ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the liberal democracy in combination with social democracy that has provided the ideal state form for resisting the communist threat to the capitalist world-economy. The broader theoretical framework of world-systems analysis enables us to interpret our geographical bias and understand what we have been studying as part of wider political world. The chapter describes the world political scene and argues that they have become a viable form of state only when combined with social democracy and its politics of redistribution. This provides an explanation for the geography of liberal democracies with its concentration in the rich core zone of the world-economy. The First World bias of electoral geography is a side-effect of this pattern. Secondly it rediscovers the problematic nature of liberal democracy. Finally, the chapter provides a theoretical framework that can cope with elections in both liberal democracies and other political contexts. The particular outcome, the liberal-social-democratic (LSD) state, represents an all-round triumph.
