• Huijsmans, T., Kuhn, T., & Lancee, B. (2026). Place, Education, and Voting along the Transnational Cleavage in Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 1–31.
• Huijsmans, T. (2025). “American Exceptionalism” or “The Great Global Divider”? Urban-Rural Divides beyond the U.S. and Similar Countries. In N. F. Jacobs (Ed.), Rethinking Rural Politics. De Gruyter.
• Huijsmans, T., Harteveld, E., van der Brug, W., & Lancee, B. (2021). [Are Cities Ever More Cosmopolitan? Studying Trends in Urban-Rural Divergence of Cultural Attitudes.] (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102353) Political Geography, 86.
• Huijsmans, T., & Rodden, J. Crossing the Density Divide: Party Systems and Urban-Rural Coalitions. — OSF page

2. Mechanisms behind geographic and social divides

Related to the first strand, I study the mechanisms that explain socio-political divides. This includes work showing, with large-scale quantitative data, how specific characteristics of local contexts relate to perceived political neglect in rural and peripheral areas — or place resentment. I have also studied how political socialization through parents and peers works differently for urban and rural youth, and how attitudinal differences between social groups already emerge in childhood.

Related works:

• Huijsmans, T. (2023). Why Some Places Don’t Seem to Matter: Socioeconomic, Cultural and Political Determinants of Place Resentment. Electoral Studies, 83, 102622.
• Huijsmans, T. (2022). Place Resentment in ‘the Places that Don’t Matter’: Explaining the Geographic Divide in Populist and Anti-immigration Attitudes. Acta Politica.
• Huijsmans, T., & van Slageren, J. (2025). Political Socialization across Places: Differential Effects on Multiculturalist Attitudes in Urban and Rural Areas. Political Geography, 124.
• van de Werfhorst, H., ten Dam, G., Geven, S., Huijsmans, T., et al. (2025). Track Differences in Civic and Democratic Engagement During Secondary Education. The British Journal of Sociology.

3. Socio-political divides and institutional trust

Over the last years I have increasingly focused on how socio-political divides affect people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of (liberal-)democratic institutions. As a postdoc in the CriticalTrust project, I received an ODISSEI Microdata Access Grant to use CBS register data, through which I study how people’s workplace- and neighbourhood-contexts shape their views on the trustworthiness of political institutions, such as government and parliament.

Related works:

• Huijsmans, T. The ‘Meso-level’ as a Lens for Evaluating Politics: The Role of Economic Circumstances in the Place, the Job, and the Family for Individuals’ Political Trust. Presented at the EPSS conference 2026, Belfast.
• Huijsmans, T. Between Personal Finances and the National Economy: The Meso Level in Political Trust Formation. Revise & resubmit at European Political Science Review.

See the Publications page for the full list of outputs across all three strands, including a follow-up paper on urban-rural coalitions in party competition.