As soon as the results of the first round of the 2016 Austrian presidential elections were announced, a map that shows the winning candidate by municipality went viral.

Austrian election maps are usually dominated by the colours red or black to indicate a winning Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) or Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Since 24 April 2016, the day when Norbert Hofer from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) won the first round of the presidential elections, the political landscape of Austria looks almost entirely blue with some green, grey, red and black dots.

Despite five rival candidates, Hofer came out as the winner in the vast majority of Austria’s municipalities. The colours of the austromorph maps below indicate the winning candidate’s party affiliation: blue for Norbert Hofer (FPÖ), green for the runner-up candidate Alexander van der Bellen from Austria’s Green Party, and grey for the independent third-placed candidate Irmgard Griss. A few red and black dots indicate municipalities which were won by candidates from the ruling grand coalition parties (SPÖ and ÖVP respectively).

A runoff between Hofer and van der Bellen will decide Austria’s next president. And Norbert Hofer indeed has a good chance to become the country’s first president in post-war history who is not backed by one of the two major centrist parties, i.e. SPÖ or ÖVP. However, winning the second round of the elections won’t be as easy for Hofer as the upper map might suggest.

Traditional maps do not consider the population size of each municipality but rather the size of its territories. This can be quite misleading when mapping election results. Do the polygons of the small map in the upper left corner represent urban areas with a high population density or low-density rural areas? For this reason, the territories in the main map have been re-sized by the respective electorate (i.e. the number of persons eligible to vote). Consequently, the map represents the actual size of each municipality’s electorate rather than the size of its territory and therefore allows a weighted overview on the election results.

Weighted or not, Austria’s political landscape remains by and large blue. Nevertheless, the comparatively large green spots in the re-sized map suggest a rural-urban divide in the political geography of Austria. Norbert Hofer (FPÖ) was the winner in the vast majority of municipalities, especially in (less densely populated) rural municipalities, while Alexander van der Bellen (Green Party) won in most of Austria’s larger cities such as Vienna, Graz, Linz, Innsbruck, as well as in the rather urban Rheintal region (in the West of Austria).

It remains to be seen whether Norbert Hofer or Alexander van der Bellen will win the deciding second election round on 22 May 2016. Regardless of the outcome, make sure to check out the election maps from austromorph.space.

See also

• austromorph.space – A cartographic project reshaping Austria
• Detailed elections results provided by ORF (Austrian Broadcast Corporation)
• drawingdata – Visualisations of political data in Austria

Vienna has a growing democratic deficit. As long as voting rights are linked to citizenship, overly strict naturalisation requirements are weakening democratic participation. This is especially the case in countries of immigration, affecting first and foremost cities that are hubs of international migration – such as Vienna.

A series of Metropop blog posts and visualisations have already addressed the phenomenon of Vienna’s shrinking electorate. In fact, the city’s widening electorate gap is due to the fact that the growth of the city’s electorate cannot keep up with its population growth. This post examines the impact of Austria’s strict citizenship law on the size of Vienna’s electorate.

The shrinking electorate of Vienna (part III)

Although Vienna’s population grew by 16% between 1981 and 2014, the city’s electorate shrunk by 2% during the same period. Vienna’s democratic deficit is growing because voting rights are linked to citizenship – only Austrian nationals at voting age are enfranchised. Since the city’s population growth is almost entirely driven by international immigration, fewer and fewer residents are eligible to vote. Already one out of four people at voting age will be unable to participate in the citywide 2015 Vienna elections (to be held on 11 October).

A major factor for the widening gap between Vienna’s population size and the size of its electorate is that many international migrants remain foreign nationals even after years of residency in the city. One reason is that Austria has a relatively restrictive nationality law. Fist, citizenship is based on the principle of jus sanguinis, which means that Austrian-born children of foreign nationals are not automatically granted Austrian citizenship at birth. Second, citizenship is granted only to applicants who meet a range of requirements.

In 2006, an amendment of the Austrian nationality law made naturalisation requirements even stricter. This includes for example a minimum continuous residence of 10 years, knowledge of the German language (at B1 level), irreproachability (which also includes administrative penalties), a relatively high level of income, and the renunciation of foreign citizenship. Consequently, naturalisation rates and numbers have plummeted since 2006 and remained on a very low level ever since.

