Electoral Geography Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Electoral geography is the presentation and analysis of geographic information related to elections. Electoral geography can be both descriptive and analytical. Political scientists can use geographic units to display differences in political behavior (such as election results presented on a map of the states), and they can use geographic information to test theories about election behavior. Tools used can range from simple color-coded maps to computerized geographic information systems.

Elections everywhere in the world take place in a geographically definable space, and electoral geography is about how that space affects and responds to elections and the interests, incentives, and results they create. At the simplest level, elections take place in nations. Since national elections are contests that determine political outcomes for the geographically defined nation, summary electoral information can be displayed on a map. For example, a map could be constructed that shows the number of female elected representatives in each of the countries in Latin America or that shows the percentage of support for European Union membership in referenda in various countries in Europe.

Geography at the subnational level can also be used to present electoral information. Presenting candidate support by region, federal districts or states, or administrative governmental units can show where a candidate’s support lies as well as suggest reasons for candidate success or failure. Such presentations can rely on states to show where a presidential candidate’s support lies, or they can rely on smaller units such as counties or even voting precincts to display more detailed variations in candidate support, perhaps demonstrating that a candidate generates support more effectively in cities than in rural areas.

Analyzing Electoral Geographic Units

As suggested above, political science researchers are often interested in the display of electoral information by geographic units, but they are also interested in making inferences from geographically referenced information. Knowing that a candidate does well in Western states might be interesting, but it is more interesting if that finding has implications for theories of electoral behavior. It is possible, for example, to predict that candidates will do well in the West if they use particular campaign strategies. Finding predicted spatial patterns related to this theory would tell us more about elections than one particular candidate’s support in an area and could contribute to the understanding of electoral behavior more generally.

It should not always be assumed that governmental subunits are fixed in the analysis of electoral information. Many subunits are created as a result of political processes, some with the intent of having an effect on elections. Legislative electoral districts, for example, determine which voters participate in which particular elections for legislative office. Districts can be drawn in such a way that one group is advantaged over another. In the United States, extreme cases of the geographic manipulation of electoral districts are often called “gerrymanders,” after a nineteenth-century Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) whose party was thought to benefit from a famous instance of what is now known as gerrymandering. The manipulation of electoral districts is not, however, exclusively a U.S. phenomenon. In a 2008 book chapter, for example, Alonso Lujambio and Horacio Vives document how Mexican electoral districts have been manipulated and how the process has been reformed to guard against gerrymandering. Election districts, then, are often studied by political scientists to determine the extent to which they influence election outcomes. Other geographic units can be drawn with different consequences for elections. City boundaries, for example, can expand to include certain populations, which can affect the outcomes of subsequent municipal elections.

Electoral Boundaries

Electoral boundaries can influence electoral outcomes in several ways. Candidates running for political office, for example, can be expected to pay close attention to the geography of their districts and to structure their behavior to accommodate the geographic realities of their districts. In Home Style (1978), political scientist Richard Fenno notes that candidate behavior depends to a great deal on the layout of election districts. Sprawling, rural districts demand a different sort of attention than do geographically smaller urban districts. Suburban districts require different sets of candidate behaviors than do districts made up of older, more established communities.

Voters also can be expected to react to electoral boundaries. Some of these reactions may follow from candidate behaviors, but several scholars suggest that boundaries themselves can influence the attitudes and behavior of voters. Boundaries can conform to other geographic structures in a voter’s environment, which in a 1985 article, Bernard Grofman argues gives the voter the ability to “think about” the district. John H. Ely (1997) expects that voters can recognize when a district has been drawn to the advantage of one group and disadvantage of another, which can affect the voter’s interest in participating in the election. In a 2005 article, Richard N. Engstrom finds that electoral district boundaries have an effect on voters’ ability to identify the candidates running for office in their districts, depending on the degree to which the electoral districts conform to the location of local media markets.

The extent to which the drawing of electoral boundaries can influence elections has led many who study legislative redistricting to conclude that rules should be put into place to regulate those who draw electoral boundaries. Some states enforce what are called “traditional districting principles” that require districts to be geographically compact and contiguous and to contain preexisting political communities. These requirements have led those who study electoral geography to construct measures of these concepts. Different U.S. states have adopted different districting rules, many of which draw from the concept of traditional districting principles.

An alternative to establishing redistricting rules is to create politically neutral (or at least balanced) boundary commissions, which would presumably draw boundaries that are electorally unbiased. Boundary commissions are commonly used in democracies around the world to determine the geographic configuration of election districts. Boundary commissions exist in the United States, but almost always as part of a system to accommodate the failure of a state legislature to draw the districts.

The inclusion of geographic information in the study of elections is an important tool in political science’s efforts to understand elections and electoral behavior. Although the display of information on maps is a straightforward approach, modern geographic information system technology gives researchers the ability to take an analysis further. The distance between voters and public resources, or the density of populations in different parts of election districts could well have implications for how citizens vote, and geographic information system technology can assess just this sort of information.

Bibliography:

Ely, John H. “Standing to Challenge Pro-minority Gerrymanders.” Harvard Law Review 111, no. 2 (1997): 576–595.
Engstrom, Richard N. “District Geography and Voters.” In Redistricting in the New Millennium, edited by Peter Galderisi. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005.
Fenno, Richard. Home Style. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.
Grofman, Bernard. “Criteria for Districting: A Social Science Perspective.” UCLA Law Review 33 (1985): 77–184.
Lujambio, Alonso, and Horacio Vives. “From Politics to Technicality: Mexican Redistricting in Historical Perspective.” In Redistricting in Comparative Perspective, edited by Bernard Grofman and Lisa Handley. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.
McDonald, Michael P. “A Comparative Analysis of Redistricting Institutions in the United States, 2001–2002.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 4, no. 4 (2004): 371–395.
Niemi, Richard, Bernard Grofman, Carl Carlucci, and Thomas Hofeller. “Measuring Compactness and the Role of a Compactness Standard in a Test for Partisan and Racial Gerrymandering.” Journal of Politics 53 (1991): 1155–1179.