What Does Suburbia Vote For?

Is there such a thing as suburban political preference in Western Europe, and if so, how would such a finding be related to political cleavages? To answer these questions, this book combines approaches from political science and urban studies to explain how political preferences of core city and suburban voters differ from a cross-national comparative perspective by analysing Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The book postulates that urban-suburban divergences in political preference are related to diverging patterns of the daily use of spaces as well as to different lifestyles within the middle class. The analyses show that suburbanites tend to prefer the conservative side of the political spectrum. Suburbia, despite being part of the urbanised world, tends towards political preference patterns that are closer to rural than to core city patterns. In a further context, the study aims to broaden the understanding of political cleavages in European multiparty democracies, particularly the urban-rural cleavage, by highlighting the relationship between one of the largest changes in the European landscape over the 20th century and its inhabitants' political preferences.