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

The impact of geography on voting behaviour in Italy has traditionally been assessed mostly through a focus on specific regional political cultures, or through proxy indicators such as town size. When recognizing that key processes that impact on cultural and political values – such as e.g. the modernization process – can be classified as instances of innovation diffusion, we suggest that geographical remoteness from various types of centres can provide a more appropriate conceptualization of the subjective position of individuals (and places) vis-à-vis such processes. We then introduce specific measures of remoteness, which can be now commonly obtained through online mapping and routing services. We first test the descriptive ability of the concept, by introducing its aggregate formulation of geographic dispersion, and using it to effectively demonstrate orographical and geographical differences between Italy and France. We then test at the individual level – for both countries – the impact of geographical remoteness on vote choice (with a comparison with other traditional geographical indicators). We finally extend the test to aggregate municipal data on Italy. Empirical findings show that: 1) our measures effectively discriminate the two countries in terms of geographic dispersion; 2) in Italy, remoteness has significant effects on voting behaviour, both at the individual and aggregate level, and it proves able to subsume a large part of the variance explained through dummy indicators of the traditional geopolitical Italian zones.