Vote metropolitanization after the transnational cleavage and the suburbanization of radical right populism: the cases of London and Rome
From Firenze University Press Journal: Quaderni dell’Osservatorio elettorale (QOE) — Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES)
Mirko Crulli, University of Pisa
During the last years, voters’ division into opposing territorial blocs has seemed to become an increasingly prominent feature of European (and non-European) politics. Indeed, while traditional-left parties have appeared entrenched in central-urban areas, populist radical right parties and claims have appeared rampant in peripheral-rural places. 2016 sparked public attention towards this phenomenon: both Brexit and Trump’s election came largely thanks to the support of rural areas and less densely populated or peripheral metropolitan spaces. In rural areas of England, the percentage of votes to leave the European Union was 55.3%, compared to the national result of 51.9%, and the ‘Leave’ vote was strong-er the more rural the district (Harris & Charlton, 2016, p. 2122). Beyond the polarization between cities and the countryside (Jennings & Stoker, 2019), many commentators underlined that which existed between London and the rest of the country, as the capital voted ‘Remain’ at 60%. This has fueled the image of a ‘mutiny’ against London’s urban and cosmopolitan elites (Calhoun, 2016; Mandler, 2016; Toly, 2017) and, according to the sophisticated study by Johnston and colleagues (2018), among the many geographical divisions shown by Brexit, the one between the capital and the rest of the UK would be the only one that remained in the 2017 election.
However, when these authors speak of a ‘cosmopolitan and globalist center’, they are not referring to the whole of Greater London, but to Inner London alone. And indeed, the only 5 London boroughs in favor of ‘Leave’ were all located in Outer London.Later in 2016, this territorial polarization of the vote occurred also in Italy, during the constitutional referendum. The ‘Yes’ strongholds were cities with over 100,000 residents and the central districts of metropolises; the ‘No’ triumphed in small towns and suburbs (D’Alimonte & Emanuele, 2016). The same phenomenon took place in the 2018 general and 2019 European elections (YouTrend, 2019). The center-left Democratic Party stood at around its national average in communes with up to 100,000 inhabitants, while it gained much more in large cities over 300,000. Here, however, support for the party was weaker in areas farthest from the real metropolitan center. On the other hand, the right alliance, led by the populist party the Lega, has failed to break through in the largest urban centers, strengthening its support in the suburbs. In short, recent elections seem to have revealed the presence of two distinct ‘worlds’ with-in the largest Italian cities.This spatial polarization of politics is the general problem I intend to explore here.
However, rather than the more typical urban-rural divide, the preceding examples highlight the divisions that exist between voters within large metropolises, between their inner and outer districts. Therefore, the present work focuses on this ‘sub-class’ of the general phenomenon, namely on vote territorialization and polarization within major cities. The research objective is thus to give a structural explanation to the heterogeneity of electoral behavior within metropolitan areas spotlighted by recent elections.In this regard, even before the phenomenon became of public attention, some authors argued that advanced post-industrial democracies are affected by a ‘metropolitanization of politics’ process (Sellers et al., 2013; Sellers & Kübler, 2009).
According to this interpretation, with the metropolitan area becoming the prevalent form of human settlement, divisions between and within metropolises are more relevant than traditional divides between regions or between cities and countryside. And, through these new divisions, the metropolitanization process would reinforce the importance of the territory in structuring national politics. Against this backdrop, the research question is: are we now facing a strengthening of this vote metropolitanization process? if so, what sociopolitical changes and what determinants are driving this electoral dynamic?Building on the cleavage theory approach (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967), but going beyond old analytical categories, the paper advances the thesis that the emergence of a new cleavage, namely the ‘transnational cleavage’ (Hooghe & Marks, 2018), gave a boost to the electoral metropolitanization process. Indeed, this process seems to have strengthened after the multiple European crises — the Great Recession and the euro and migrant crises — during what I call here the ‘long crises-decade’ (2008–2019). This is exactly when the transnational cleavage has begun to mold more evidently the European politi-cal competition. Furthermore, the empirical results of the authors supporting the metropolitanization thesis showed that inner metropolitan districts represent the bastions of cosmopolitanism, while the outer ones the realm of ethnonationalism (Sellers et al., 2013; Sellers & Kübler, 2009). And these are basically the same orientations characterizing the opposite poles of the transnational cleavage. In fact, at the extremes of this cleavage are the TAN (tradition/authority/national) pole and the GAL (green/alternative/libertarian) pole. On the supply side of politics, the TAN pole is occupied by the populist radical Right and the GAL pole by the Left and the Greens. On the demand side, the TAN pole is represented by voters ‘who feel they have suffered transnationalism — the down and out, the culturally insecure, the unskilled, the deskilled’ (Hooghe & Marks, 2018, p. 115), whereas the GAL pole by highly educated and cosmopolitan voters who have benefited from transnationalism. But if it is true that, even before the structuring of the transnational cleavage, cosmopolitan orientations were concentrated in the central metropolitan districts and ethnonationalist ones in the suburbs, then it is reasonable to hypothesize that this new cleavage has exacerbated the vote metropolitanization process.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. The next section concerns the theoretical framework. I will emphasize two remarkable gaps in the literature dealing with the geography of electoral behavior: the tendency to look only at individual-level explanations, overlooking the importance of places, and the still pre-dominant focus on traditional concepts, such as the urban-rural dichotomy, which does not account for the important inner-urban divide that we know less about. Addressing these gaps offers the opportunity to illustrate the ‘metropolitanization of politics’ theory in detail and to clarify why I deem it important to explore the territorial-metropolitan dimension of new cleavages. Then, I will test the thesis of this article on two case studies: London and Rome. After describing the research design (section 3), introducing the hypotheses, the empirical analysis follows two steps. Firstly, I investigate whether there has effectively been a strengthening of vote metropolitanization during the 2010s (section 4). Secondly, relying on the British Election Study (BES) and the Italian National Election Studies (ITANES) surveys, I verify whether the presumed electoral polarization correspond-ed to the prevalence of GAL values in inner districts and TAN values in the suburbs (section 5). In the conclusion, I summarize the findings, detecting not only if the metropolitanization of politics thesis holds in the UK and in Italy, but also if the transnational cleavage has a rooted metropolitan dimension.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-12099
Read Full Text: https://oaj.fupress.net/index.php/qoe/article/view/12099
