Geographic Truths: Local Communities and Politics in the 21st Century

Abstract

Are local communities still relevant to politics? Though economic globalization has made national boundaries more porous, the geographic concentration of the populist vote suggests that local factors retain political relevance. In this dissertation, I investigate the role of local communities, and geography more broadly, in structuring the politics of ad- vanced democracies in the 21st century, from voters to parties to party systems. In the first paper, I examine the relationship between local attachment and political attitudes and vot- ing behavior, using survey data from the United Kingdom to show that “localist” voters are curiously cosmopolitan and are more responsive to local economic conditions in their vote choice. In the second paper, I investigate how parties and MPs represent local communities and how voters perceive that interaction. Combining legislative-speech data and surveys, I show that MPs are more locally-focused in constituencies in which voters demand higher levels of localism from their MPs. Finally, the third paper re-introduces the classic center- periphery cleavage. Building on the work of Stein Rokkan and co-authors, I re-conceptualize peripherality as defined by individuals’ perceptions of the quality of political representa- tion; I use survey data from the United Kingdom to construct and validate a measure of community-level peripherality. Taken together, these papers enhance our understanding of the relationship between geography, politics, and economics in the 21st century.