Subjective social status in places that don't matter: geographical inequalities in France and Germany Open Access

The past few years have seen renewed interest in the topic of spatial inequalities within countries and their social and political consequences (e.g. Adler & Ansell, 2020; Jennings & Stoker, 2019; Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). While social inequalities between the top earners and the bottom earners have risen in recent decades in almost all parts of the world (Piketty, 2019), spatial differences also seem to have widened in Western countries. In half of the OECD countries, GDP inequalities between regions have constantly increased since 2000, and in the whole OECD group the top 20% of regions now display, on average, twice the GDP per capita of the bottom 20% of regions in the same country¹ (OECD, 2020).

Spatial differences within countries have been driving forces of the recent success of populist and radical right parties. An analysis of European countries at the district level shows that the populist vote is concentrated in areas characterised by local economic and industrial decline, lower employment rates and less educated populations (Dijkstra et al., 2020). Donald Trump's electoral success was largely due to support that emerged among similar populations in rural areas (Cramer, 2016; Monnat & Brown, 2017).² In the United Kingdom, the Brexit vote in 2016 revealed a country divided between pro-European metropolitan areas, and towns and rural zones claiming national sovereignty (Jennings & Stoker, 2019).

Our analysis originates from these considerations and aims to provide new evidence about spatial inequalities within countries and the so-called “geography of discontent” (Dijkstra et al., 2020). The growing differences between the dynamic cores embedded in the global economy and the stagnating peripheries have generated growing discontent in the “places that do not matter”, where people feel neglected by national politics (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). Our study wishes to contribute to the description of the “geography of discontent” by analysing spatial differences and trends within countries in terms of subjective social status. This is a measure of the hierarchical position people believe they occupy in society and is particularly useful for studying political discontent because it reflects individuals’ perceptions of their social standing. Our article thus shares in the renewed interest in subjective social status (Gidron & Hall, 2017; Gest et al., 2018; Engler & Weisstanner, 2021; Nolan & Weisstanner, 2022; Oesch & Vigna, 2021).

We study geographical inequalities of subjective status over the previous two decades and aim to answer two questions: how does subjective status differ between regions, notably between the urban centres and rural regions, and how have these potential differences evolved over the past two decades? We analyse the differences in subjective social status between areas and their trends, both at the mean level and controlling for objective individual socioeconomic factors that are heterogeneously distributed across space.

We focus on France and Germany, the two most populous countries in the European Union, characterised by different degrees of centralisation. In France, spatial inequalities have long been at the centre of the political debate, and some events as the spread of the Yellow Vests movement in small towns and rural areas have recently brought them to the fore. Germany, instead, has been characterised by a history of territorial division and still struggles for levelling West-East differences. Geographical inequalities in Germany have recently been made visible by the uneven distribution of the support for the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AFD) in the last federal elections of 2021.³ We use individual-level data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) from the periods 1999–2017 for France and 1992–2021 for Germany.

In what follows, we first clarify the concept of subjective social status. After presenting our first two hypotheses on spatial inequalities of subjective status in Western countries, we discuss the specificities of our case studies and present some additional hypotheses on regional inequalities in France and in Germany. We then present the data and methods and show the main findings, confirming the relevance of spatial inequalities in the two countries but casting doubt on their recent increase. We conclude with a discussion of these results and their implications.

According to Weber (1978 [1922]), social status depends on a symbolic hierarchy of social recognition. It reflects the degree of social honour that is accorded to people (Chan & Goldthorpe, 2007). This characteristic differentiates the concept of social status from the concept of social class, which is based on the position people occupy in the labour market and thus has an objective basis.

Although social status is correlated with the objective position of individuals, namely, their education, employment and income (Andersson, 2015; Evans & Kelley, 2004; Lindberg et al., 2021), it is not limited to it. Social status constitutes a specific dimension of inequalities based on differences in esteem and respect.

Subjective social status is often measured by asking people to place themselves on a ladder representing society. This subjective response about where an individual feels he or she stands in relation to others captures the social recognition he or she believes is warranted (Gidron & Hall, 2017). The relevance of subjective social status in the study of inequalities is confirmed by its correlation to socially stratified outcomes. Often used in research on health outcomes, subjective social status has been shown to be positively correlated with several causes of mortality (Demakakos et al., 2018) and with both physical and mental health (Präg, 2020; Scott et al., 2014), even after controlling for several objective indicators of socioeconomic status.

