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James Gimpel, University of Maryland- College Park
To be sure, the most visible red vs. blue differences in party support and voter turnout can largely be explained by variations in the composition of local populations. Income, race and ethnicity, education, generation or age cohort, and religious confession, have all been leading contenders in recent years. But the geographic clustering of like-minded voters may indicate far more than the presence or absence of particular social groups at these locations. Two groups of blue-collar workers with similar background traits, but from two different geographic settings, may vary widely in their political behavior. These differences may be accounted for by local effects, sometimes called "neighborhood effects," whereby otherwise disparate voters act similarly because they live at the same location and have therefore been influenced by the same local forces, including each other. In the practical world of campaign politics, much is at stake in the clear understanding of the geographic distribution of voter support. Both federalism and the Electoral College turn states and regions into distinct electoral battlegrounds, each with their own political, economic and demographic characteristics, or "cultures." To understand how to win The electoral of the 2004 election followed the pattern of 2000. The Southern states went heavily Republican. President Bush did poorly on the While states must be targeted for purposes of the Electoral College, major campaigns realize that within states there is critical variation that must be explored and understood. Most observers now recognize that the "red" vs. "blue" Election Night maps really mask an urban-rural divide within states--a gap that has increased in recent years according to a range of definitions. In 2004, the difference in Democratic support between the most and least populous counties in the nation exceeded 25 points. Party strategists are alarmed by this widening urban-rural gap, particularly on the Democratic side. Although on their own, the nation's tiniest burgs do not amount to much, collectively they do cast enough votes to anchor the Electoral College to the Republican candidate in many states. In the wake of the 2004 election, newly elected DNC chair Howard Dean is said to have urged his party's elites to study and address their "rural problem." Many political geographers are involved in the study of redistricting, and this is often what non-experts think of first when they think about the intersection of political science and geography. Geographic dispersion or concentration is but one characteristic of an electorate, but it is a very important one in a nation where political representation is geographically based. As important as it is, political geographers working within the field today have moved far beyond the study of redistricting. Social scientists interested in change over time are examining how geographies have morphed, tracing these alterations to a series of sources, including migration, immigration, generational turnover, the surge and decline of who is mobilized to vote, and, less frequently, political conversion. Survey researchers are busy examining voters' local interactions with other voters within and across neighborhoods to understand the micro-foundations of the geographic patterns we observe on maps. Students of campaign politics are at work scrutinizing the decisions candidates make in targeting some locations for visits and advertising buys while ignoring others. Those interested in political institutions have noted interesting diffusion effects across nearby jurisdictions that suggest processes of geographic influence are at work. New methods for conducting geographically-related research are being developed across several social science fields, greatly aided by advances in computer and software technology. It is fair to say that the study of political geography is only just beginning, with new insights and understandings mounting with every new conference paper as researchers plow untilled fields, and use new resources and ideas to reconsider previous findings. James Gimpel is professor of government at the University of Maryland-College Park. He can be reached at jgimpel@gvpt.umd.edu and 301-405-7929. Recent Publications on the Geography of American Politics  Gimpel, James, Irwin L. Morris and David R. Armstrong. 2004. "Turnout and the Local Age Distribution: Examining Political Participation Across Space and Time," Political Geography 23: 1: 71-95. Nadeau, R., R.G. Neimi, H.W. Stanley, and J.F. Godbout. 2004. "Class, Party and South/Non-South Differences." American Politics Research 32:1 (January): 52-67. Gimpel, James, J. Celeste Lay, and Jason E. Schuknecht. 2003. Cultivating Democracy: Civic Environments and Political Socialization in America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Gimpel, James and Jason E. Schuknecht. 2003. Patchwork Nation: Sectionalism and Political Change in American Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Hayward, Clarissa Rile. 2003. "The Difference States Make: Democracy, Identity, and the American City," American Political Science Review 97:4 (November):501-514. Lublin, David, and D. Stephen Voss. 2003. "The Missing Middle: Why Median-Voter Theory Can't Save Democrats from Singing the Boll-Weevil Blues," Journal of Politics 65:1 (February). Baybeck, Henry and Robert Huckfeldt. 2002. "Urban Contexts, Spatially Dispersed Networks, and the Diffusion of Political Information." Political Geography 21:2 (February): 195-220. Black, Merle and Earl Black. 2002. The Rise of Southern Republicans. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Gimpel, James and Jason Schuknecht. 2002. "Reconsidering Regionalism in American State Politics." State Politics and Policy Quarterly 2:4 (Winter): 325-352. Gimpel, James and Jason Schuknecht. 2001. "Interstate Migration and Electoral Politics," Journal of Politics 62: 1: 207-231. Voss, D. Stephen. 2001. "Huddled Masses or Immigrant Menace? The Black Belt Hypothesis Did Not Emigrate." American Review of Politics 22: (Summer):217-32. |
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