RESEARCH TRENDS IN THE STUDY OF ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY

Abstract

Electoral geography, which deals, for the most part, with the regional variations in voting behavior, has occupied one of the main field of the study on the political behavior or on the opinion. Some new ways of research have been introduced in this field and these are summarised here in reference to main and important articles of electoral geography. 1) One of the traditional view points represented by Siegfried is that the political opinion is concerned much more with the social integration of the community through the activities and influences of the social, political and economic organizations or groups. Without this point of view, quantification of each socio-economic element would not be able to clarify the complex relations between community and opinion of its residents. 2) On the other hand, the behavioral approach, represented by Cox, considers spatial elements which are important in the behavior and decision and gives its own explanation in the field of geographical studies to the modeling of voting behavior within the spatial context. But many problems remain to be solved; measuring of the network structure, the information flow and the attitude changed by the acceptance of information, tempo-spatial generalization from the results of small-scale sampling survey to large-scale voting characteristics and so on. 3) Kasperson and McPhail, for example, have recently written some interesting articles which show one of the recent trends in this field. This is the dynamic analysis of areal differentiation in voting behavior and its influence upon the political system through the electoral results. These new points of view in electoral geography within the field of political geography should introduce more of the works done in the recent accomplish ments in social geography so as to elaborate the analysis of spatial pattern in voting behavior.