Revitalizing electoral geography / edited by Barney Warf and Jonathan Leib.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: Part I Conceptual Foundations: Introduction, Barney Warf and Jonathan Leib; On the shores of the 'moribund backwater'?: trends in electoral geography research since 1990, Jonathan Leib and Nicholas Quinton. Part II Electoral Geography Outside of the US: Electoral systems, geography, and political behaviour: United Kingdom examples, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie; Spatial regression for electoral studies: the case of the Italian Lega Nord, Michael Shin and John Agnew; Elections and cultural political economy: the political geography of the Bloque Nacionalista Galego in the Galicia autonomous community, Erinn P. Nicley; Place, identity, and Taiwan's presidential elections, 1996{u2013}2008, Daniel McGowin; The power of definition: the Puerto Rican diaspora and the Island's status referenda, Luis D. Sánchez-Ayala. Part III Electoral Geography in the US: Class, ethnicity, religion and place in the 2008 US Presidential election, Barney Warf; The emerging geography of how Americans cast their ballots, Toby Moore; The 2008 US Presidential primary elections in geographic perspective, Fred M. Shelley and Heather Hollen; Electoral alignments and place-based cleavages in statewide votes in Alabama, Nicholas Quinton and Gerald R. Webster; Sexual politics and the Sunshine State: electoral geographies of Florida's Marriage Protection Amendment, Thomas Chapman; Index.

Electoral Geography, the analysis of spatial patterns of voting, is undergoing a renaissance with new methodological advances, theoretical shifts and changes in the political landscape. Integrating new conceptual approaches with a broad array of case studies from the USA, Europe and Asia, this volume examines key questions in electoral geography: How has electoral geography changed since the 1980s when the last wave of works in this sub discipline appeared? In what ways does contemporary scholarship in social theory inform the analysis of elections and their spatial patterns? How has electoral geography been reconfigured by social and technological changes and those that shape the voting process itself? How can the comparative analysis of elections inform the field? In addressing these issues, the volume moves electoral geography beyond its traditional, empiricist focus on the United States to engage with contemporary theoretical developments and to outline the myriad theoretical, conceptual and methodological perspectives and applications that together are ushering in electoral geography's revitalization. The result is a broader, comparative analysis of how elections reflect and in turn shape social and spatial relations.