ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Elections and Representation
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1631946
This article is part of the Research TopicAre You Experienced? Thirty Years of Roman Vote(r)s (1993-2023)View all articles
Votes and Urban Divisions in Rome during the Second Republic
Provisionally accepted
Claudia Mariotti*
Nicola D'Amelio- Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
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This study examines the evolution of electoral behavior in Rome during the Second Republic (1993–2024), analyzing the relationship between urban morphology, sociographic structures, and political allegiance. Electoral and census data, disaggregated and re-aggregated by toponymic zones instead of administrative units, are visualized through GIS-based cartographic projections. The use of toponymic zones, deeply rooted in Rome’s historical culture, geographical morphology, and social values, enables a finer-grained analysis of electoral alignments that captures lived spatial identities. The findings trace the persistence and transformation of spatial cleavages, highlighting the enduring significance of concentric and radial electoral divisions shaped by infrastructural lines such as the Grande Raccordo Anulare and ancient consular roads. Despite shifts in political supply and voter volatility, certain socio-territorial cleavages remain remarkably stable, reflecting deeper historical, cultural, and socio-economic structures. The study contributes to debates on the resilience of urban territorial belongings and the spatial mediation of political behavior, underlining the importance of historically sedimented spatial units in electoral analysis.
Keywords: Rome, Electoral geography, territorial cleavages, urban political behavior, Spatial voting patterns, socio-graphic factors, Electoral maps
Received: 20 May 2025; Accepted: 21 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mariotti and D'Amelio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Claudia Mariotti, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy
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