This study offers a novel account of the geographical variation in the association of educational attainment with electoral behaviour. It estimates multilevel random-coefficient models using survey ...data from the British Election Study Internet Panel and data on constituency characteristics to explore the extent to which, and reasons why, the voting behaviours of individuals with identical qualifications varied across different types of parliamentary constituencies in British general elections from 2015 to 2019. We find the geography of this educational cleavage has not been evenly distributed in recent years. While the individual-level association of educational attainment and vote choice indeed varied geographically at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, there is only limited evidence to suggest that similarly educated individuals voted differently in constituencies with low and high densities of persons with high levels of education. Rather, our findings suggest that constituency left behind-ness (broadly defined) is the most important factor in explaining the spatial heterogeneity of education-based voting in recent British general elections.
Abstract A vast and growing quantitative literature considers how social networks shape political mobilization but the degree to which turnout decisions are strategic remains ambiguous. Unlike ...previous studies, we establish personal links between voters and candidates and exploit discontinuous incentives to mobilize across district boundaries to estimate causal effects. Considering three types of networks – families, co-workers, and immigrant communities – we show that a group member's candidacy acts as a mobilizational impulse propagating through the group's network. In family networks, some of this impulse is non-strategic, surviving past district boundaries. However, the bulk of family mobilization is bound by the candidate's district boundary, as is the entirety of the mobilizational effects in the other networks.
What is the effect of gerrymandering on the partisan outcomes of United States Congressional elections? A major challenge to answering this question is in determining the outcomes that would have ...resulted in the absence of gerrymandering. Since we only observe Congressional elections where the districts have potentially been gerrymandered, we lack a non-gerrymandered counterfactual that would allow us to isolate its true effect. To overcome this challenge, we conduct computer simulations of the districting process to redraw the boundaries of Congressional districts without partisan intent. By estimating the outcomes of these non-gerrymandered districts, we are able to establish the non-gerrymandered counterfactual against which the actual outcomes can be compared. The analysis reveals that while Republican and Democratic gerrymandering affects the partisan outcomes of Congressional elections in some states, the net effect across the states is modest, creating no more than one new Republican seat in Congress. Therefore, the partisan composition of Congress can mostly be explained by non-partisan districting, suggesting that much of the electoral bias in Congressional elections is caused by factors other than partisan intent in the districting process.
•Computer simulations distinguish partisan gerrymandering and natural electoral bias.•Most electoral bias results from the geographic concentration of partisan voters.•Partisan gerrymandering produces more Republican districts in Republican-controlled states and more Democratic districts in Democrat-controlled states.•But nationally, the net effect of gerrymandering on the partisan control of Congressional seats is modest.
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.
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”.
The concept of representative democracy presupposes the participation of active citizens. A significant drop in the interest and trust of citizens was observed with the onset of the new millennium, ...not only in voter turnout. However, the Czech president traditionally enjoys quite high support from citizens and leads (except for a few fluctuations) in surveys ranking their trust in politicians. This corresponds to the high interest of voters in participating in the presidential elections, which has gradually increased and, in the last presidential election (2023) in the second round, reached the third-highest level in the history of the independent Czech Republic. The regression analysis results confirm that participation in elections is mainly determined by previous participation; however, a highly personalized election with significant media coverage can also mobilize different types of voters than the general election. Factors of social exclusion such as the rate of distraints and the rate of unemployment retain their negative influence on voter turnout even in the presidential election.
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.
Populist radical right parties are considerably more popular in some areas (neighbourhoods, municipalities, regions) than others. They thrive in some cities, in some smaller towns, and in some rural ...areas, but they are unsuccessful in other cities, small towns, and rural areas. We seek to explain this regional variation by modelling at the individual level how citizens respond to local conditions. We argue that patterns of populist radical right support can be explained by anxiety in the face of social change. However, how social change manifests itself is different in rural and urban areas, so that variations in populist radical right support are rooted in different kinds of conditions. To analyse the effects of these conditions we use unique geo‐referenced survey data from the Netherlands collected among a nationwide sample of 8,000 Dutch respondents. Our analyses demonstrate that the presence of immigrants (and particularly increases therein) can explain why populist radical right parties are more popular in some urban areas than in others, but that it cannot explain variation across rural areas. In these areas, local marginalization is an important predictor of support for populist radical right parties. Hence, to understand the support for the populist radical right, the heterogeneity of its electorate should be recognized.
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.
It is widely acknowledged that geographic data in Ghana and most of Sub-Sahara Africa is patchy, and lack geographic coverage and detail. This has implications for mobility and access to ...socioeconomic, and cultural opportunities which require address and location data typically provided through geocoding. A critical component of geocoding is a reference database to lookup matching address and location information. Accordingly, we investigate the suitability of, and the use of electoral polling stations to build a reference database for geocoding. This was undertaken by mapping their geographic coordinates, analyzing their geographic spread and detail, and outlining the database structure for building the reference database. Using the 2020 electoral polling station data for the Greater North area of Ghana, we found that 93% of the geographic coordinates can be obtained from open data sources. Also, there is high proximity with a nearest neighbor distance of 663 m, a reasonable service area of 4300 m, and a median distance of 3700 m from a community location. The widespread availability, large geographic spread and moderate detail, make polling stations a creditable data source for geocoding. It is recommended the polling station data be augmented with a detailed geographic data like those from landmarks and paratransit service.
PDF
