Subjective social status in places that don’t matter: geographical inequalities in France and Germany

In recent decades, the rise of the service economy and the growing attractiveness of large cities have created new social inequalities within countries, which have been seen as a source of resentment for people living in the “places that don’t matter”. We study spatial inequalities in terms of subjective social status using a measure of the place in the social hierarchy that individuals believe they occupy in France (1999-2017) and Germany (1992-2021) on the basis of data from the International Social Survey Program. In France we find important and persistent inequalities between urban and rural areas, as well as between the capital region and all the other regions, partially mediated by income differences. However, the time trend does not show any consistent increase in the geographical differences in subjective status apart from a possible negative trend in rural areas from 2006 to 2010 and in rural places and the outskirts of large cities after 2013 compared to large cities. In Germany, our analysis shows weak differences in subjective social status between urban and rural areas, but large inequalities between the West and East. While this gap is still relevant today, it has partially decreased over the past decades.