The new spaces of the electoral map
The above remarks may help in addressing political maps with the required openness. Geopolitics often pushes the notion of truth to its limits (Raffestin et al. 1995), and the mapping of inter-state rivalries consists more of a clash of lies, especially concerning the “historical rights” of a particular state over a particular territory, with political maps featuring the competition of truths.
The case of the mutation of electoral spaces in the West allows us to understand this difference. This new configuration, which is omnipresent and massively recurrent, is so clear that it can be formalized simply by means of two equations1 (Lévy 2020). Its legibility is improved by the use of cartograms. While a Euclidean base map relies on the geometric homology between angles, lengths or surfaces on the space to be represented and on the map, the cartogram opens up the range of possibilities by making the map surfaces correspond to any series of geolocalized variables of the reference reality – population, production, etc. – while respecting a few topological rules (each spatial unit remains well surrounded by its neighbors), which makes it possible to maintain a cartographic relationship between the image and the reality it represents.
Almost everywhere, and with very few exceptions, votes in favor of various types of openness to otherness are clearly more numerous in highly urban areas, those with a powerful combination of density and diversity, such as the centers of large cities, and become weaker as the level of urbanity decreases. This new geographical situation reverses long-standing electoral traditions that were organized more on a regional scale. The shift became visible in the early 1990s, in specific issues, such as the referendums on European construction or the questions of immigration, sexual orientation or religion. It then deepened when the tribune parties that fed on these issues gained influence. Finally, from the early 2000s in the United States, and in the following decade in Europe, it became a generalist marker: the major elections that decide on the major political choices of societies fall within this geographical model. Here, some examples are discussed (see Figures 1.5–1.9).
The first pair (see Figures 1.5 and 1.6), which concerns France, shows that the configuration of the 2017 presidential election was already present, almost identically, in that of the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty. In both cases, three different scales appear to be relevant: large regions; urban areas, with a strong opposition between cities and the suburban countryside; and, in a more complex way, city centers and part of the suburbs.
Figure 1.5. The French referendum of September 20, 1992 on the Maastricht Treaty (source: Lévy et al. 2017)
Figure 1.6. The 2017 French presidential election, April 23 (first round) (source: Lévy et al. 2017)
This is also the case for the 2020 US presidential election (see Figure 1.7). The cartogram immediately reveals a pattern that is almost undetectable on Euclidean maps using the same data grid. It is essentially the network of large cities, in whichever state they are located, that voted predominantly Democratic, while a vast continuous swath of large suburbs and countryside opted for the Republicans.
In their construction, these maps seem banal and are comparable to any other electoral map of any place and time. However, it should be noted that the use of the cartogram as a background map, with the population as the reference data, constitutes a semiological extension of the fundamental principle of democracy: “one man, one vote, one pixel”, it might be said. More profoundly, these maps express a major change in electoral choices that reflects a bifurcation in the practices of living in the West.
Figure 1.7. US Presidential Election, November 3, 2020 (source: Lévy et al. 2020)
The revolution in mobility allows the majority of the population to make economic-geographical trade-offs involving their place and type of residence, place of work, educational, commercial and leisure practices. The result is that the “residence assignment” – almost a house arrest – that heavily marked European rural societies has been greatly reduced and that the place of residence is becoming an indicator of individuals’ biographical strategy, without forgetting that the capacity, not only financial but also cultural, to define and carry out such a strategy is not equally distributed in society. This reality, which is both novel and complex, can be usefully compared with another strategic indicator, namely voting in favor of a particular political orientation. It can therefore be said (Lévy et al. 2018) that a contemporary electoral map brings two conceptions that can refer to the right, face to face. On the one hand, it is about the geographical distribution of political orientations in developed countries, which, almost always argue and decide on issues of justice, through the positions taken by voters on the balance sheets and programs of candidates. On the other hand, the residential choices that determine voter location enable individual actors to apply to themselves, as far as their capacity for action allows, the idea of justice that they deserve to benefit from. These two dimensions come together and interact because the project that each actor implements through their spatiality uses the resources (or, on the contrary, suffers from the absence of these resources) incorporated in an environment that is at least partly the result of public policies.
Finally, what was observed was that these maps were not only representations of other spaces, but of the spaces themselves. In Switzerland, multiple electoral spaces correspond to the responses of voters to multiple referendum questions. These questions are often about openness/closure or identity/otherness, and each time they very clearly oppose the centers of the largest cities to the suburban areas. For a time, however, this reality was masked by the fact that, in Euclidean metrics, cities are not very visible. This allowed the public scene to limit its interpretations to the Röstigraben theme, that is, to the country’s linguistic divisions, which the Swiss constitutional system largely takes into account and which, unlike the gradients of urbanity, does not threaten sociopolitical or institutional balances.
Gradually, however, new cartographic expressions using the cartogram technique or hybrid variants are making it possible to give greater prominence to densely populated areas. Thus, the following two maps (see Figures 1.8 and 1.9) also present two political spaces in conflict. The first is a common conflict plane in Swiss politics and is explicitly taken into account in the life of the federal institutions; it therefore belongs to the “cruising regime” of the Confederation. The second is new and is knocking on the door to be recognized as such.
From the moment it circulates, is received, discussed, and used in public debate, the map – this one and all of the others – does not only account for new political spaces. It creates new spaces that are a part of social life by itself. Indeed, as a representational object that links an external reality and the construction of a discourse
