Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Electoral geography
Summary
Electoral geography is the analysis of the methods, the behavior, and the results of elections in the context of geographic space and using geographical techniques. Specifically, it is an examination of the dual interaction in which geographical affect the political decisions, and the geographical structure of the election system affects electoral results. The purpose of the analysis is to identify and understand driving factors and the electoral characteristics of territories in a broad and integrative manner.
Elections
Elections serve as the central political expression and exercise of power within democratic states, and conducting elections in democracies requires the translation of the political decisions of the distributed voting public into resulting “seat” representation of the various constituencies, except in the cases of Israel and the Netherlands which each have only a single constituency.
It is philosophically accepted that in a democracy, each vote is equally valid amongst all other votes and thus each eligible voter casts only one equally valued vote. However, disproportionality and bias towards specific voting groups arise in the construction of artificial constituency boundaries in that political parties and policies are unevenly and inaccurately represented in the aggregate results amongst the electoral regions when compared to the popular vote.
Electoral district
The territorial unit with boundary distinctions in representative elections is commonly termed the constituency, district, or precinct, and serves as both a region for the tabulation and study of the electoral result. These boundaries are defined in various methods, which are unique to each state, and can cause alterations or skewing of aggregate vote results and by extension the true decision of the electorate.
Electoral geographers require the knowledge of the local and statewide laws and procedures for conducting elections, though it has been claimed that it is not within their purview to attempt to correct any observed flaws.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.