Ist mehr besser? Politische Implikationen der disparaten Daseinsvorsorge in Deutschland

The Covid-19 crisis intensifies the lively debate on regional disparities in the supply of public services. Particularly in sparsely populated rural areas, many municipalities had a hard time providing competitive medical care, education facilities, public transport, or broadband internet – even before the Covid-19 outbreak. While on the one hand a further strengthening of urban centres is currently discussed, on the other hand a feeling of being abandoned is perceived among people in rural areas indicating a conflict between agglomerations and the countryside. The present analysis kicks off the empirical debate for Germany: Based on a newly compiled dataset, this contribution provides a spatial analysis, in how far a poor supply of public services is related to an alienation from established political parties in the elections to the Bundestag 2017 and the European elections 2019. An index of public services is created combining amongst others the distance to the closest situated train station as well as the accessibility of the nearest hospital on the municipality level. As expected from other Western democracies, also in Germany a less intense supply of public services is related to a stronger election result for the right-wing AfD. Partly however, this result is simply driven by the stark divergence between rural and urban municipalities and disappears when zooming in on smaller rural municipalities. What is more, AfD support does neither increase with a longer distance to the closest train station nor with a higher level of municipality debt. Nevertheless, the results point to favourable breeding grounds for right-wing populism in areas of political alienation and economic distress. Robustly, the AfD performs better where turnout is lower, where larger shares of the population emigrated and in the face of a tighter labour market. On the contrary, an innovative local economy has the potential to contain right-wing support.