Electoral Geography, Political Behavior and Public Opinion
This chapter reviews how political identities and opinions are unevenly distributed across space, explores the roles of individual and contextual factors in electoral geography, and discusses the challenges of inferring causal effects in a multi-level world.
Why It Matters
The publication begins with a motivating question: Are geographic concentrations of individual actors, as displayed in maps of voters’ political support for political parties, policy positions, or behaviors, anything more than the composition of individual characteristics that describe them? Does social influence have a geographically constrained component?
Its central contribution is to show that this chapter reviews how political identities and opinions are unevenly distributed across space, explores the roles of individual and contextual factors in electoral geography, and discusses the challenges of inferring causal effects in a multi-level world.
It matters because the findings connect institutional choices to the way authority, public responsibility, and political behavior are experienced in practice.
Key Findings
- Political identities and opinions are unevenly distributed across space, reflecting both individual characteristics and contextual effects.
- Social influence has a geographic component; proximity and local context matter for political behavior and opinion formation.
- Population size and density affect social outcomes beyond individual composition, influencing trust, social pressure, and traditionalism.
- Isolation, whether by distance or barriers, can reinforce distinct political identities and sometimes protect communities from outside influences.
- Causal inference in political geography is challenging due to issues like selection effects, measurement limitations, and the inability to randomly assign environments, but new data and experimental designs are improving research.
Research Design
- Design
- Chapter
- Geography
- Global, with examples from the United States, Canada, India, Switzerland, and other countries.
- Unit of Analysis
- Individuals and geographic units (e.g., precincts, counties, regions, states)
- Methods
- Review of literature across political science, sociology, psychology, economics, and related fields.; Discussion of observational and experimental research designs, including field experiments and quasi-experiments.; Synthesis of findings from studies using survey data, spatial analysis, and network analysis.
Full Abstract
Politically relevant identities and opinions about politics and government are neither randomly nor evenly distributed across space. The task of social scientists studying electoral geography is to understand why. Explanations go to individual characteristics, the characteristics of the settings where they live out their lives, or interesting interactions of the two. Moreover, social influence apparently has a physical and geographic component in the sense that proximity matters. Although people can form more contacts over longer distances than in the past, that does not seem to have diminished the greater weight placed on contacts close-by, pointing to the sustained coincidence of social and geographic space. Size and density of settlement also matter over and above compositional effects, continuing to account for many negative social outcomes. The chapter closes with the consideration of challenges to social scientific inference posed by the effort to account for the experience of a living in a multi-level world.
Citation
In Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022, pp. 224-240.
- Venue
- Handbook on Politics and Public Opinion, Edward Elgar Publishing