The Political Geography of Austrian Elections

Funding: Austrian Science Funds (FWF); requested support approximately 109,000 Euro

Status: In preparation

Recent presidential and parliamentary elections — not only in Austria — have revealed a stable pattern: left-wing and liberal parties win in urban centres, while conservative and radical-right parties dominate rural areas. This new and renewed territorial cleavage pushes classic survey-based electoral studies to their limits, as respondents are typically selected in national random or quota samples without systematic consideration of their urban or rural location.

Electoral geography based on aggregate data offers far more than a second-best alternative when individual-level micro-data are unavailable. Spatial models are particularly well-suited to capturing the effects of territorially heterogeneous sociodemographic characteristics and to modelling the urban-rural divide. Modern quantitative methods — including multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP; Park et al. 2004; Ghitza and Gelman 2013) and spatial regression models (Bivand et al. 2013) — allow both downscaling of attitudinal data to small geographic units and rigorous examination of spatial dependence.

The project analysed four closely interrelated perspectives on Austrian federal elections:

1. Spatial heterogeneity of socioeconomic structural data, political preferences, and political behaviour, drawing on precinct-, municipal-, district-, and Land-level data;
2. Local and spatial determinants of vote choice, using spatial regression models to assess the effects of socioeconomic, cultural, and political context variables on party strength;
3. Voter flows and strategic voting, analysing vote mobility between electoral rounds and across elections;
4. Electoral forensics as a measure of democratic quality, applying statistical methods to disaggregated electoral data to examine the plausibility of official election statistics.