Abstract
Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a truism across Northern democracies. Left unquestioned, this geography plays a central role in shaping electoral and referendum campaigns. In Europe and North America, observers identify recurring patterns dividing local populations during national votes. While much research describes those patterns in relation to ethnicity, religious affiliation, historic legacy and party affiliation, current approaches in political research lack the capacity to measure their evolution over time or other vote subsets. This article introduces “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM), a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of geographic cleavages in vote outcomes by implementing a metric of agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. Unlike existing approaches, DyAM offers a stable measure for political agreement and disagreement—accounting for chance, statistically robust and remaining structurally independent from the number of entries and missing data. The method opens up to a range of statistical, structural and visual tools specific to Network Analysis and its usage across disciplines. In order to illustrate DyAM, I use more than 680,000 municipal outcomes from Swiss federal popular votes and assess the evolution of political cleavages across local populations since 1981. Results suggest that political congruence between Swiss local populations increased in the last forty years, while regional political factions and linguistic alignments have lost their salience to new divides. I discuss how choices about input parameters and data subsets nuance findings, and consider confounding factors that may influence conclusions over the dynamic equilibrium of national politics and the strengthening effect of globalization on democratic institutions.
Highlights
Debates over new forms of polarization in the electorate stress the importance of assessing how political cleavages evolve over longer periods [1]
I present how Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM) reveals the dynamics of political cleavages between Swiss local populations
When looking into how this landscape is organized, an analysis of all votes called over recent decades supports the idea of strong regional alignments and clear divides between linguistic communities [77, 78]. This finding is, put into perspective when examined against more recent outcomes; agreement networks that include votes called in the 2000s and 2010s point to a new layout of political cleavages between local populations
Summary
Debates over new forms of polarization in the electorate stress the importance of assessing how political cleavages evolve over longer periods [1]. The fundamental codependence of democratic institutions across levels and the dynamic nature of political processes suggest that the interest for harmonizing methodological and ontological languages between fields remains a major unsolved problem Against those limitations, and others I detail below, this article reports “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM) as a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of political cleavages by implementing a metric of political agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. In order to illustrate DyAM, I use over 680,000 municipal outcomes of 290 Swiss national popular votes called from 1981 to 2015 With this publicly available data, I produce more than 10,400,000 Alpha measures of political agreement/disagreement between municipal voting populations. In the 1990s, boundaries between linguistic communities dominate the network, confirming the idea of an ethnic cleavage—the so-called “Rostigraben”—in Swiss politics This divide dissipates gradually, in the 2000s when voters in German-speaking cities and those across French-speaking municipalities agreed increasingly over vote outcomes. I conclude this article by briefly pointing at the many ways further methodological developments and empirical applications of DyAM can contribute to enriching a transdisciplinary research on political behaviors
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