Subjective social status has been recently used by scholars interested in analysing status dynamics and their consequences on political behaviour, especially exploring the link between status anxiety and the electoral success of radical right populist parties or the Brexit vote (Gest et al., 2018; Gidron & Hall, 2017, 2019). As subjective social status depends on people's perception of how much recognition they receive from society, it also serves as an indicator of people's feeling “left behind” by their society, a feeling populist parties are often said to appeal to. To the extent that subjective status is related to components of people's objective condition as well as their subjective perception, it has been considered as capturing both economic and cultural aspects of political discontent (Gidron & Hall, 2017).

In their influential article, Gidron and Hall (2017) analysed the evolution of the subjective social status of men and women without college educations relative to that of all men and women. They adopt a descriptive approach and compare the relative subjective status of people without college education over several points in time, finding that this specific portion of the population has become increasingly frustrated about their place in society. Even if subsequent analyses on time trends have cast doubt on the hypothesis of the status downgrading of the working class in most Western countries (Oesch & Vigna, 2021), Gidron and Hall's results are in line with the argument of status anxiety that other scholars have made. Gest points out “the emerging sense of displacement” of working-class communities (Gest, 2016, p. 127), and Arlie Hochschild (2016) shows in her ethnography that white working-class men in the US feel that their status has been downgraded by the elite and is threatened by the rising status of minorities.

At the same time, another argument underlines the importance of the community dimension, suggesting that status loss was more heavily concentrated in specific areas within countries. The deindustrialisation and the rise of the service economy have led to the concentration of economic activities in large and dynamic cities, while towns and rural areas are often characterised by the lack of opportunity. It is people living in declining places that would feel increasingly left behind by the global economy and national political elites (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018).

Previous studies on the link between place-based factors and subjective social status are rare. The reference group theory suggests that people tend to compare their social position with colleagues, family and friends and thus people who are similar to them. As a consequence, they generally see themselves as being in the middle of the social hierarchy (e.g. Evans et al., 1992; Merton & Kitt, 1950). This would mean that economic changes at the community level do not have much influence on individual perceptions. Nevertheless, Evans & Kelly (2004) showed that national indicators like wealth and the unemployment rate have a significant impact on individual subjective social status. Moreover, comparative research has shown that high levels of income or education inequalities have a stigmatisation effect on people at the bottom of the social hierarchy, who tend to have a lower subjective social status in more unequal societies – but the reverse is not true for people at the top of the social hierarchy (Lindemann & Saar, 2014). If this mechanism holds not only between countries, but also within countries at the between-regions level, people living in declining areas should show lower subjective social status when objective spatial inequalities are larger, making regional differences in subjective positions also particularly large.

Although we observe a trend of economic convergence between countries, economic inequalities seem to be increasing within countries and between regions within a given country (Eurofound, 2019). These spatial changes in the Western world have their origins in the rise of the service economy and the decline of the ancient industrial poles. Moretti (2012) shows, for the US how deindustrialisation has resulted in a stark decline of the old manufacturing centres. At the same time, the human capital externalities of many service activities led to increasingly concentrated economic growth in a few globalised poles such as Austin, Boston, New York, San Francisco and San José or Seattle, contributing to a geographical “Great Divergence”. Some exurb and minor urban centres as Youngstown, Michigan Coty or Toledo in the Rust Belt of the US, have become “post-traumatic cities”: they have lost their industrial basis, leaving their inhabitants disempowered, marginalised and nostalgic about the past (Gest, 2016).

The agglomeration effect of service activities also contributed to the success of European metropolitan centres, especially capital cities such as London, Dublin or Warsaw, while many regions became increasingly depopulated, namely, rural ones (Eurofond, 2019). The result is an increasing dualization between core and periphery. A new social divide may thus emerge that divides citizens who live in cities strongly benefitting from global economic growth and citizens who live in suburban communities, postindustrial towns and the urban periphery (Jennings & Stoker, 2017). In terms of people's attitudes, places that have experienced economic decline seem to have become more closed and communitarian, while dynamic cities enjoying strong economic growth have become more liberal and cosmopolitan (Jennings & Stoker, 2019).

