Abstract
Understanding where and why political change is happening in a country is a fundamental issue in political geography. While electoral choice is individual, it is influenced by various sociological, cultural, and geographical factors postulated to create ‘cultural fields’ influencing individual decision-making. Here, we test the cultural field hypothesis on Sweden, an important democracy of Europe long regarded as an example by other European countries, by studying the middle-long-term evolution of the spatial structure of political choice over the last three decades. In testing the cultural field hypothesis, an analysis of spatial correlations is combined with groupings of Swedish municipalities into larger communities reflecting the similarity of their voting profiles. We show that spatial correlations decay logarithmically, which is a sign of long-ranged interactions, and also demonstrate that Sweden can be divided into three or four large and stable politico-cultural communities. More precisely, a transition from three to four main politico-cultural communities is observed. The fourth community, which emerged in the early 2000s is of particular interest as it is characterized by a large vote-share for the Sweden Democrats, while almost all other parties underperform. Moreover, the Swedish electoral landscape seems to be increasingly fragmenting even when the voting profiles of the municipalities over the country are slowly converging.
Highlights
Understanding where and why political change is happening in a country is a fundamental issue in political geography
While previous studies have only investigated the spatial correlations or the groupings of basic entities into communities, we provide an extended discussion of our results in the light of the state-of-the-art electoral geography of Sweden
We present the results of the analysis of spatial correlations for each of the ten Swedish parliamentary elections held between 1985 and 2018 and for the changes between two consecutive elections
Summary
Understanding where and why political change is happening in a country is a fundamental issue in political geography. People living in big cities are likely to vote differently than those living in the countryside, due to different socio-cultural backgrounds and different political issues at stake. Such geographical differences have led to the postulate that there exist ‘cultural fields’ that influence individual decision-making (Siegfried 1913; Bussi 1998; Gamache 2005). These fields are meant to encode local biases in intentions and propensities to act in certain ways (Borghesi and Bouchaud 2010) and are by nature independent of events, such as, e.g., elections. Elections offer a possibility to quantify these cultural fields and provide
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