More than 40% of all foreign nationals in Austria are living in Vienna. Naturalisations have peaked in Austria’s capital city in 2003, simply because many migrants and refugees from former Yugoslavia who have arrived during the early 1990s had met the required minimum period of residence by then to become eligible for citizenship.

Since the amendment of the citizenship law became effective in 2006, the naturalisation rate (i.e. naturalisations per 100 foreign nationals) strongly declined: from more than 4% (in 2005) to just above 0.5% (in 2014). Since 2010, on average less than 2,400 foreign residents of Vienna have been granted citizenship per year. And the majority of these new Austrians were actually born in Austria.

So what … ?

Less naturalisations mean less Austrian citizens, and less Austrian citizens mean less eligible voters. In a growing city like Vienna, less eligible voters mean a growing democratic deficit (as already discussed here). Since the implementation of the stricter naturalisation requirements in 2006, Vienna’s population growth has even accelerated, driven by increased international immigration. Between 2005 and 2014, the city’s population has grown by 8.5% while the electorate has gained just 2.8%. However, the number of the people eligible to vote would not have increased at all if the lowering of the voting age from 18 years to 16 years would not have added 27,948 additional persons to the electorate in 2007.

What if … ?

What if naturalisation rates would not have declined? How many more people would have been added to Vienna’s electorate since 2006? Aiming to answer these questions we elaborated three scenarios, which illustrate the impact of the tightened citizenship law since 2006 on the size of Vienna’s electorate in 2014. For this reason, we just considered naturalisations of people at voting age – i.e. 18 years and older for 2006 and 16 years and older from 2007 onwards.

Scenario 1 keeps the annual average naturalisation rate 2001–2005 constant from 2006 onwards. Since naturalisation were at an all-time high during the period 2001–2005, scenario 2 is based on annual average rates 1996–2000, which rather correspond to the long-term trends since the 1980s. Scenario 3 depicts what would have happened if there had been no naturalisations at all since 2006.

In both main scenarios (1 and 2) the number of naturalised Austrians among Vienna’s residents by 2014 is several times higher than the actual numbers observed since the amendment of the nationality law became effective in 2006. During the eight years between 2006 and 2014, just 21,317 foreign residents in Vienna at voting age were granted Austrian citizenship.

So, let’s assume that the naturalisation rates observed during the period 2001–2005 (i.e. just before the requirements were tightened) would have continued after 2006 (scenario 1). In this case more than four times more foreign residents at voting age (98,028 persons) would have received Austrian citizenship. Consequently, Vienna would have had 76,711 more eligible voters by 2014 compared to the actual figures. When applying the slightly lower rates of the period 1996–2000 (scenario 2), in total 81,639 foreign residents at voting age would have been naturalised between 2006 and 2014. As a consequence, Vienna’s electorate would have added 60,322 more eligible voters by 2014.

The chart above illustrates the consequences of the stricter naturalisation requirements that became effective in 2006 on the size of Vienna’s electorate in 2014. As already mentioned, Vienna’s total population (all ages and nationalities) increased by 8.5% between 2005 and 2014 (dark line), while the city’s electorate grew only by 2.8% (red line).

In scenario 1 (blue line), which is based on naturalisation rates observed between 2001 and 2005, the electorate would have increased by 9.8% since 2006. This would have meant that the electorate would have stronger increase than the total population and, hence, a narrowing of Vienna’s electorate gap. Scenario 2 (yellow line), which shows the development after 2006 according to 1996–2000 naturalisation rates, would not be too far off from scenario 1. Vienna’s electorate would have increased by 8.3% – just 0.2% less than the change of the total population. In the case of the reference scenario 3 (grey dashed line), which depicts a hypothetical situation with no naturalisations since 2006, Vienna’s electorate would have increased by 0.9% until 2014 – if only because of the lowering of the voting age from 18 years to 16 years in 2007.

