Mapping politics: how context counts in electoral geography

Electoral geography, indeed political geography in general, has been largely concerned with mapping distributions which are then ‘explained’ by non-spatial factors. To the extent that spatial context itself has counted, it has been largely in terms of locality or neighborhood effects which are presumed to work against ‘larger’ or ‘wider’ social processes. This paper takes issue with conventional mapping and locality-effect accounts of context on the ground that each involves a radical ontological separation of space and society that cannot be sustained. A concept of context-as-place is elaborated which abandons the identification of context with a single (local) geographical scale and provides a way of bridging the gap between abstract sociological and concrete geographical analysis. The potential of the concept is explored in a series of analyses of Italian electoral geography over the period 1947–1994.