Here is an annotated bibliography with some electoral geography literature and more sources:

Bloch, M., Buchanan, L., Katz, J., & Quealy, K. (2018, July 26). An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Presidential Election. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/upshot/election-2016-voting-precinct-maps.html#10.95/40.753/-73.982/10008

This map allows users to focus in on specific areas of the country, to see how precincts voted during the 2016 election.  You can put in a zip code to locate certain areas or just click and zoom around the map to get a good idea of how the country voted.  The developers used JavaScript and ArcGIS software to create the map and collaborated with The Upshot to finalize the project. The project began after the 2016 election, as all the data became available and is still an active web page today.  The resulting data from this map illustrates that there are many political bubbles within the country, specifically in ethnic areas, most college areas, and metropolitan areas. These findings are reiterated in some of the literature presented here.

 

Forest, B. (2017). Electoral geography: From mapping votes to representing power. Geography Compass, 12(1). doi:10.1111/gec3.12352

This article discusses inferential electoral geography and how it has largely been eclipsed by other methods and approaches of electoral geography.  It speaks of the recent shift toward inexpensive digital technologies that allow cartographic representations of electoral data in news and social media.  Benjamin Forest states that because of this shift, election mapping has become democratized. He speaks of the origins of electoral geography and the first modern election map of the 1880 presidential vote; the often discussed revival of electoral geography in the 1980’s by Anglo-American geographers: “the task of the political geographer is the identification and interpretation of the sectional manifestations of political issues.”  The advent of the ‘red-blue’ map of the 2000 U.S. presidential election is seemed as cementing the spread of electoral cartography and the association of color with Democrats and Republicans as the two major parties. The idea of the purple vote is also discussed and maps are shown comparing the two ideas of ‘red-blue’ and ‘red-blue-purple.’ A cartogram of the popular vote is also explained. Scatterplots are shown to explain that a party with geographically concentrated support will earn more seats relative to their national vote share.  Redistricting and gerrymandering is discussed in detail by use of a map of congressional districts in North Carolina for the 1992 election.

 

Grofman, B., & Handley, L. (1989). Black Representation: Making Sense of Electoral Geography at Different Levels of Government. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 14(2), 265. doi:10.2307/439760

This article explains how electoral geography helped identify areas where minories (especially black people) are disproportionately represented on local, state, and federal elections.  It shows that there has been a dramatic increase in black representation in the south over the last 15 years and that there are large differences in black electoral success across regions, and that these success rates vary across type of office.  The number of minorities in government continues to be much smaller than those of non minorities. The article features tables informed by electoral geography that illustrate many issues such as, black elected officials as a percentage of all elected officials; black representations in congress by geographic area, and cities with the largest black populations; election methods for U.S. city and county governing boards; and more.  All information is from the 1980 census.

 

Leib, J., & Warf, B. (2016). Revitalizing Electoral Geography. London: Taylor and Francis.

Chapter two of Revitalizing Electoral Geography explores the trends in electoral geography research since 1990.  Leib and Warf state that electoral geography began to rise in a 1988 conference in Los Angeles and a 1990 publication of papers from the conference into a book, Developments in Electoral Geography.  Like Woolstencroft suggests in 1980, ten years later the academy was still having major issues against electoral geography claiming it to be a “methodological obsession.”  The chapter examines how electoral geography has waxed and waned since the publication of the Developments in Electoral Geography  and contemplates trends and theoretical approaches within electoral geography.  An explanation of a database that was created of 224 electoral geography journal articles, dating between 1990 and 2007 in order to address the claims in this chapter is explained in the introduction and utilized throughout.  Demographics of electoral geography writers are also discussed in detail.

 

Louvet, R., Aryal, J., Josselin, D., Marchand-Lagie, C., & Genre-Grandpierre, C. (2016). The polygon overlay problem in electoral geography. Conference Paper. Retrieved from file:///Users/admin/Downloads/spatialaccuracy2016 (1).pdf.

This article talks about an algorithm that tackles the polygon overlay problem in electoral geography before using areal interpolation methods.  It introduces the practice of electoral geography in general terms as “the study of polling results according to their spatial context.” The paper does not propose a new areal interpolation method but moreso a process to reduce areal interpolation error by improving matching between source and target data.  An idea of creating more fitted areal units is identified as useful in the case of electoral geography as well as a combination of areal interpolation with the algorithm discussed. First the article describes study areas and explains why these polling areas could be reaggregated, then the article describes the areal interpolation methods used and how the team measured geometrical precision and interpolation errors.  The implementation of the algorithm is explained and, in closing, the team presents and discusses results “showing how accuracy can be improved by aggregating and reducing precision.”

 

Muehlenhaus, I. (2019). Ways to Show Data. In World Geography: Understanding a Changing World. Retrieved from https://worldgeography.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1847963

This article explains the terminology and practices Geographers use to create interesting and informative maps.  It speaks of relative and absolute location; relative being the common way we describe areas: “I live about three blocks down”, and absolute being the longitude and latitude for a specific place.  Other aspects of location are discussed such as site and situation. Site refers to the location’s environment, where things like access to water, transportation, and climate come into play. Situations refer to the entwinement of a location with it surroundings.  There are many different situations and sites for locations.

