Town vs Country

German newspaper Zeit has noticed a divide in attitudes in many western countries between their rural and urban communities. This divide in attitudes was seen clearly in the last presidential election in the USA and in the UK's Brexit referendum. In both these cases there were clear differences between the way urban and rural communities voted.

Zeit Online therefore decided to find out if there was this same urban-rural split in attitudes in Germany. In Diving into Urban-Rural Prejudice the newspaper first set out to discover how many Germans live in the countryside and how many in towns and cities. They discovered that "almost 70 percent of all Germans live in places with a population of less than 100,000". Zeit has visualized this answer in a dot map and bar graph, which shows the percentage of Germans living in different sized communities.

In the rest of the article Zeit explores the attitudes of urban and rural communities to a number of social and political questions to discover if there really is a difference in attitudes between town and country. The newspaper discovered a number of areas where there are clear differences in social and political attitudes. It also discovered that some of these seem to have grown in recent years (perhaps in response to Germany's acceptance of a large number of refugees).