Urban Administrative Fragmentation and Its Consequences on Electoral Behaviors at Romanian National Legislative Elections: A Case Study on Bucharest

Abstract

Many of the present day major cities have their territory partitioned into administrative subdivisions for a wide range of local governance purposes. Partisan local elections are held for electing the politicians into public administration offices of the subdivisions, which may lead to the creation of local partisan conflicts within each unit. In this paper, I analyze the influence of this local political context on the electoral behaviors formed at the national legislative elections to see if the local political context in the subdivisions determines a lack of democratic representation by rendering the socio-spatial conflicts of the city irrelevant. I explore this on Bucharest, a large city of nearly two million, at the national legislative elections between 2000-2016. The methodology is drawn from the subfield of electoral geography, as I spatial analyse the geographic clustering of electoral behaviors in the six subdivisions of Bucharest. The results in Bucharest show the capacity of the subdivisions to influence voting decisions through the local political context when certain conditions are met.