ABSTRACT
Great Britain has a well-established electoral geography. Using the terminology developed by Key (1955) for the study of American elections, this has produced a long series of 'normal' elections, with none that can be identified as 'deviating', let alone 'critical'. Once established, the geography has remained largely stable in a relative sense, though not in an absolute one: the electoral map is similar to a topographic surface whose relative morphology remains constant but whose elevation changes (occasional periods of uplift punctuated by depression, and sometimes of tilting too). The 1997 general election continued that overall sequence, though with some interesting variations which point to the possible beginning of a new era of micro-geography within the same overall pattern. We illustrate that here by decomposing the map into three separate spatial scales - regional, interconstituency and local.