To put it plainly …

By 2014, almost one out of four residents of Vienna at voting age were not eligible to vote because of their (foreign) citizenship. The share of persons not eligible to vote increased from 18.0% in 2005 to 24.5% in 2014 mainly because of stricter naturalisation requirements that became effective in 2006. Assuming that the Austrian nationality law would not have been tightened, the share of residents at voting age unable to vote would have still increased until 2014, but significantly less: by 1.5% in scenario 1 and by 2.6% in scenario 2. In case there would have been no naturalisations at all since 2006 (scenario 3), the share of Vienna’s residents at voting age not eligible to vote would just be 1.5% higher than the actually observed 24.5%.

Vienna’s widening electorate gap is due to fact that voting rights in Austria are based on citizenship. The democratic deficit in Austria’s capital city has even become more severe after naturalisation requirements were tightened in 2006. So, how to narrow the gap between the city’s total population and its electorate?

On the one side, the consequences of citizenship laws need to be reconsidered. Too strict naturalization requirements literally produce more foreign nationals, which in turn leads to a diminishing share of residents eligible to vote. Given that the majority of naturalised persons in Vienna since 2006 were actually born in Austria, obviously jus sanguinis should be dropped in favour of jus soli, which would grant citizenship to everyone born in the country. On the other side, democratic participation could be strengthened if citizenship and voting rights would be decoupled. This is especially the case in countries and cities with a high share of international migrants. Voting rights that are bound to residency (e.g. after a stay of 3 years) would much better reflect the reality of a society shaped by immigration.

Although both options would make a lot of sense, the political reality in Austria is that neither a liberalisation of the citizenship law nor a voting law based on residency would find a legislative majority. However, without any reforms of Austria’s citizenship law and/or voting law Vienna’s electorate gap will definitely become even wider in the future.

References:

• Data sources: Statistics Austria and Statistics Vienna (MA23)

See also:

• Vienna electorate – A collection of Metropop contributions to the topic of Vienna’s shrinking electorate.

After Austria’s national election round in September 2013, it took the new (old) government a while to come up with a new five-year government programme in late December 2013. Some say it’s substantially vague, I say it also includes at least one fundamental mistake with respect to the percentage of the population living in rural areas. Here is the translation of the original quote on page 20:

“A focus of the Austrian government is to strengthen rural areas,
where 66 per cent of the population live.”

… see also: screenshot highlighting the demonstrable error, and original PDF (in german).

It is well-known that around 2010 planet Earth became predominately urban, with more than 50 per cent of the global population living in urban areas. It seems that this escaped the notice of Austria’s political elite. Accordingly to the government’s working programme for the period 2013 to 2018, only one third of Austria’s population is urban. In fact, already by the 1950s the proportion of Austria’s urban population reached more than 60 per cent, and further increased since then.

In order to separate guesstimates from evidence, it is necessary to consider different definitions of urban and rural areas. On top of that, these definitions vary from country to country – see national definitions of “urban” (collected by the UN). In the case of Austria, at least three different approaches of “urban” should be considered:

1. Communes of more than 5,000 inhabitants
   … a definition that is, in the case of Austria, also used by the UN.
2. Urban regions … as defined by Statistics Austria, taking into account population density as well commuting flows from the outer zones to the urban core.
3. Degree of urbanisation … accordingly to the OECD-Eurostat definition, which is distinguishing between three types of area by using a criterion of geographical contiguity in combination with population density based on grid cells of 1 km².

No matter how one might distinguish rural from urban populations, the majority of Austria’s population is certainly urban. In 2013, about 57 per cent lived in communes with more than 5,000 inhabitants and more than 66 per cent lived in urban areas (core and outer zones) – and not the other way round (in rural areas), as incorrectly stated in the government programme. Accordingly to the OECD-Eurostat definition, only 40 per cent of the population of Austria lived in thinly populated areas (i.e. rural areas), while almost 60 per cent lived in urban areas: 30 per cent in densely populated areas (i.e. cities or large urban area) and 29 per cent in intermediate populated areas (i.e. towns and suburbs or small urban area).

Well, I always hoped that politicians don’t get everything wrong – and still do hope so. However, since the government programme was published more than a month ago, it makes me a little bit worried that this odd error has not been corrected by now, i.e. by the end of January 2014.