Revitalizing Electoral Geography

Jonathan Leib, Barney Warf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138274105
• eBook ISBN: 9781317063452
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Electoral Geography, the analysis of spatial patterns of voting, is undergoing a renaissance with new methodological advances, theoretical shifts and changes in the political landscape. Integrating new conceptual approaches with a broad array of case studies from the USA, Europe and Asia, this volume examines key questions in electoral geography: How has electoral geography changed since the 1980s when the last wave of works in this sub discipline appeared? In what ways does contemporary scholarship in social theory inform the analysis of elections and their spatial patterns? How has electoral geography been reconfigured by social and technological changes and those that shape the voting process itself? How can the comparative analysis of elections inform the field? In addressing these issues, the volume moves electoral geography beyond its traditional, empiricist focus on the United States to engage with contemporary theoretical developments and to outline the myriad theoretical, conceptual and methodological perspectives and applications that together are ushering in electoral geography's revitalization. The result is a broader, comparative analysis of how elections reflect and in turn shape social and spatial relations.

PART I
Conceptual Foundations

Chapter 1
Introduction

Barney Warf and Jonathan Leib

Electoral geography – the analysis of spatial patterns in voting – has a long history and once possessed a distinguished status within the discipline of geography. From the 1960s through the 1980s, electoral geographers were important practitioners in the application of quantitative techniques and cartography to electoral data at the local and national scales. This body of work, largely empiricist in inspiration and focus, nonetheless generated a substantial literature that revealed the deeply spatial nature of elections, including electoral redistricting, economic and demographic factors, and the campaign strategies of parties and candidates (Taylor 1973; Taylor and Johnston 1979; Gudgin and Taylor 1979; Swauger 1980; Morrill 1981; Archer 1988; Archer and Shelley 1986, 1988; Archer et al. 1985; Archer and Taylor 1981; Johnston 1982; Johnston et al. 1990; Martis 1982; Martis 1989). Related works were concerned with the state, social relations, and the socio-spatial context of ideology, in which elections are seen as arenas in which subjects express their preferences within structural constraints ranging from the local scale to the world system (Agnew 1996; Flint 2001; Johnston and Pattie 2003). The vast majority of such projects focused on the US, with a few notable examples drawn from Europe (Agnew 1995; Johnston and Pattie 2006; Adams 2007). This literature has offered a rich, detailed portrait of the spatiality of elections at the national and local levels; redistricting and gerrymandering; shifts in voter preferences, turnout rates, and correlations with various socioeconomic variables; and neighborhood effects on political behavior.

Over the last three decades, however, electoral geography has fallen into senescence. As human geography became increasingly preoccupied with conceptual matters approached through various forms of social theory and political economy, electoral geographers’ obsession with techniques and data, reflecting an unrepentant positivist or naïve empiricist outlook, and their studied neglect of issues of theory and social context, left the subdiscipline unable to contribute substantially to contemporary conceptual debates. Publications in this area, accordingly, declined in number and status, and electoral geography degenerated into its own “moribund backwater.” As well, the practitioners within the field of electoral geography reflected an earlier time period within the discipline of geography. While the discipline has witnessed a partial closing of its gender inequality gap in recent decades (though not as fast and as thoroughly as we would like), the overwhelming majority of electoral geography studies are still authored by males.

More recently, however, a renaissance of sorts has begun to emerge in electoral geography (Johnston 2005; Shin and Agnew 2008; Warf 2009; Webster, Chapman and Leib 2010). Many political geographers, as well as some members in related disciplines such as political science, have sought to bring new perspectives to the field, countering the traditional positivism, engaging with conceptual debates, and avoiding the overly American bias that once plagued the topic. Methodological advances such as Geographic Information Systems have allowed electoral data to be analyzed in novel and intriguing ways. New theoretical perspectives from political economy to post-modernist and post-structuralist approaches have been added to the electoral geography literature, accentuating the role of multi-scalar explanations in the field, and injecting a concern for class, identity, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality within electoral geography studies. At the same time, when combined with more traditional spatial-analytic methodologies, these perspectives have provided greater insight through newer “mixed methods” approaches to the study of electoral geography. Moreover, the political environment itself has become more conducive to the subdiscipline’s reconstruction, particularly in the US, where, since the heated presidential election of 2000, academic work on the spatiality of elections has intensified. Thus, theoretically, conceptually and pragmatically, electoral geography is poised to re-establish itself as an important part of the intersections between politics and geography.

