The political geography of democracy is analysed through, primarily, a world-systems framework. The geography of elections and their tendency to be features of the core of the capitalist world-economy is noted, requiring a cautionary approach to current proclamations of a new wave of democratization. A world-systems explanation of the core-periphery geography of elections explains the different political geography of elections in both core and periphery. Liberal democracy is treated as a particular political process that developed through conflicts specifically in core countries from the nineteenth century to the present. In contrast, elections in the periphery are defined as ‘the politics of failure’. Parties in the periphery are unable to construct lasting and viable constituencies of support because of the lack of resources that parties in power can award to supporters. Democracy is by no means a perfect mechanism for offering representation to citizens. Rather it is a negotiated form of politics that offers better representation and access to the state for some groups relative to others; the concepts of ‘the politics of power’ and ‘the politics of support’ explain the incongruity between elite interests and the geography of voting. Elections are a form of politics that, though still an expression of power, tend to provide a better politics of democracy in the core than the periphery. Hence, it is not surprising that other types of politics are mobilized as part of citizenship, or democratic, rights. Hence, a political geography of social movements is introduced. Social movements provide interesting political geographies as they are not so tied to the territorial limits of states. Though built within particular place-specific contexts, social movements engage in a politics of scale that has the potential to engage the scale of reality rather than being trapped in the state, the scale of ideology.