Electoral Geography Research Articles

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY IN A BROAD AND NARROW SENSE

ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY IN A BROAD AND NARROW SENSE

Friends and Neighbours: Electoral Geography of 2020 Local Election in Metro City, Lampung, Indonesia

This article discusses local political dynamics in Indonesia, notably in the city of Metro. There are several factors why a particular candidate is more politically electable than others, including ethno-religious factors and money. Moreover, a traditional factor that needs to be considered in the study of electoral geography is the influence of the spatial effect upon voting behaviour. In the election, demographics and geography are two important factors in voting behaviour. The local election resulted in a competitive and dynamic political contest among the local elite in Metro. The result of the 2020 local election was particularly interesting because the independent candidate won and defeated the party-based candidate. This is a mixed methods approach combining the data from interviews and a qualitative survey. This research aims to analyse the spatial factor in Metro’s local election, looking at why a certain candidate won in a particular area and how the geographical factor influenced voting behaviour. Secondly, the result of the qualitative survey supported the finding that voters still consider ethno-religious factor. The finding obtained by this research reveals two significant narratives, specifically the crucial factor of ethno-religious sentiment on voting preference and the spatial factor related to residency in securing a victory for the candidate in the local election. Essentially, research concludes that the spatial factor is of importance in the context of Metro’s local election and supports Woolstencroft's (1980) classical concept of electoral geography comprising “friends and neighbours”.

AUR – The Electoral Geography of Romanian Conservative Nationalism

In December 2020, Romania held elections for its new Parliament amid the pandemic crisis. The voter turnout was historically low, at 31.84%. The Alliance for the Union of Romanians, a new party, won 9% of the vote, making it the fourth largest party in the Parliament. Having received only 0.29% of the votes in the local elections held 2 months prior, Alliance for the Union of Romanians’ success was unexpected. To explain this outcome, we analyse its programmatic choices, political strategy and symbolic and electoral geographies. The pandemic crisis allowed the consolidation of a nationalist and conservative constituency originating in the 2018 constitutional referendum to ban same-sex marriages. Romania’s example shows that a nationalist-conservative radical party can become viable if extra-political groups, networks and organisations are willing to lend significant local support to it.

The effect of micro-level context in polling stations on voting

Studies of electoral geography have traditionally examined the impact of spatial context on vote choice at the neighborhood or larger geographical level, overlooking potential effects of the immediate physical environment in the polling station. Observations of actual polling stations located in schools in Israel revealed a strong presence of nationalist and religious content in and around voting booths, in the form of naïve décor such as murals and children’s drawings (Study 1). In three experimental studies (Studies 2–4), we examine the effect on voters of such seemingly apolitical cues. The experimental studies were conducted in the days prior to Israeli general elections for the 21st and 22nd Knesset. Using a virtual-reality interface based on real-life content in actual polling stations (Study 2, student sample) and simulated environments (Studies 3 and 4, representative samples of Jewish Israeli voters), the three experiments document an effect of naïve nationalist décor on simulated voting, particularly for left-wing less-nationalist voters. In Study 5, based on actual voting in the 22nd Knesset, we capitalize on the random allocation of voters to polling stations in schools and find a correlation between the content displayed around polling places and voting patterns among distinctively left-wing populations. Investigating the influence of the encounter with the immediate environment at a resolution of meters and seconds exposes the potential impact of the (ultra-)micro temporo-spatial scale on decision-making and enriches theoretical discussions on the multiscalarity of contexts in electoral geography analyses.