The article explains the difficulties in representing the Earth in an accurate manner.  Two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional globes are references for their pros and cons.  Muehlenhas claims that globes are the most accurate way to see the world, though they are often lacking in deeper information about sites and situations.  Google Earth has relieved some of the issues for geographers in relation to globes. Two-dimensional maps are more compact and usable than globes but distort the surface of the Earth, this practice of taking a three-dimensional map and representing it as a flat surface is called “projecting.”

The Mercator, named after famous geographer Gerard Mercator, is the projection used by many Web Mapping Software such as Google Maps, Bing, and MapQuest.  Though the projection distorts the landmass and countries appear larger than they are, distorting the area of land masses, The Mercator preserves shapes. “Compromise” projects do not preserve anything as they distort shape, size, distance, etc., though they distort in a way that makes the map look more accurate and are popular because they resemble Earth as a globe.

 

Rodrigues-Silveira, R. (2017). Mapping politics: How mode of production counts in electoral geography. doi:10.1016/0962-6298(95)00078-x

The article shows some of the mapping applications in R, using electoral geography as a core example–using functions to compare and understand voting behavior.  The first function explored is the electoral completion map, a choropleth map “compares the performance of two political parties over two elections and converts the results in a diverging color scheme from the best to the worst results for each party,” corresponding to an electoral volatility map. The maps in this article explore electoral results between 1998 and 2002, 2002 and 2006, and 2010 and 2014 in Brazilian municipalities for the two main parties.  It examines a quadrant map, which allows for representing correlations and the spatial association of two variables; a scatterplot; a proportional symbol map; and a high low map which allows inspection of the endurance of certain patterns over broader series of time or multiple indicators. Another common mapping application is a Kernel Density Map, or Hot-Spot Map, used to identify areas of high levels of concentration of events, or hot-spots. The last mapping example is a flow map.

 

Scribner, H. (2018, July 27). Do you live in a political bubble? This New York Times interactive map shows 2016 election voting habits for Utah and beyond. Retrieved from https://goo.gl/evQiEG

This article examines the political atmosphere in Utah, in conjunction with the extremely detailed map of the 2016 election, and concludes similar ideas of others that cities, ethnic areas, and college areas were mostly blue.  While the state of Utah was overwhelmingly red, when zoomed in there were a few areas where blue was solid.

 

Small, A. (2017, April 03). Here’s the U.S. Presidential Election, Mapped by Precinct. Retrieved from https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/is-this-the-ultimate-2016-presidential-election-map/521622/

This article discusses the person behind the extremely detailed map of the 2016 election, Ryne Rhola.  Described as a “scrappy amateaur cartographer”, Rhola was a fourth year Ph.D. student in Economics at Washington State University, when he created this map.  He had been building maps for a very long time—since high school. In 2008 he began building maps with MS Paint.

The article discusses the hardships of compiling precinct data, as it is not as easy as the county level data.  Rhola had to sometimes track down this data by calling county clerks and Secretaries of State. He also had to file a Freedom of Information Act to request the results in New York and New Jersey.

 

Staff, T. U. (2018, July 26). Political Bubbles and Hidden Diversity: Highlights From a Very Detailed Map of the 2016 Election. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/25/upshot/precinct-map-highlights.html

This article explains the nuance of the Extremely Detailed map of the 2016 election, the unexpected results, and the very large amount of red (Trump voters).  It explains that the map gives a measure of how the area around a precinct compares with other areas. There is also an option to see how long it would take to drive to the nearest precinct that voted for the other candidate of a major party.  “By these measures, for example, the area around the Times headquarters in Manhattan had a higher share of Clinton voters than 96 percent of the country, and the nearest Trump precinct, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a 36-minute drive away.”

The article talks about voting enclaves having to do with religious, ethnic, and educational aspects of voters.  Showing the bubbles of blue in most college campuses and ethnic areas; and the bubbles of red from most Evangelical areas.  It explores the voting trends of the Deep South, city limits, and metropolitan areas.

 

Takenaga, L. (2018, November 04). How The Times Makes Those Addictive Election Maps. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/reader-center/how-we-cover-elections-interactive-maps.html

This article explains who and what is behind the New York Times interactive maps.  A core team of 10 people use interactive web maps through JavaScript, which has become the dominant technology for making interactive maps.  In addition to writing their own JavaScript code, the team also uses software libraries so as not to build everything from scratch. The Times uses open-source libraries created by other developers around the world and have created libraries themselves.

The article talks about some of the obstacles of creating electoral geography maps such as, the troubles of locating precinct map shapes and figuring out how different devices will view the map and catering to those multiple devices.  The New York Times frequently collaborates with different places in the newsroom and The Upshot to create their maps.  The article concludes with the prospect of The Times planning to collect data about the upcoming 2020 election and to take part in more international work.

 

Woolstencroft, R. (1980). Electoral Geography. International Political Science Review, 1(4), 540-560. doi:10.1177/019251218000100407

This article begins with an explanation of how electoral geography has gotten to where it is today.  Written in 1980, the author contemplates the idea of ‘space’ as an added discipline to political geography.  As a subfield of political geography, electoral geography had increased research activity rapidly since World War II.  Academics argue that geographical relevance is unproved while others argue that geography is capable of providing “an entirely new dimension to the study of elections.”  Woolstencroft provides a statement of the method of electoral geography of the time: “Maps of the distribution of election results and various socioeconomic characteristics are produced and then compared to ascertain relationships.”  This explanation in 1980 is relevant to the practice today. “The object of this research [is] to delineate political regions and to ascertain degrees of cohesiveness.”