This volume seeks to expedite the resurgence of electoral geography through a series of chapters that integrate new conceptual and theoretical approaches with a broad array of case studies from around the world. Key questions that tie the theoretical and empirical sections together include:

1. How has electoral geography changed since the 1980s, when the last wave of works in this subdiscipline appeared?

2. In what ways does contemporary scholarship in social theory inform the analysis of elections and their spatial patterns?

3. How has electoral geography been reconfigured by social and technological changes such as new requirements for voter identification?

4. As electoral geography distances itself from its previous obsession with the United States, how has the comparative analysis of elections informed the field?

Summary of Chapters

The chapters in this volume fall into three major categories. The first set deals conceptually with theoretical and conceptual topics, including the evolution of electoral geography, lines of debate, and silences and omissions. The second group consists of case studies drawn from the UK, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan. The third focuses on the United States; some are concerned with elections at the national scale, while others focus on more local contexts. These chapters also deal with different types of electoral geography topics, including general and primary candidate elections, referenda, voter eligibility issues, as well as the varied impacts of different types of voting and registration procedures and systems.

Jonathan Leib and Nicholas Quinton begin by tracking electoral geography’s trajectory over the past 20 years. Analyzing 224 articles published over the last two decades, they trace major topic areas of electoral geography research, such as voting studies, electoral systems, redistricting, and pedagogic issues, as well as the diverse theoretical perspectives that have been brought to bear on the subject, such as spatial analysis, political economy, and poststructuralist interpretations. The latter, in particular, has led to a thorough reconceptualization of power within electoral geography and studied attempts to overcome the chasm that separated the analysis of elections from wider issues of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and inequality.

One of the signs of electoral geography’s maturation is the growing number of case studies not located in the United States. Britain, of course, has long been the subject of attention from electoral geographers. Ron Johnston, one of human geography’s most well known and prolific contributors, together with Charles Pattie use the British context to examine the impacts of different voting systems, including first-past-the-post, supplementary vote, and alternative vote, on national and local elections there, as well as comparisons with similar systems in other countries. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, as no voting system is perfect, but their adoption inevitably entails careful attention to the context and spatial specifics in which they are implemented.

In an indication of electoral geography’s growing methodological maturity, Michael Shin and John Agnew use geographic information systems and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to explore the electoral geographies of Italy’s Lega Nord, a secessionist and anti-immigrant group that has recently enjoyed rising popularity. Their case study reveals the necessity to take spatial structures into account when conducting statistical analysis of electoral patterns.

Erinn P. Nicley introduces a cultural political economy approach to examine the rise and fall of the regionalist political party, the Bloque Nacionalista Galego (BNG), in regional elections in Spain’s northwest province of Galicia from 1985 to 2005. In his analysis, Nicley uses this cultural political economy perspective to bring political economy, cultural studies, and semiotics into the study of electoral geography, and, combined with GIS analysis, seeing these elections as moments in time that both are influenced by and influence changing political, economic and social life in northwestern Spain.

Traditionally, English-language studies of electoral geography have focused almost exclusively on elections in North America, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. Daniel McGowin works to rectify this imbalance through his study of Taiwan/Republic of China’s four direct presidential elections from 1996 to 2008. He traces the hegemony of the KMT, viewed by many Taiwanese as a foreign party that arrived from the mainland in the chaos of the 1940s. In the tussles between the KMT and rival parties in these elections, issues of place, identity, ideology and Taiwan’s future status become hopelessly intertwined.

Puerto Rico, caught between its roles as US Commonwealth and an autonomous island with its own political character, is analyzed by Luis D. Sánchez-Ayala. In this chapter, Sánchez-Ayala focuses on the multiple attempts to resolve the island’s final status through electoral referenda: whether as a Commonwealth, a US state, or an independent country. He focuses on a key issue within this debate over the island’s future status: who would be considered eligible to vote in a future referendum. Would the electoral universe for a future referendum be limited to only those who live on the island? Would those who were born on the island but have moved to the mainland be included? Or would those born and raised on the mainland, but who can trace their ancestry back to the island, be also allowed to vote? Because there are more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than on the island itself, this issue is intertwined with complex questions about the construction of Puerto Rican identity/identities both on the island and the mainland.