Designing Electoral Districts for Proportional Representation Systems: How Electoral Geography and Partisan Politics Constrain Proportionality and Create Bias

Previous articleNext article No AccessDesigning Electoral Districts for Proportional Representation Systems. How Electoral Geography and Partisan Politics Constrain Proportionality and Create BiasAndré Walter and Patrick EmmeneggerAndré Walter Search for more articles by this author and Patrick Emmenegger Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Just Accepted Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723975 Views: 27Total views on this site HistoryAccepted October 14, 2022 © 2023 Southern Political Science Association. All Rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Reckoning with the digital turn in electoral geography

The sub-discipline of electoral geography contains research threads that draw on different theoretical, philosophical, and methodological traditions. I link these threads to the ‘digital turn’ that is occurring in the electoral landscape and in the discipline of geography itself. The use of digital technology is increasingly shaping electioneering and data regimes, providing new conceptual challenges concerning the spatial mediation and subsequent knowledge politics of voting and campaigning. Responding to these challenges requires not only building on the subfield’s tradition of interdisciplinarity but also on strengthening intra-disciplinary dialogue, in particular working across the quantitative–qualitative divide.

Electoral districts’ distribution in Jordan: Political geographical analysis

This study attempts to reveal the impact of distribution inequality of electoral districts on the election outcomes in Jordan. Since 1993 elections, electoral laws and regulations have been adopted that underestimate population density in Jordan, meaning that some regions with lower population densities have obtained more parliamentary seats than regions with high population density, including the governorates of Amman, Irbid and Zarqa. Successive Jordanian governments’ strategies have intentionally ignored electoral geography, which reduces the chances of mainly the Palestinian component obtaining significant numbers of seats in the Parliament. Governments have also sought to mitigate the chances of Islamic, Leftist and Nationalist parties obtaining a majority of seats in the Parliament, and thus being able to exert effective pressure to hold the executive authority accountable and responsible for its actions. In addition, low levels of confidence of most Jordanian citizens in Parliament have resulted in a lack of true desire to vote, which has led to an increase in the percentage of wasted votes compared with the cast votes. The study concludes that the executive authority's domination in drawing and dividing electoral districts as part of its hegemony and control over the general policy of elections has purposefully neglected population density and geographical criteria. In light of the study results, an urgent need arises to endorse an election law that accomplishes the standards of distributive justice, maximizes the role of supportive and opposition parties, raises citizen confidence in Parliaments, reduces the percentage of wasted votes and finally activates a truly representative Parliament.

The Segregation Effect: How Residential Isolation Shapes Ethnic Minority Representation in England

AbstractExtant literature argues that ethnic minority representation in plurality systems will benefit from the presence of sizable co-ethnic populations. I argue that the threshold for election depends not only on a minority population's group size but a district's level of segregation. I show that residential segregation can facilitate the increased representation of ethnic minority populations. Contrary to the prevailing literature, however, I find that increased segregation levels in cities with sizable minority populations decrease the percentage of co-ethnics elected to office. I support this argument with evidence from an original dataset on the local representation outcomes of Muslims in England between 2011 and 2021, which covers 434 district council elections. Using threshold modelling, I introduce the concept of the population threshold, above which increases in segregation level decrease Muslim representation. This article contributes to the electoral geography literature on ethnic minority representation.

A new electoral map? Brexit, realignment and the changing geography of party support in England

Critical elections theory has linked fundamental changes in electoral geography to realignment. In the UK there has been much debate over whether Britain is going through a period of realignment and the extent to which this can be attributed to Brexit. In this paper we assess how far the 2016 EU referendum has contributed to creating a new electoral geography. The 2019 UK General Election was characterised by far-reaching changes to geographical patterns of support for the major parties, with Labour losing many of its ‘red-wall’ seats to the Conservatives, especially those which voted strongly for Brexit. Meanwhile, Labour strengthened its position in the Remain-leaning metropolitan heartlands. We provide a detailed examination of how the geography of support for the ruling Conservative Party changed over-time, before and after the referendum, and the extent to which the new electoral map reflects the geography of Brexit. We find that geographical patterns of party alignment did change abruptly after the 2016 referendum, a pattern which is not consistent with the gradually evolving electoral geography. Moreover, the changes appear to be driven almost entirely by the electoral sorting of voters on either side of the Brexit divide. This suggests that the Brexit electoral shock was a major contributing factor to the reshaping of England's electoral geography.

