Geographical Representation. Does geography still matter for voters' perception of local councils?

Geography is a classic dividing line in the understanding of politics and the political landscape at national level. We know less about the importance of geography for voters when it comes to the lowest level: the municipalities and the local political elites. In this paper, we look at the relative importance of geography for voters' views on municipal representation and examine which individual and contextual factors are behind it. Our premise is that geography contains both a physical aspect – a place with area, distance and people – and an identity aspect. We answer the question through a comparative case analysis of voters in two countries – Denmark and Norway – with quite similar political, party, and electoral systems: multi-party systems where national parties dominate local politics with a supplement of local lists, municipal elections are carried out with proportional representation where the entire municipality is one constituency, and both the parties and the voters influence who will represent the party in the municipal council, and thus the geographical representation. Moreover, both countries have gone through extensive territorial reform with the merger of municipalities. However, the timing of reforms differs, and the two countries are also very different when it comes to the physical aspect of geography. Thus, we may reveal how important geography is for the voters' views of municipal representation and what explains these views, compared to e.g. attitudes towards gender and age representation. In particular we examine how geography is related to time and place and whether contextual factors such as the time difference in the implementation of territorial reforms come into play. The analyses are based on representative voter surveys carried out immediately after the last local council elections in the countries – 2023 in Norway and 2021 in Denmark. The paradox seems to be that despite geographical differences in a physical sense and differences in the time horizon for reform implementation, the voters' emphasis on geographical representation is great - and greater than gender and age - in both countries. More generally, geography appears to be size and context-dependent and should rather be understood as identity-bearing than as an absolute physical relationship for voters. Furthermore, geography is in that sense important for the legitimacy of representative local democracy. Therefore, and because the question of geographical representation is something that is decided within the individual party, by the local party organization and its voters, geography is an aspect that political parties – as gatekeepers - should keep in mind when they draw up their electoral lists and decide which candidates voters can vote for.