An electoral geography of Western Europe

Abstract

The European Parliament elections give the opportunity to map voting behaviour in Western Europe. The main methodological difficulty is related to the classification of the parties. The cleavage theory is not a sufficient basis for an operational typology. The left-right axis remains an important basis for a classification. We have discriminated three groups of parties (the left, including the ecologists; the moderate centre-right and classical right; a growing populist reactionary right and the extreme-right, with a different geographical pattern). Beyond those families, the regionalist parties can also be isolated. The green voting pattern is more specific to the ‘central’ regions and not linked to that of the traditional left, which is related to the traditions of the workers' movement or more specific to the “peripheral” regions. In general, the metropolitan regions vote more to the left than the surrounding regions, today more and more often on the basis of an intellectual voting pattern, including some well to-do urban and periurban districts. The centre-right and classical right voting pattern designate two main spaces: a conservative mid-European area, with a strong Christian-democracy in the Catholic countries with a quite recent State building (however recently collapsed in Italy), and rural peripheral spaces, mainly those dominated for a long time by small familial rural enterprises and/or by strong and conservative religious practices. At the European scale, the new populist reactionary right is stronger in the `central' regions than the traditional extreme right, even if the latter is also present in some central deprived urban and old industrial districts.