How Far is the City? Geographical Remoteness and Voting Behaviour in Italy and France

Operationalizations of geographical factors regarding vote choice at the individual level have traditionally focused on the presence of specific regional political cultures, or on generic indicators such as town size. We suggest that geographical remoteness from centres could provide a more accurate measurement of the subjective position of individuals in relationship to processes that can be theorized as having an impact on cultural and political values, such as e.g. the modernization process. As new indicators of geographical remoteness, we introduce measures of distance between the place of residence of a citizen and political centres at different hierarchical levels, based on road distances and travel times along traditional roads (also accounting for differences in orography and geography among different countries and regions). We empirically test the impact of such indicators on vote choice on the Italian and French cases. We use survey data from the 2006 ITANES and the 2002 PEF, and information about road distances and travel times obtained through online mapping/routing services. We first assess differences between the two countries in terms of orography and geography. We then estimate multivariate models of vote choice at the individual level, in order to test the following hypotheses: a) that the new indicators add significant explanatory power, compared to traditional indicators related to the centre-periphery cleavage; b) that the new indicators have different effects on vote choice for different parties, expressing different affinities of these parties with the cleavage.