Ecologie politique des votations fédérales sur l’environnement en Suisse, 1981-2010

Political cohesion is a key form of collective socio-ethical manifestations of solidarity and cooperation in groups. The disappearance of traditional political lines among voters and in the political elite destabilizes political institutions. Research finds that lack of cohesion among voters can lead to an increase in social injustice and the unequal empowerment of affluent minorities. In the midst of elections, the notion of “culture wars,” the idea of a pervasive and growing divide among the population over ideological trenches, becomes salient. In Swiss politics, such divisions are often accounted through historic characteristics of the pluri-linguistic, multi-confessional country. Recent votes have brought attention to another divide long identifies by scholars, the urban-rural distinction over certain political issues such as immigration and international policies. Current analysis fail, however, to go beyond the case-by-case approach, and consider all votes as equally important to define political polarization. In this study, I import a measure of agreement—and disagreement—, Krippendorf’s alpha, and use Social Network Analysis to uncover the geography of political ideologies of local communities. I use vote results for all federal popular votes between 1981 and 2014 and find the Swiss population clusters into 4 “ideological components” and 15 “moral constituencies.” Through my analyses, I offer an alternative explanation to the paradoxical Swiss political cohesion as the results of an ideologically bound network of cities, and of suburban populations. Furthermore, those findings comfort the main thesis that political preferences—and by extension ideologies—are closely linked to local and trans-local spatial layouts.