Explanation of Dominant Approaches in Electoral Geography

As one of the oldest and the most dynamic branches of political geography, Electoral geography has experienced ups and downs more than other branches of political geography. The objective ontology of the phenomenon of vote and its spatial distribution have linked this branch to spatial approach so that a large proportion of works in the area of Electoral geography have been written based on this approach. With the fall of positivism, the researches of Electoral geography also decreased. On the other hand, domination of descriptive, case, and applied studies without a robust theoretical and philosophical basis on theoretical and basic writings, is the main deficiency of Electoral geography in International and Iranian level. The aim of the present theoretical-fundamental study was to explain the dominant theoretical approaches in Electoral geography.

The Electoral geography can be explored in five theoretical approaches. The first approach is the traditional approach that deals with the spatial patterns of voting in the form of a regional school and human-environment relations. The second one is a spatial-behavioral approach that examines the voting behavior according to the measurement and analysis of key spatial variables based on the spatial school. The third approach is a radical approach that base on radical geography school deals with the theoretical articulation and revealing mechanisms that form Electoral processes. The fourth approach is a location-based approach that focuses on the impact of geographic-historical context on electoral behavior on the basis of the humanistic geography school and structuration theory. And, the fifth approach is a critical approach that criticizes the current approaches to the study of electoral geography and the presesentation of alternative readerships of electoral geography based on schools such as feminism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism.