ABSTRACT
In the Geography of Elections (Taylor and Johnston, 1979) we attempted to overcome the uncoordinated nature of much electoral geography research by setting our study within the social cleavage theory of Stein Rokkan (1970). This volume continues in that tradition. There is an important limitation to this approach, however, as some reviewers pointed out The contents of the Geography of Elections had a huge geographical bias towards the ‘First World’. This volume is equally susceptible to such criticism. Our parochialism is not due to a dearth of elections outside our First World since there have been literally hundreds of such elections over recent decades. But electoral geographers have chosen, by and large, not to study these particular elections. It is the contention of this chapter that this limitation of coverage has been a prime cause of the poverty of theoretical development in our sub-discipline: we need to extend the world of electoral geography.
