Neighborhood Characteristics, Cultural Frames, and the Law-and-Order Vote

Recent political geographical research has demonstrated that neighborhood characteristics matter for voting behavior. Despite this, the influence of neighborhood crime, disorder and cultural diversity on voting for parties that emphasize law-and-order remains unclear. Drawing on different traditions, this research adds two cultural-sociological concepts to this line of research: individual cultural frames, and urban cultural climates. The first refers to how individuals’ interpretation of their surroundings is influenced by their cultural attitudes, in specific authoritarianism. The second refers the extent to which a city’s cultural climate can be seen as progressive or conservative. This climate is then the cultural context in which neighborhood characteristics become framed as problematic or not. This is investigated for Dutch natives by using multilevel analyses that tie together the individual, neighborhood, and city level. Results show that cultural diversity decreases voting for law-and-order parties in progressive cultural climates. Cultural diversity and disorder decrease voting among non-authoritarian voters and increases it strongly for authoritarian voters. Although former research has focused on populist radical-right parties, results were stronger for the non-populist-radical-right VVD. This research demonstrates that neighborhood problems are not universally experienced as such, but that the problematizing of neighborhood characteristics is influenced by deep-seated cultural attitudes and long-standing cultural atmospheres.