Conference Agenda

The results of the European elections show a marked change in electoral behaviour, especially after the crisis of 2008. Among other things, they are characterised by a recomposition within the left, manifested in a weakening of social democracy, and a rise in power of extreme right-wing forces based on a nationalist and exclusive discourse, leading to a division of the working classes and modifying the traditional geography of the capital-labour divide. These new dynamics are revealed at the level of the metropolitan/non-metropolitan or centre/periphery divides. Other dynamics are also becoming apparent, such as in early-industrialisation regions or in dynamic tourist areas.

We present a cross-country analysis of the geographies of voting behavior in the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections using BLUE EP [1], a new municipality-level results of EP elections. BLUE_EP was recently released by the authors of this contribution and provides results for approximately 90,000 Local Administrative Units (LAU) in the EU27 and 500 parties or lists in each election, along with a classification of all parties into political groups and broader political families. The dataset was constructed by carefully collecting, harmonizing, and merging 27 national datasets, closely following the standard European and national GIS typologies for Local Administrative Units. To the best of our knowledge, BLUE EP is the first dataset to support a uniform, Europe-wide analysis of local voting behavior in EP elections.

Using our dataset, we address four research questions. First, we study the local geography of support for the main European political families across countries, quantifying consistent cross-country trends such as the stronger position of Green and left-wing parties in urban centers and higher rates of Populist Radical Right (PRR) vote in rural areas. We discuss exceptions qualitatively. Second, combining BLUE EP with European Commission data on municipalities’ degree of urbanization, we show that our dataset provides evidence for a statistically significant widening of the rural-urban gap in PRR vote between 2019 and 2024, while not supporting the hypothesis of an increase in the rural-urban gap in vote for left-wing and center-left parties. Third, we study the (in)existence of cross-border voting clusters and relate them to recent findings regarding the structure of cross-border living areas. Fourth, we study the potential spillover effects of political dynamics in the local political scene on other EU countries’ diaspora vote in 8 member-states (Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Croatia, Italy, Portugal, Romania) where detailed data is available.

[1] Hublet, F. (2024). BLUE_EP: A Dataset of Municipality-Level Results of European Parliament Elections. Codebook v1. Paris: Groupe d’études géopolitiques. 10.5281/zenodo.14569325

Voting preferences are the outcome of a number of cultural, historical and socio-economic conditions. The issue concerning variation of this phenomenon has been studied in the dimension of different preferences between communities of rural and urban areas. However, the subject matter regarding the specificity of voting behavior in small towns compared to abovementioned types of areas remains under-researched. For this reason, an attempt was made to examine the factors affecting political preferences of small towns’ (less than 20,000 inhabitants) communities in Poland. The principal objective is to state whether the size of a town (expressed in population number) or its location on the center-periphery axis is more decisive in terms of shaping specific voting behavior. The last four election results to the Parliament were examined (in 2011, 2015, 2019, 2023) for all communes (NUTS-5) of Poland. The main research consisted of two stages. Firstly to find a relation between town size and voting preferences and calculate a statistical population threshold above which voting preferences relate more strongly to large centers than rural areas. The second task was to state the distance between the location of a small town and a sub-regional growth center by expressing to threshold to such a center in kilometers and changing voting behavior. Studies have shown statistical significance of both drivers – town size and its location on a center-periphery axis. However, the regional variation in the dominance of either factor is strongly affected by another complex aspect - historical and cultural diversity of Poland's territory.

Redistricting is constantly accompanied by political conflicts as well as academic arguments in countries with majoritarian or mixed electoral system, as a result of the process could potentially influence the outcome of elections. In the international scientific discourse and legal processes, this conflict is managed by different approaches. So far, Hungary didn’t implement such methodologies by the executive branches, therefore such anomalies as malapportionment, are not taken care of, as the electoral reform of 2011 has not been advanced by any kind of social or scientific disputes. Having reviewed existing processes of redistricting in the US, UK, and Canada, a procedure was created in this paper for revising district boundaries, that would fulfil the requirement of proportionality in respect of Hungary as well. To achieve that, at the first place, proportionality among counties must be assured.Secondly, if a given county will have modified number of constituencies, district borders must be redrawn to gain proportional representation of voters. The results show that the proposed subdivision would provide proportional allocation for the forthcoming 10 years at least.