ABSTRACT
The geography of voting involves mapping the voting data des cribed in the last chapter in order to try and understand the pat terns revealed. There are two different ways of doing this. Some studies concentrate on the spatial pattern of the voting on the map; others attempt to compare the voting map with maps of other phenomena. The Siegfried study of voting in Ardeche in Chapter 1 is an elementary example of the latter approach. Clearly, the second type of study may build upon, and develop from, the first approach. In this chapter we shall deal with the patterns of votes per se, and in the next one with the various correlates of the voting maps. Before we consider these maps, however, we need to understand what the votes themselves represent. That is the subject matter of the first half of this chapter. Until recent years, both types of study have lacked a general
theoretical framework. This has meant that numerous empirical studies have remained isolated from each other. Studies have not usually been consistently linked together even within a single country, while Comparisons between countries have rarely been attempted. Hence, despite the early studies of Siegfried and others, the geography of voting has lagged far behind survey analyses in comparative voting studies. Fortunately this situation seems, at last, to be coming to an end, largely through the historical and ecological studies of Stein Rokkan and his associates. We report on Rokkan’s framework for comparative election studies in this chapter.
