Research on liberal-representative democracy in geography has focused on two areas: electoral geographies and geographies of democratization. Thinkers in this tradition have focused considerable attention on the geographical organization of democratic politics in complex, spatially extensive territories. This assumes that democracy is framed by bounded territories, involving a nested hierarchy of scales contained within the nation-state. Modern democratic theory has developed around a specific geographical imagination. Both these fields of research – political science and political theory – tend to assume a given spatial formation of democracy, consisting of territorialized national states, internally divided in some way or another. There is also a substantial body of liberal political theory associated with the justification of institutions of liberal democracy, a body of work that often provides key critical insights into the operations of actually existing liberal democracies. There is an enormous field of literature, largely in political science, devoted to examining the conditions under which such liberal democratic institutions develop, as well as to particular aspects of these systems, including political parties, elections, voting behavior, citizenship, and the media. Liberal-representative democracy is usually legitimated by appealing to the basis of politics in the preferences and liberties of private individuals recognized as equal citizens under the rule of law. This is a model unevenly developed in the post-Enlightenment West, and widely emulated and/or imposed in other parts of the world.
#Voting blocs and behaviors free#
Liberal democracy is usually taken to refer to forms of institutionalized popular representation, involving periodic mass election of representatives to authoritative legislatures (and in many cases of executive heads of state), under conditions of free speech and association. Low, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009 Geographies of Liberal Democracy This is particularly evident in countries such as Italy (with a north–south split) and Belgium (with an entrenched linguistic division) where some political parties have an explicit subnational focus.Ĭ. More broadly the extent to which some parties have a broad national appeal while others have a more local or regional support is also of interest. In Worcestershire in England, the election of an independent MP campaigning against the downgrading of a local hospital in UK elections in 20 is an example of the potential impact of local factors. Ron Johnston and colleagues have examined the shifting geographies of voting in the United Kingdom where broader national trends intersect with more local factors. Events such as the closure of a local industry or the reputation of a candidate and her family in an area may be strong determinants of voting behavior. There are neighborhood or locality influences which may reinforce or override other factors. Spatial analysis of voting patterns has revealed that voting behavior is not just a function of party allegiance and ideological disposition. It is perhaps the study of voting behavior where geographers have raised the most interesting questions. However, population changes may render this difficult and political parties may have vested interests in maintaining levels of over- or under-representation in certain cases.
Ideally electoral boundaries should be constructed in such a way as to ensure roughly equal numbers of voters. Geographies of representation examine such things as the nature of electoral systems (e.g., first past the post or proportional representation), the existence of centralized or federalized systems, and the construction of electoral boundaries and associated issues such as gerrymandering. The first explores the ways in which power is transferred, whether through elections or through more ‘irregular’ processes such as a military coup. These are the geographies of elections (forms of transfer of power), of representation (types of electoral system), and of voting (spatial patterns of voting behavior). Within the geographical study of elections three broad concerns can be identified. Probably the strand within political geography which most overtly followed a quantitative approach has been electoral geography. Storey, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009 Electoral Geography
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