All these elements suggest that within-country inequalities may have become increasingly important to understanding social change in Western countries. In particular, the growing concentration of economic activities in large cities may have depressed the subjective social position of people living in declining areas, which are former industrial cities and rural areas. To illustrate this claim, we can recall the French protest movement of the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), that took to the streets in 2018 primarily in the countryside and small cities. Rising fuel prices were the casus belli, and mobility was the issue around which the movement primarily rallied. The physical distance itself between the working class, disproportionately living in the countryside and small towns, and the elite living in the large cities was singled out as having played a role in building solidarity inside the movement (Jetten et al., 2020).

Our first two hypotheses, thus, are the following:

While the increasing concentration of resources in large cities seems to be the case for most Western countries in recent decades, specific geographical characteristics differentiate France and Germany.

First of all, the two countries have different levels of centralisation, suggesting different configurations of the centre-periphery inequalities. Some data can give an idea of those differences. France is a centralised state, with 80% of total government expenditures managed at the central level. In contrast, Germany is a federal republic with substantive regional autonomy and only 60% of total government expenditures accruing to the central government, 23% going to the federate states, and the rest to the municipal level.⁴ Moreover, with a population of almost 13 million, the metropolitan area of Paris accounts for almost 20% of the entire French population, and only one other large metropolitan area accounts for more than 2 million inhabitants: Lyon. In contrast, Germany has seven large metropolitan areas with more than 2 million inhabitants, and only 6% of the national population live in Berlin, the largest one.⁵

France thus is a centralised country hierarchically organised around a predominant centre, Paris, with few other important cities, while Germany appears more like a network of dynamic cities. These differences should also be visible in the spatial disparities in subjective social status in the two countries: inequalities should be marked in France, especially between the capital region and the other areas of the country, while no specific city or region is expected to prevail in Germany.

The two countries also have two very different histories of spatial inequalities. The problem of spatial inequalities is not new in the French public debate. In 1947, the French geographer Jean-François Gravier (1972[1947]) first published the book titled Paris et le désert français [Paris and the French desert], denouncing the large concentration of resources in the capital. This work constituted a reference for French territorial policies for several decades. The Interministerial Delegation of Land Planning and Regional Attractiveness (DATAR) was created in 1964 and immediately began work on reforms that were first called “regionalisation” and then “decentralisation” (Bodiguel, 2006).

Even if the concentration of industrial activities decreased somewhat over the past century (Bonnet, 2021), the economic inequalities between the region of Paris and the rest of the country seem to persist. The census in 2008 revealed that the region of Ile-de-France, which only corresponds to 2% of the national territory, accounts for 29% of the GDP, with the average salary being 28% higher than the national mean (Lafourcade, 2012).

The recent political events further brought the idea of a divided country to the fore. The 2022 presidential election revealed great spatial differences. During the first round of balloting, the radical right party, Marine Le Pen's then-called Front National, obtained more than 30% of the votes in several provinces in the northeast and southern parts of the country, while her score was less than 6% in the city of Paris.⁶

These arguments lead us to suppose that spatial inequalities in France are deeply rooted, both from an objective point of view and in the perception of people. Differences between regions seem to have increased during recent decades due to structural changes in the national economy. This leads us to formulate the following hypotheses for France:

These strong objective economic differences are also visible in subjective indicators. While we are not aware of any studies on subjective social status, research on life satisfaction has shown that in 1991, the difference in mean life satisfaction between East and West was 1.3 points on a scale from 0 to 10. This differential decreased to less than 0.6 points in the following years, but did not disappear and even increased again after 2000 (Easterlin & Plagnol, 2008). We then expect subjective status gap to have also decreased over the last decades but to still be visible nowadays.

Not surprisingly, these inequalities are also visible in the recent electoral results. The party of radical right Alternative for Germany (AFD) gained vast support in economically vulnerable and demographically old districts, mainly in the eastern part of the country, while the Green Party was disproportionately successful in economically thriving and younger places such as München, Stuttgart and Hamburg (Franz et al., 2019).

Our additional hypotheses for Germany, thus, are the following:

We use individual-level data from the ISSP. Germany has been part of the programme since its foundation, and France joined in 1996. At the beginning, the question on subjective social status was only included in the modules about inequalities, but since 2002, it has been asked every year. Unfortunately, some geographical variables changed over time. Nevertheless, in our analysis, we can use up to 16 rounds for some models for France (from 1999 to 2017⁷) and up to 19 rounds for Germany (from 1992 to 2021).⁸ References to all datasets including DOIs are available in the Appendix. The annual samples vary from a minimum of 905 respondents (Germany 1999) to a maximum of 3,117 observations (Germany 2012). Table A1 in the appendix shows the size of each country-year sample.

