CITY AS AN ONION? CASE STUDIES OF ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY IN PRAGUE AND WARSAW

Electoral geographical research into urban territories shows a distinction in voting behaviour between a city centre and its surroundings. A recent exploratory study of the electoral geography of Prague found that distance from the city centre was the variable that best explained the spatial variation of votes, which might follow a concentric pattern and, thus, it recommended seeking a theoretical explanation in urban sociology, e.g. in the Burgess model of the city. Following this recommendation, I compared spatial patterns of voting behaviour in two cities – Warsaw and Prague. Using component analysis, I reduced the number of analysed variables to one for each city representing the main spatial polarisation. In Prague, voting behaviour showed a distinction between the city centre, inner suburbs and outer suburbs. While the city centre and the outer suburbs were conservative, the inner suburbs tended to vote for the left. This partially follows the Burgess model. On the other hand, the electoral geography of Warsaw showed a different structure. In this article I present a way of visualising urban electoral data in maps that avoid distortion caused by varying polygon size.