Michaud et al. Appl Netw Sci (2021) 6:67 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41109-021-00409-z Applied Network Science RESEARCH Open Access A spatial analysis of parliamentary elections in Sweden 1985–2018 Jérôme Michaud1,2* , Ilkka H. Mäkinen1, Attila Szilva2 and Emil Frisk1 *Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract 1 Department of Sociology, Understanding where and why political change is happening in a country is a funda- Uppsala University, 751 26 Uppsala, Sweden mental issue in political geography. While electoral choice is individual, it is infuenced Full list of author information by various sociological, cultural, and geographical factors postulated to create ‘cultural is available at the end of the felds’ infuencing individual decision-making. Here, we test the cultural feld hypoth- article esis on Sweden, an important democracy of Europe long regarded as an example by other European countries, by studying the middle-long-term evolution of the spatial structure of political choice over the last three decades. In testing the cultural feld hypothesis, an analysis of spatial correlations is combined with groupings of Swedish municipalities into larger communities refecting the similarity of their voting profles. We show that spatial correlations decay logarithmically, which is a sign of long-ranged interactions, and also demonstrate that Sweden can be divided into three or four large and stable politico-cultural communities. More precisely, a transition from three to four main politico-cultural communities is observed. The fourth community, which emerged in the early 2000s is of particular interest as it is characterized by a large vote- share for the Sweden Democrats, while almost all other parties underperform.