Democracy

Electoral Geographies of Liberal-Representative Democracy

Liberal democracy refers to forms of institutionalized popular representation, involving periodic mass election of representatives to authoritative legislatures, under conditions of free speech and association. This model of democracy is unevenly developed in the West and is often presented as the ideal to be emulated throughout the world. Electoral geography focuses on how the mechanisms of representative politics are spatially organized in liberal democracies. This field maps the spatial distribution of votes, explains the context-specific factors affecting voting behavior, and explains how the spatial organization of electoral systems affects how votes are translated into representative majorities in liberal democracies. Research on electoral processes has also broadened out to include the geographies of campaigning, party formation, and political communication. It has also focused on the processes of democratization. The so-called diffusion of democracy as a global form of governance since the late 1980s has followed in the wake of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, political transitions away from authoritarianism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and the application of norms of democratic governance in the geopolitics of Western international financial policy, trade negotiations, and military engagements. Geographers have investigated whether the adoption of democratic forms of governance can be accounted for by specifically geographical factors. They have also critically assessed the theoretical assumptions and the practical devices through which liberal forms of electoral democracy have been circulated as the global norm.

Critical Geographies of Democracy

Democracy has only recently become an explicit object of concern in critical human geography. Recent work in this tradition searches for the signs of alternative understandings of radical democracy in the fractures and margins of liberal-representative polities. This work defines democracy as more than a set of procedures for legitimizing the decisions of centralized bureaucracies and holding elected representatives accountable. Radical democracy is understood to be a process of ongoing contestation, in which the objects and subjects of politics are constantly redefined. Radical democracy holds [Page 706]to an alternative sense of “democratization,” understood not as the geographical diffusion of established norms of democracy but as the deepening of democratic impulses and their extension of new arenas of everyday life. Radical democracy also opens up to scrutiny the role of all sorts of social and cultural practices in sustaining or undermining a broader democratic culture through their contribution to the quality of the public sphere.

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