We also replicate our analyses on data from the European Social Survey (ESS), the only other large international survey providing a measure of subjective social status. This variable is available in round 6, which was run in 2012. While we cannot reproduce trends over time with these data, the ESS allows us to replicate the analyses on levels.⁹

Our analysis is set at the individual level, and our dependent variable is subjective social status. It is measured with the MacArthur scale, which asks individuals to place themselves on a 10-point social ladder representing society. This single-item measure captures individuals’ perceived rank in the social hierarchy (Gidron & Hall, 2017). The question is worded as follows: “In our society there are groups that tend to be towards the top and groups that tend to be towards the bottom. Where would you put yourself on a scale from the bottom to the top?” Respondents are then shown the figure of a ladder going from 1 to 10.¹⁰

Our key independent variables are geographic indicators that split the territory in different ways. We build four different geographical variables for France and three for Germany to verify each of our hypotheses and to make our results as robust as possible.

For France, statistical division NUTS level 3 (corresponding to departments) allows us to build three geographical variables. A first variable separates the three largest metropolitan centres – the department of Paris (with postal code 75) and all the departments of its first and second cluster (77, 78, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95), the department of Lyon (69, Rhône) and the department of Marseille (13, Bouches du Rhône)¹¹ – from all the other departments. A second geographical variable groups the departments into six macro-regions: Île de France, Centre-Bassin Parisien, the northeastern region, the western region, Méditerannée-Pyrénées, and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. A third indicator separates the departments into three groups – predominantly urban, predominantly rural, intermediate – following the OECD categorisation (OCDE, 2013).

For Germany, NUTS is only distinguished at the aggregate level 1 in the ISSP. A first indicator thus separates the West-German states from the East-German states. These two macro-regions correspond to the areas belonging to the former Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, with the region of Berlin entirely categorised in the eastern area. Another indicator divides the country into three areas: Southwest-Germany (Baden-Württemberg and Bayern), Northwest-Germany (corresponding to all the other western states) and East Germany.

Finally, we use an auto-assessed item available in ISSP that asks people in which kind of place they live. Our typology for France and Germany consists of four types of places: large cities, outskirts of large cities, small towns, and rural areas (the last category merges country villages and farms or houses in the countryside). The main limit of this variable is that it is available only starting from 2005 for France and from 2004 for Germany.¹² Tables A2 (France) and A3 (Germany) in the appendix provide descriptive statistics of all geographical indicators.

For each country, we first describe the evolution of subjective social status in different places over time. We weight our individual observations using the probability weights provided by the ISSP. Moreover, we also use locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS) to reduce short-term fluctuations due to sampling errors and to highlight long-term trends. In this way, each data point is adjusted considering the adjacent points, with neighbouring points getting higher weights than distant ones.

Further models were also run including income as an additional independent variable. Income cannot be considered a simple control variable, similar to class and education, as salaries from similar jobs strongly vary between places. We interpret income as a mediating variable between place and subjective social status. We use equivalent monthly household income, adjusted for inflation through the consumer price index based on the values of 2017.¹⁴

The last two plots of Figure 4 show how subjective social status evolved over time in France depending on a place's degree of urbanisation. The graph on the bottom left is based on the OECD typology referring to the degree of urbanisation of the departments, while the graph on the bottom right reports the results produced with the auto-assessed typology (2005-2017). Even if confidence intervals overlap a little, both graphs show a clear-cut ranking between the types of places: the higher the degree of urbanisation, the higher the average subjective social status. Moreover, the predominantly urban departments saw a stronger decrease in subjective status than the intermediate and predominantly rural departments. These results partially conflict with what we observe in the graph based on the auto-assessed urban-rural variable: the right-hand panel shows a slightly decreasing status for people living in the outskirts of large cities after 2013 and for people living in rural areas from 2006 to 2010 and, again, after 2014, while status remained constant in large and small cities.