Contextual factors influencing election results in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Electoral geography tends to focus on the impact of geographical context on electoral behavior recently and challenges the classical compositional approach. We analyze spatial contextual factors of the 2018 general elections of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the linear regression models based on the fault line theory result in wrong estimations in several municipalities, not fitting into the national pattern. Using spatial modelling, it is confirmed that the strong territorial base of Bosnian parties is shaped by spatial dependence and spatial spillover effects. In addition to the spillover effect of individual party performance, the indirect neighbourhood role of ethnicity, sectoral structure and education was also shown in some cases.

Geographical Realignment of the Hungarian Voting Behaviour Between 2014 and 2022

One of the main aims of electoral geography is to examine the spatial and socio-economic relationships of voting behaviour. Based on this, strong social cleavages were identified in the developed democracies in the 1960s, which strongly determined voting behaviour. After the regime change, these cleavages were also utilized by Hungarian electoral geographers to describe the spatiality of voting behaviour. However, a decrease in the importance of these cleavages has been reported, with the market turn of the traditional left and the strengthening of the populist right, new alignments have been created. The present study examines the spatiality of Hungarian voting behaviour and its transformation applying quantitative methods to the last three parliamentary elections. Based on our results, with the populist rhetorical change of Viktor Orbán (who is the leader of Fidesz, the governmental party since 2010) that has occurred since the migration crisis (2015), he appeals much more to disadvantaged people in the economic crisis regions (the losers of globalization), in addition to being able to retain his party’s significant rural voter base, while its support is relatively decreasing in the economically active, educated, and high-income regions.

Spatial Configuration of Key Parliamentary Constituencies in the Republic of Korea in the XXI Century

This article analyzes electoral competition between key parties in the Republic of Korea. Although the electoral geography of RoK is atypical, the presence of an almost two-party system and the use of single-member districts allow for the analysis of competition in Korean elections in the same context as in more studied countries such as the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. We define the stably swing constituencies in 2000-2020’s, their location and factors of high volatility. The overwhelming majority of districts which regularly change their political orientation are located in the north of the country — Capital Region and Chungcheon — where high competition is observed in the largest cities. Electoral differentiation of urban agglomerations is complex and subject to the influence of multiple factors, but several patterns can be identified. A significant portion of swing constituencies are in this state due to their location in transitional zones between areas with high support for candidates from the conservative camp (center and far periphery of the city) and their opponents (suburban semi-periphery). The main factor of differentiation is the electoral divide between different generations of voters. In small cities, the electorate of the main parties balances each other out, resulting in these constituencies regularly changing their party orientation. Some constituencies in the center of Seoul have special significance for both parties, so political heavyweights traditionally run in them, attracting attention to their constituencies and making them swing.

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN BULGARIA - SECOND ROUND (21.11.2021): BRIEF ANALYSIS FROM THE BULGARIAN REALITY

Electoral geography is a relatively new discipline that dates back to the French school (1913). It studies the nature of democratic elections, their conduct and results. In its development, it uses a number of quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as knowledge from many other sciences

A PERILOUS DEMOCRATIC EXERCISE WITHIN AN EXCEPTIONAL HEALTH CONTEXT

This article questions the organization of the French municipal elections within the context of a global pandemic (COVID-19). In a little-explored scientific field in the cities of Le Mans, Allonnes, Coulaines and Arnage, we examine the practice of abstention on the part of voters in Le Mans Métropole. In this regard, principal component analysis followed by hierarchical cluster analysis was performed. We used the data of both the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and the French Ministry of the Interior. Our main goal consisted in highlighting the electoral geography of Le Mans Métropole at the municipal and sub-municipal levels, using maps. We thus report that abstention rates soared. This fact corroborates the initial hypothesis of low turnout by the population at the end of this first round of the municipal elections and benefiting certain candidates on the local electoral scene. This was particularly the case for the left-wing party, the victory of which was also analysed within a national context of the Socialist Party’s decline. Keywords: municipal election, abstention, covid-19, France, urban community of Le Mans, spatial analysis.

