RC05 - Comparative Studies on Local Government and Politics

Sellers, Jefferey M.; Kübler, Daniel; Walter-Rogg, Melanie; and Walks, W. Alan (Eds.). (Forthcoming November 2012). The Political Ecology of the Metropolis: Metropolitan Sources of Electoral Behavior in Eleven Countries. Essex: ECPR Press.

A growing majority of humanity lives in sprawling, interconnected urban regions. Diversified metropolitan geographies have replaced the centuries-old divide between urban and rural areas, and transformed the territorial sources of electoral politics. Affluent and low density suburbs provide powerful bases of support for neoliberal and culturally conservative parties. Urban concentrations have joined poor suburbs as the remaining bastions of a Left under attack. New dimensions of partisan competition have emerged around the material interests and subcultures of distinct metropolitan places. Throughout the developed world and beyond, metropolitan patterns of electoral support and participation have shifted axes of partisan competition to the right, and driven the global spread of neoliberalism.

This volume undertakes the first systematic comparative analysis of these patterns. The analyses draw on data from 13,300 municipalities in 175 metropolitan regions and eleven countries, and multilevel statistical methods. The results support a compelling new thesis to explain many recent shifts in political behavior and public policy: the metropolitanization of politics.