These apparently contrasting results could be partly due to the fact that the predominantly urban departments contain both people living in cities and people living in the outskirts of large cities, and possibly only the status of the latter may have declined over the study period. Nevertheless, the comparison between these two graphs questions the declining subjective status of rural residents: if people who define themselves as inhabitants of rural areas (approximately 37% of the national sample in France) seem to report a decline in status, this is not true if we include people living in rural departments according to the OECD categorisation (less than 20% of the national sample). This could mean that the auto-assessed variable is a more precise indication of the kind of place people live in or that we should not overinterpret the small changes over time as they may simply reflect trendless fluctuations.

We move on to multivariate models, where we control for gender, age, cohabitation status, education and social class. We run several linear models using the different geographical divides as independent variables (for an overview of the regression results with period coefficients, see Table A5 in the appendix).

However, according to our multivariate analyses, the gap between regions does not seem to have widened over the period under study: Figure 5 shows that the gap remained constant between the large metropolitan centres and the other departments and even decreased between regions and between urban and rural departments. The interaction terms modelling relative time-trends of subjective status in those areas confirm these results (see table A5 in the Appendix). Only according to the auto-assessed variable does subjective social status seem to have decreased slightly more on the outskirts and in small cities and rural places than in large cities. An additional negative trend is particularly visible in rural places from 2006 to 2011 and on the outskirts of large cities after 2013. Nevertheless, these fluctuations are relatively small and cannot be considered a clear result. Overall, there is no clear increase in the status differences between the types of places, as only one of our four variables would suggest a possible increase in status inequalities, while the others suggest an appeasement.

We test status differences between regions and by degree of urbanisation by reproducing our analysis with data from round six of the European Social Survey (see Table A6 in the appendix for the regression results). Even if subjective status differences are generally smaller in this survey, these analyses confirm that, in 2012, people living in the capital region had a higher subjective status than people living in almost all the other regions (with the exception of Centre-Bassin Parisien). The hierarchy between large cities, outskirts, small cities and rural areas is also confirmed by this robustness test.

We further investigate the link between place and subjective social status by running the same models adding household income as a further control variable (see Table A7 in the appendix for the regression results). We interpret income as a mediator between the place where people live and their subjective social status, as both earnings and prices vary across places. The results show that individual income effectively mediates a part of the association between places and subjective status, but another part of the story remains unexplained.

The two bottom plots in Figure 7 show how subjective social status evolved over time in Germany depending on a place's degree of urbanisation declared by the respondents. The differences between the kinds of places are smaller than what we observe in France and not statistically significant. Surprisingly, the ranking between the four types of places is also different. Subjective social status increased in all kinds of places from 2004 to 2014, and only people living on the outskirts of large cities showed systematically higher values of subjective status than the others. Comparing West and East Germany, we see that the differences between the curbs are slightly larger in eastern states than in western states.

The multivariate regression results confirm the same large difference between eastern and western states. Even when controlling for gender, age, cohabitation status, education and social class, there is an average difference of 0.5 points between the citizens of the two parts of the country (see Table A9 in the Appendix for the regression results). Likewise, our robustness test on the ESS confirms the salience of the east-west divide, with a 0.6 points difference between East and West Germany in 2012 (see Table A10 in the appendix).

When running multivariate models with household income, we observe that this variable mediates part of the east-west difference in subjective social status. However, a sizeable difference of 0.4 points is not explained by individual income differences (see Table A11 in the appendix).

Concerning the degrees of urbanisation, the difference between the types of places remains small after controlling for age, gender, cohabitation status, education and social class. If there was a hierarchy, moreover, it would be the opposite of the one observed in France: citizens living in the outskirts of large cities have slightly higher subjective status than the others throughout the study period in East Germany, and people living in large cities have a lower subjective status than the others in the most recent years in both the west and the east (Figure 8, bottom plots). When adding income as an additional control, then even these small differences between the kinds of places disappear, meaning that they are due to differences in economic conditions. At the end of the day, our hypothesis on the hierarchy between the kind of places should be rejected for Germany: in Germany, there is no negative correlation between subjective social status and living in rural places and no positive correlation with living in a large city. Our robustness test with the ESS survey confirms this result (see Table A10 in the appendix).

Spatial inequalities within countries have been the source for new social and political divides in the past few decades (Gest, 2016; Jennings & Stoker, 2019; Moretti, 2012). According to an influential argument, the residents of the so-called periphery feel increasingly left behind (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). Our study analyses spatial inequalities from a subjective point of view using social status and measuring the position people think to occupy in the social hierarchy. Our analyses show the levels and trends of subjective social status in different areas of the European Union's two most populous countries, France and Germany. We examine whether subjective social status differs between places of the same country and if those differences have increased over the last two decades.

