Bringing up the past: Political experience and the distribution of urban populations

•Cumulative political experiences are significantly related to urban primacy.•Length of capital status is associated with increases in urban primacy.•Democratic and communist experiences are associated with decreases in urban primacy.•Colonial experience exhibits a curvilinear relationship with urban primacy.

This article reexamines the effects of political determinants on urban population distributions by developing a series of longitudinal measures that proxy for a nation’s political experiences. The cross-national analyses are derived from a new database that includes population figures for the five largest cities of 123 nations from 1960 to 2005. This coverage allows for the development of the 1–4 urban primacy ratio which is used to assess past findings and test four hypotheses related to the length of capital status as well as colonial, democratic, and communist experiences. The main findings suggest that the length of a nation’s largest city’s capital status is positively associated with urban primacy. Conversely, nations with longer democratic or communist experiences have lower levels of urban primacy. Finally, the results on colonial experience are curvilinear and lend strong support to modernization and central place theory.