Dr. Simone Piras (p), Prof Fabrizio Alboni, Prof Luca Falasconi, Dr Claudia Giordano, Dr Valentino Marini Govigli, Prof. Marco Setti

Recent political events at the global level have shown a rapid growth of populist voting alongside declining electoral participation. The regional economic literature argues that a relevant driver of this phenomenon is the progressive marginalisation of many (mostly rural) places due to the effects of agglomeration economies. However, electoral behaviour shows path dependencies embedded in the history of a territory, and results from the interplay of complex territorial- and individual-level factors. Additionally, rather than being driven by marginalisation as measured through objective indicators, it may be driven by the perception of marginalisation, with the two not necessarily being aligned. In this article, we use data from an original survey conducted at the regional (NUTS2) level, merged with secondary data at the municipal (LAU2) and Local Labour System (LLS) levels, to investigate how individual and territorial characteristics impact voting behaviour. Questions about recent and past electoral behaviour allow us to determine voters’ switching patterns, considering abstention as well as populist voting as potential alternative outcomes. Additionally, we test the impact of both individual perceptions and indicator-based measures of social and territorial marginalisation. Our survey was conducted immediately after the 2024 regional elections in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. This region represents a particularly interesting case study because of its high social capital, its tradition of socialist governments providing high-level public services, its polycentrism, and its territorially diffused economic activity, exemplified by the many industrial districts. Electoral abstention and political polarisation along the centre-periphery fault line are relatively new yet clearly emerging patterns. We estimate multilevel models with two potential outcomes: abstention or voting for populist parties. Preliminary results suggest that perceived marginalisation is a stronger explanatory variable than marginalisation as measured through objective indicators of socio-economic and demographic decline. Similarly, although both territorial- and individual-level characteristics show statistically significant associations with electoral behaviour, the latter explain a much larger share of the variation. Therefore, alongside redistributive policies across households and territories, policy practitioners aiming to address the ‘revenge of the places that do not matter’ and to generate diffuse social wellbeing should pay attention to prevailing narratives of marginalisation rather than targeting purely economic and geographical indicators.

Dr. Nikolaos Terzidis (p)

This paper investigates the relationship between globalization and the profound transformation of the Greek electoral landscape over the 1996-2023 period. Employing an estimation strategy that accounts for time-invariant unobserved factors across local labor markets differentially exposed to imports from China, we uncover that globalization is a key catalyst of the Greek electoral transformation. Specifically, we first document that regions more exposed to import competition exhibit increased voter turnout and support for radical left parties, coupled with decreased support for radical right ones. A more granular classification of the political parties according to their economic stance illustrates that import competition increases support for parties moderately in favor of market liberalization, as opposed to those favoring extensive welfare policies. The estimated effects are concentrated in regions with low-to-medium unemployment levels, underscoring the heterogeneous adjustment to global shocks, based on different levels of the local economic uncertainty.

Mr Yashvant Premchand (p), Dr. Peter Mulder

Climate change and the green transition impose highly uneven costs and risks across households and places, yet political support for policies addressing these risks does not necessarily follow the same spatial logic. This paper examines how material exposure to climate- and energy-related risks aligns with political representation across Dutch neighborhoods. We combine fine-grained spatial indicators of energy burdens, housing quality, and exposure to environmental hazards, such as flooding and land subsidence, with neighborhood-level election outcomes from recent Dutch parliamentary elections. Political representation is captured using a newly constructed Policy Favorability Index (PFI), which measures how strongly political parties support housing-level climate adaptation and the redistribution of energy transition costs. To assess misalignment between exposure and representation, we introduce two complementary measures of political incongruence: a high-exposure–low-PFI quadrant classification and a continuous Interest–Vote Incongruence (IVI) index that captures the alignment between exposure and voting patterns supportive of one’s material interests. The results reveal a sharply structured political geography of the green transition. While exposure to high energy costs, poor housing quality, and climate risks is widespread across both metropolitan and peripheral regions, political incongruence is overwhelmingly concentrated outside the urban core. Neighborhoods in less urban and lower–human-capital regions are significantly more likely to combine high exposure with support for parties offering limited or regressive housing-level climate and redistribution policies. By contrast, highly educated and densely urban neighborhoods tend to vote in line with their material interests, even at comparable exposure levels. Regression analyses show that education and urbanity are the strongest correlates of political alignment, outweighing income and wealth. These findings suggest that the green transition is mediated through an education- and urban–rural political divide, reflecting broader patterns of spatial inequality and political detachment. The paper contributes a scalable framework for studying the political foundations of climate policy and highlights a central challenge for building a socially just and politically sustainable green transition. The places most exposed to climate risks and energy costs are often those least politically aligned with protective policy responses.