In the US context, Barney Warf describes the impacts of class, ethnicity, and religion in the historic 2008 presidential election, which led to the first African-American president, Barack Obama. Contrary to stereotypes that portray Democrats as the party of the working class and Republicans as the party of the wealthy, he demonstrates that Obama’s support tended to rise steadily with average household income level. Using GWR, he concludes that, holding other influences constant, many voters in each group tended to support Obama more strongly when they lived outside of regions in which their ethnicity or religion dominated, perhaps indicating a subtle geography of appreciation for difference.

Toby Moore summarizes the spatiality of several dimensions of American voting in the 2008 elections, including same day versus election day registration, early voting, provisional voting, voter identification laws, and voting technologies, all of which combine to shape local and national outcomes in complex ways, as well as emerging issues such as the impacts of votes cast by citizens located overseas.

While numerous studies exist, both historical and contemporary, of the geography of US presidential general elections, Fred M. Shelley and Heather Hollen examine an understudied yet vitally important aspect of these elections, the Presidential primary election process. Using the 2008 presidential primaries as a case study, Shelley and Hollen examine the important geographical aspects of the American primary election system that helped lead to the nomination of Barack Obama and John McCain by the country’s two main political parties.

Using measures of spatial autocorrelation, Nicholas Quinton and Gerald R. Webster analyze spatial patterns of voting patterns in multiple elections in Alabama, both partisan contests and “culture war” referenda, demonstrating how quantitative approaches can be combined with contextually-sensitive studies in a “conciliatory” manner. As the culture wars flared across this deeply conservative state, they exposed deep and persistent geographic divides among the state’s regions in which race, ideology, and place were inseparably fused.

Finally, Thomas Chapman analyzes the geographical contours of Florida’s 2008 marriage amendment referendum, in which proponents sought to place a ban on same-sex marriage within the state’s constitution. Taking a cue from the recent subgenre of work that invokes a critical and post-positivist approach towards electoral outcomes and the political geographies of sexuality, Chapman examines the electoral geographies of Florida’s referendum results through the lens of the cultural politics of sexuality.

While diverse in numerous ways, the overall goal of the 11 chapters that follow is to outline the myriad theoretical, conceptual and methodological perspectives and applications that together are ushering in electoral geography’s revitalization.

References

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Agnew, J. 1995. The rhetoric of regionalism: The Northern League in Italian politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 20: 156–72.

Agnew, J. 1996. Mapping politics: How context counts in electoral geography. Political Geography 15: 129–46.

Archer, J. 1988. Macrogeographical versus microgeographical cleavages in American Presidential elections: 1940–1984. Political Geography Quarterly 7: 111–26.

Archer, J. and F. Shelley. 1986. American Electoral Mosaics. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.

Archer, J. and F. Shelley. 1988. The geography of US presidential elections. Scientific American 259: 44–53.

Archer, J., G. Murauskas and F. Shelley. 1985. Counties, states, sections, and parties in the 1984 presidential election. Professional Geographer 37: 279–87.

Archer, J. and P. Taylor. 1981. Section and Party: A Political Geography of American Presidential Elections. New York: John Wiley, Research Studies Press.

Gudgin, G. and P. Taylor. 1979. Seats, Votes and the Spatial Organisation of Elections. London: Pion.

Johnson, R. 1982. The changing geography of voting in the United States: 1946–1980. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 7: 187–204.

Johnston, R. 2005. Anglo-American electoral geography: Same roots and same goals, but different means and ends? Professional Geographer 57: 580–87.

Johnston, R. and C. Pattie. 2003. Representative democracy and electoral geography. In J. Agnew, K. Mitchell and G. Toal (eds) A Companion to Political Geography. Oxford: Blackwell, 337–55.

Johnston, R. and C. Pattie. 2006. Putting Voters in Their Place: Geography and Elections in Great Britain. New York: Oxford University Press.

Johnston, R., F. Shelley and P. Taylor (eds) 1990. Developments in Electoral Geography. London and New York: Routledge.

Martis, K. 1982. The Historical Atlas of United States Congressional Districts: 1789–1983. New York: The Free Press.

Martis, K. 1989. The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress: 1789–1989. New York: Macmillan.

Morrill, R. 1981. Political Redistricting and Geographic Theory. Washington, DC: Association of American Geographers.

Shin, M. and J. Agnew. 2008. Berlusconi’s Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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Taylor, P. 1973. Some implica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• PART I CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS
• PART II ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY OUTSIDE OF THE US
• PART III ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE US
• Index