THE NEIGHBOURHOOD EFFECT IN A LOCAL ELECTION

One of the more popular ideas in electoral geography is that there is a positive correlation between residential proximity and voting behaviour. Often referred to as the neighbourhood effect, the idea is quite simply that individuals within a given local area tend to vote similarly. The process involves, it is suggested, social contacts between neighbours leading to political discussion and information flow which exerts an influence on the way people vote. Closely related to, but distinguishable from the neighbourhood effect is the friends-and-neighbours effect whereby neighbours of a particular candidate will tend to know him better, discuss him more, and support him more avidly than they will other candidates. Since the concepts of the neighbourhood effect and the friends-and-neighbours effect have been adopted into the literature of political geography, and have become central as explanatory models for certain spatial patterns of voting behaviour,¹ the rather inconclusive and contradictory findings of researchers using these concepts require examination, and the concepts and process require an empirical test.     

The origin of the road and city network of Roman Pannonia

In any one macro-region there is usually one brief period of large-scale city foundation. Within Pannonia the road and city building impulse was introduced from outside along differing axial lines at three different times. Impulse chains extended from the generating points or areas to the primary objectives. The pattern of the network was determined by the selection of basic strategic objectives, which were placed on specific sites of high military-transport potentiality. Each of the road networks proved to be fanshaped composed of three elements: the axial entry route, the “cross-bar” along the Danube and “ribs” or “trusses” joining key border posts to the axis. The total pattern was that of a parallelogram of urban corridors surrounding a vacant middle.