Elections, Ecological Inference and Social Capital in Historical Perspective

The goal of ECOSOCIAL is to examine empirically the historical evolution of political cleavages and socioeconomic inequalities, with a multidisciplinary perspective and the use of granular local level data and cutting-edge statistical methods. Who turns out to vote? Who do the poor and the rich vote for, and how has this changed in the long run? Why and when did the left-right voting pattern break down in Western democracies? What can the past teach us about democratic backsliding? While there is plenty of evidence on the rise of Europe’s far right and the emergence of multi-elite party systems, we lack a quantitative analysis of the long-term changes in the structure of political cleavages. The gap in the literature comes from the fact that it mostly relies on survey data, which do not allow us to go far back in time. An alternative is the reliance on local-level granular information, but inferring individual voting behavior from aggregate data may lead to ecological fallacies. ECOSOCIAL will help fill this gap, by exploiting the historical depth of existing electoral data while offering novel solutions to the ecological inference problems. Its novelty will be to put today’s transformations into a longer historical perspective – which crucially will allow us to better understand them and their consequences. ECOSOCIAL will advance the existing research in four steps. First, I will provide the first comprehensive quantitative study of US elections between 1788-2024, considering both Presidential votes and primaries. Second, I will propose novel econometric solutions to overcome ecological fallacies. Third, I will apply this new methodology to six European countries, thereby enhancing our understanding of partisan realignments in Western democracies. Finally, I will construct historical series of the evolution of social capital going back to the 19th century, so as to investigate whether the explanatory power of this factor has gained importance in recent years.