Political Parties and the Geography of Economic Preferences

• In Event: Spatial Dimensions of Inequality

Abstract

Cross-nationally and within countries over time, there is a great deal of variance in the regional composition of political parties competing in national elections. In some nations, parties are highly polarized on a regional as well as an ideological basis. In other countries, representatives from all over the country work together in ideologically-aligned parties. In this paper, we set out to explain the variance in the regional distribution of support for national political parties. We argue that the regional economic levels are an important source of voter preferences that help to explain party support across the territory. We measure the geographic distribution of support for governing parties using party nationalization scores, capturing spatial dispersion, and Moran's I, capturing spatial clustering. Using party vote count data from the European NUTS-level Election Dataset (EU-NED) linked to extensive information on electoral district economic profiles of 20 countries between 1980 and 2020, we find that high regional economic disparities are associated with significantly lower party nationalization scores and high regional economic clustering is associated with significantly higher spatial clustering in party vote share distribution.

Authors

• Melissa Ziegler Rogers, Claremont Graduate University

• Dong Wook Lee, Adelphi University