ECPR Press The Political Ecology of the Metropolis: Metropolitan Sources of Electoral Behaviour in Eleven Countries

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 local sources of electoral politics. The resulting patterns of electoral support and participation have shifted axes of partisan competition to the right. This volume undertakes the first international comparative analysis of metropolitan political behaviour. The results support a powerful new thesis to explain many recent shifts in political behaviour: the metropolitanisation of politics. Review 'Based on a painstaking empirical analysis of eleven country cases, this study documents the pervasiveness and importance of the re-territorialisation of politics in a globalised world. This return of territory is not patterned along cleavages as we know them, but based on new territorialised contrasts within and between metropolitan areas. The thought-provoking study draws our attention to the challenge the metropolitanisation of politics poses to national parties and democratic traditions.' --Hanspeter Kriesi, Stein Rokkan Chair for Comparative Politics, European University Institute 'A virtuoso work of comparative politics filled with insights about how places condition politics. This magisterial achievement gathers uniform electoral data from different parts of the main metropolitan areas of the US, Canada, Western and Eastern Europe and Israel, analyses them using the same methods, including multi-level analysis, and paints a definitive portrait of the changing metropolitan political terrains and their implications for national politics. A must-read for all those interested in the geography of politics.' --Professor John Mollenkopf, Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York 'This book starts from the observation that in recent years urbanised centres have emerged all over the world, influencing their surrounding areas. Against the background of this metropolitanisation of contemporary societies, the authors reflect critically on the widespread assumption that national institutions and national political cleavages determine political conflicts, party structures and voting behaviour, not only at national but also at regional and local level. Has the emergence of metropolitan regions changed the conditions on which this assumption has been based? And in which way do the new metropolitanised spatial structures impact on political behaviour in metropolitan regions? These are the questions tackled by an international research team over the last ten years. The results published in this book are thought-provoking because they show clearly that to understand political processes in contemporary societies we have to take what the authors call the newly evolved metropolitan political ecology seriously.' --Hubert Heinelt, Professor for Public Administration, Institute of Political Science, Technische Universitat Darmstadt About the Author Jefferey M. Sellers is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. The author of Governing From Below: Urban Regions in the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and editor of Metropolitanization and Political Change (VS Verlag, 2005) as well as numerous articles and book chapters, he is co-founder and co-director of the International Metropolitan Observatory Project. Daniel Kübler is Professor of Political Science at the University of Zurich and co-director of the International Metropolitan Observatory Project. He has co-edited Metropolitan Governance: Capacity, Democracy and the Dynamics of Place (Routledge, 2005) and authored numerous articles and book chapters related to metropolitan governance, urban democracy and public policy analysis. Alan Walks is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto. He is