Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review 2025, 61(3): 251-276 | DOI: 10.13060/csr.2024.009

Does a Rural-Urban Divide Exist in the Czech Republic?

Pavel Pospěch ORCID..., Barbora Hubatková ORCID..., Ondřej Klíma ORCID...
Fakulta sociálních studií, Masarykova univerzita, Brno

This paper examines whether there is a rural-urban polarisation in values in the Czech Republic, similar in form and extent to corresponding developments across many western European countries and the United States. The paper uses a mixed-method design, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative part works with data from the European Values Study, differentiated by settlement size and commuting time, which allow us to distinguish between rural municipalities based on their level of remoteness. The qualitative part focuses on the media coverage of the relationship between rural and urban populations over the past ten years. This relationship is analysed utilising discourse analysis, drawing on the methods of structural hermeneutics. Using these approaches, we identify three key dimensions that articulate the relationship between urban and rural populations. In conclusion, we argue that rural-urban polarisation as a ‘social border’ is almost non-existent in the Czech Republic, but it is strongly present in society as a ‘symbolic border’. We explain this paradox with reference to the ideological functions played by the social representations of cities and rural areas.

Keywords: rural-urban divide, social representations, polarisation, symbolic borders, culture

Received: November 3, 2022; Revised: February 14, 2024; Accepted: February 27, 2024; Prepublished online: June 6, 2024; Published: September 1, 2025  Show citation

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Pospěch, P., Hubatková, B., & Klíma, O. (2025). Does a Rural-Urban Divide Exist in the Czech Republic? Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 61(3), 251-276. doi: 10.13060/csr.2024.009
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