Strange-Mapping Political Culture with Election Results

I have long felt that mapping political cultural geography by using election results is a key element of political science that has long been ignored. Academia seems to dismiss it as too simple, and pundits tend to rely on it as the holy grail in explaining everything (remember the nonsense about “Red” states v.s. “Blue” states in the United States over the past decade?) That means that bloggers get to do most of the real analysis, and perhaps the best work on this has been done by Strange Maps — the entire set of their geographic reviews are worth noting once again, what with a recent map showing the regional breakdown of election results in Denmark.
* The 2007 presidential election in France saw votes for the Socialist candidate in the west, particularly the southwest, and it was suggested that this reflected the region’s long tradition of dissent previously seen as the Cathar heresy in the Middle Ages, Huguenot protestantism thereafter, and anticlericalism, antimonarchism and eventually modern socialism.
* The 2004 election in Ukraine saw a very stark divide between the pro-European western half of the country voted for Yushchenko, the pro-Russian eastern half for Yanukovich, along dividing lines that closely reflected the borders of the Kievan Rus, the medieval Slavic ancestors of Russia and Ukraine.
* The 2007 legislative elections in Poland showed that, despite massive displacements of Poles, Germans and others peoples in the 20th century, the electoral results nevertheless eerily correspond with an old imperial border that has been erased from history since 1918.
* Recent local elections in Denmark suggest that, despite the harmonization of historic linguistic divides in Denmark, a cultural divide remains that is reflected in election results.
* In the American South, there remains a strong correlation between areas with high cotton production in the 1860s to the counties that voted for Obama in the 2008 presidential election — or as the author notes, they went from picking cotton to picking presidents!