Regional cleavages in African politics: Persistent electoral blocs and territorial oppositions

Do socio-economic cleavages shape electoral dynamics in African countries? Previous individual-level and party systems research on African politics has de-emphasized socio-economic factors, contributing to the common view that ethnic cleavages and short-term ethnic alliances define politics both locally and nationally. Focusing on Kenya, Zambia, and Malawi, we draw on methods in electoral geography to offer a spatial analysis of geographic patterns in constituency-level electoral returns over three decades that reveals the existence of persistent regional voting blocs that, in their temporal stability and multiethnic character, are not well explained by prevailing theory. The anomalies open the door to a reinterpretation national electoral structure and dynamics in the three countries that takes the geographic clustering of the persistent voting blocs as a clue to their etiology. We propose an interpretation that focuses on core-periphery cleavages in national electorates, following Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) classic model of territorial oppositions in countries undergoing political and economic integration and modernization. DHS data and proxies for regional economic activity support this interpretation. Socio-economic cleavages of the type explored in comparative political economy literatures on spatial inequality and territorial politics may be more salient in African electoral politics than previously thought.

Electoral proces 2018, State of Mexico: an approach from electoral geography

Electoral proces 2018, State of Mexico: an approach from electoral geography

The European NUTS-level election dataset: A tool to map European electoral geography.

Datasets on subnational election results in Europe frequently do not match with regional statistics available for cross-national research, mainly because territorial statistical units change over time and do not map onto the national electoral districts. This hinders consistent comparative research across time. This research note introduces EU-NED, a new dataset on subnational election data that covers national and European parliamentary elections for European countries over the past 30years. EU-NED's major contribution is that it provides election results on disaggregated levels of the statistical territorial units used by Eurostat with an unprecedented consistency and temporospatial scope. Moreover, EU-NED is integrated with the Party Facts platform, allowing for a seamless integration of party-level data. Using EU-NED, we present first descriptive evidence on the European electoral geography and suggest avenues of how EU-NED can facilitate future comparative political science research in Europe.

Analysis of the rural community behavior in the Area of Electoral Geography (Case study: Varzaqan county)

Analysis of the rural community behavior in the Area of Electoral Geography (Case study: Varzaqan county)

Electoral Geography: Approaches to Study Voting Behavior

Approaches to understanding voting behaviour played an important role in the field of electoral geography. Studies based on voting behavior normally rely on information gleaned from primary and secondary sources of data. Aggregate or composite election data for states or constituencies is convenient for examining election results, such as differences in votes between states. Different perspectives or approaches played an important role in examining the factors influencing the way people vote. This type of information usually consists of data related to voter's behavior and their specific socio-economic characteristics etc. Electoral geography involves collecting and analysing data through various techniques and approaches. The data analysis study in electoral geography usually focuses on ascertaining spatial patterns of party performance and voters' behaviour. It is thus clear that electoral geography has a special place for approaches that are useful for spatial analysis. The primary aim of this study is to explain various types of methods and approaches used in electoral geography for the analysis of voting behaviour. This study provides researchers, geographers, political and social scientists with a better understanding of the skills to analyse election data.

Continuity in Discontinuity? Spatial Patterns of Electoral Behaviour in the 2021 Czech Parliamentary Elections

This article examines the spatial factors that shaped the 2021 parliamentary elections. Building on a great deal of research in electoral geography and spatial analysis, it focused on specific spatial elements of voting behaviour that have not been previously studied, and on the key time-specific factors that shaped the electoral map and party system in the 2021 elections. Employing a quantitative approach to aggregate electoral and socio-demographic data, the study maps the electoral dynamic by exploiting the unique political situations that were characterized by a competition between two blocs – the two centre-right coalitions, SPOLU and the Pirates and STAN, and the populist ANO and SPD parties. Despite profound changes in the party system, the spatial stratification of Czech politics remained unchanged. Quite the contrary, the societal cleavages shaped the spatial voting patterns even more intensively. Additionally, the study shows that regional context factors modified the overall nationwide trend. Varying from region to region, factors included religiosity, local patriotism, the role of local entrepreneurs, and the effect of a popular local leader.