Abstract

This paper concludes a ten-country collaborative study of metropolitan regions and their consequences for political behavior. The analysis summarizes results from multilevel or ordinary least squares regression models of partisanship, national election turnout and local election turnout over the 1990s and early 2000s. Across most advanced industrial countries and beyond, the findings reveal an emerging new political geography that is rooted in metropolitan places. Divisions within and between metropolitan regions have increasingly replaced both urban-rural cleavages and national class interests as the determinants of electoral participation and partisanship. These new patterns help to account for the expanding bases of support for neoliberalism in most advanced industrial societies, and for emerging political cleavages linked to cultural divergences and globalization. In ways that vary with national systems of institutions, disparities in local and national voter turnout are also rooted not just in the socioeconomic composition of communities, but in the contextual conditions of metropolitan places.