Metropolitan Geography, Electoral Participation, and Partisan Competition

Abstract

Throughout the developed world and beyond, diversified metropolitan regions have replaced the centuries-old divide between city and countryside. In the varied polities of contemporary democracies, the common geographies of metropolitan regions have given rise to parallel territorial patterns of electoral participation and partisan orientations. This paper, drawing on a pooled eleven-country ecological dataset, presents results from the first systematic international comparative analysis of these patterns. We find that the contextual effects from metropolitan places on voting go beyond what the social and economic composition of those places can explain. Parties from across the partisan spectrum now look to strongholds in particular types of metropolitan settings, and compete for dominance in others. In metropolitanized democracies, stronger electoral mobilization among low-density, affluent and middle class suburbs has skewed electoral competition. Metropolitan geographies thus embed electoral advantages for parties on the Right, and for parties that embrace neoliberal policy agendas.