The Consequences of Gentrification and Marginalisation on Political Behaviour

In most of the major cities of Switzerland there was some degree of gentrification during the 1990s. Specifically, former working class neighbourhoods near the centre of cities were transformed into areas with a rich cultural life and became the preferred residential areas of a modern urban middle class. In the same period that this core city was gentrified, a marginalisation occurred in peripheral working class neigh-bourhoods as the population aged and the number of immigrants and underprivi-leged people increased. In both cases the root cause was deindustrialisation and the change towards an information society. Both gentrification and marginalisation have implications for the views and political attitudes of the affected population which can be measured over time by comparing the results of elections, and in the case of Swit-zerland the very frequent popular referenda. This paper examines the relations be-tween economic and socio-demographic change and the change of voting behaviour in Swiss cities over the last two decades. Some evident trends are identified: gentrified city districts vote in a more and more left-libertarian way whilst marginalised periph-eral districts still vote in favour of the welfare state but also vote in a more con-servative way in lifestyle- and immigration-issues. It appears that as a result of gentri-fication and marginalisation the political landscape of Swiss cities is changing from a bipolar left-right structure to a tripolar structure