Overall, the average subjective social status slowly decreased in France over the studied period, especially if we control for people's objective socio-economic conditions. In contrast, the average subjective status constantly increased in Germany from 1992 until 2016, but then decreased notably. In both cases, then, we observe a negative country-level trend at least in the most recent period, possibly reflecting the growing of a generalised sentiment of dissatisfaction.

Our analyses show two different patterns of geographical inequality in the two countries, pointing to the specific configuration of the spatial divides in different contexts. The centre-periphery divide is very evident in France's centralised state. Consistent with our hypotheses, people living in the three largest urban centres perceive their status to be higher than people living in the rest of the country – as do people living in the region of Paris more generally compared to those in all other regions. Subjective social status is overall significantly higher in urban places than in rural areas during the entire studied period from 1999 to 2017. These geographical differences are visible even when controlling for education and social class, and they are only partly mediated by income differences between places.

In Germany, by contrast, spatial inequalities appear to be different. The disparities in subjective status between urban and rural places are very weak, and people living in large cities often place themselves lower on the social ladder than do people living in the outskirts or in rural areas. The urban-rural divide seems to play a subordinate role in self-evaluated social status in Germany. In contrast, and coherently with what objective indicators as GDP suggest, the east-west divide has not disappeared. Even controlling for gender, age, education and social class, people living in the eastern states have a significantly lower subjective social status than those living in the western part of the country. This difference is partially but not completely explained by income inequalities.

Overall, our paper gives credence to the relevance of within-country spatial inequalities from the subjective point of view. People's perception of their social standing is correlated to the place they live in. However, surprisingly, our results do not support the hypothesis that inequalities between regions have widened in the past two decades. Regional inequalities have even decreased in France over the entire period, especially because people's subjective social status has decreased more in the large metropolitan areas than in the other places. Coherently with Rodriguez-Pose's (2018) claims about the decline of France's North-East, then, subjective status decreased in that area, but it unexpectedly also decreased in the capital region and stayed more stable in the others. This definitely contrasts with our hypothesis about the growing frustration of the “peripheral France” (Guilluy, 2011, 2015). Only when we consider an auto-assessed categorisation of urban-rural citizens, which may be more precise than a geographical variable based on departments, we can possibly see increasing gaps between the types of places: both on a descriptive level and controlling for the objective socioeconomic position of people, it seems that people living in rural areas perceived a slightly decreasing status between 2006 and 2010 and after 2013 – similarly to people living in the outskirts of large cities - , while subjective status was almost constant in large cities throughout the study period. Nevertheless, these trends are weak, and further analyses based on larger datasets with a more precise geographic location of respondents, as the municipality of residence, would be necessary to clarify this point. Survey data allow us to investigate the subjective dimension of social stratification, but they unfortunately provide limited information on people’ location compared, for example, to register data.

Likewise, we do not see increasing spatial inequalities in Germany. Subjective status has decreased in the whole country starting from 2014, after a long period of constant increase, suggesting a generalised deterioration of people’ perception of their social standing in the last years. But the only relevant geographical divide, the one between eastern and western states, has partially decreased over the study period.

The role of internal migration in the observed relative trends between places remains an open question. The observed decline of subjective status in the Ile de France and in the French large metropolitan centres, for example, could be due to the decrease of the perceived social position of citizens who lived permanently there, but also to the arrival of new low-subjective status people. Economic and demographic decline are intrinsically intertwined and are likely to combine differently in different areas. Further analyses based on longitudinal data could help understanding the role of migration flows.

In conclusion, in neither of the two countries does our paper find clear support for the hypothesis of growing differences between “central” and “peripheral” places. This casts doubt on the idea of a growing resentment in the “places that don't matter” (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). The recent popularity of right-wing populist parties in rural communities and the spread of specific political movements such as the French Gilet Jaunes in the same areas could be due to the successful mobilisation of silent spatial hierarchies that have long been in place, or to the more successful mobilisation of some latent discontent that grew, more or less recently, throughout the two countries.

I thank the four anonymous reviewers at European Societies for their helpful feedback to this article. Special thanks to Daniel Oesch for extensive feedback.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Nathalie Vigna is PhD candidate working on different aspects of social stratification, notably comparing objective and subjective measures, and looking into geographical differences in several European countries.