Polotics...

Political geography is the differences between people in there belief in government over a broad range of space. You can look at political views in many different scalar quantities. You can look at and analyze voting and policy matters patterns of people anywhere from one voting district to Carson County to the State of Nevada or on the nation as a whole. Political geography looks at people and their government on different scales, political cartography maps people and their government at a multitude of scales. The basis of political cartography is voting, be it on a specific candidate or on a policy or on a party, or a party’s platform, voting is the primary form of political mapping. Mapping voting patterns.

By mapping these patterns we can see where people are and what there views on everything are. Based on that analysis we can then make deductions about other things on the populous. If, for example, we see and intensely high number of republican voters in an area we may deduce an influx of a certain type of person from that area, and then we can deduce why that area has those types of people. For example, Douglas county Nevada voted republican for pretty much every possible ballot question and office last election. I know from talking with such people that most ranchers are republican. So based on the land use and the available land in Douglas county I would say it has a higher percentage of ranchers than say lawyers or bankers.

Political cartography is a great way to map the U.S. and each state and discover what people believe in each of those regions. You can tell California is more liberal than Nevada based on its voting patterns. Etc.

Michael F. Goodchild does an excellent job in telling of how GIS and politics are affected by each other in his article Just the Facts, Political Geography Quarterly, 10(4): 335-449. This article helps explain many of the fallacies of GIS and its applications and gives a brief overview of political geography.

Basically political cartography maps out how people think about government. This can then indicate how people think in general. This is a great help to human and cultural geographers who are trying to map why people are where and who is where they are. It has become another tool in the democratic world to help indicate where who is and why.

In Vladimir Kolossov's article "American geography and the rise of political geography in Russia". Kolossov explains how political geography and political cartography didn’t exist when the communist government was in control, but as the soviet block fell apart and a democratic system was put into place American geographers and emerging Russian geographers began to map out the new system. This excited American geographers because it enabled them to see how people moved, voted and thought based on where they were from the beginning of the new system. American and Russian geographers monitored and mapped voting patterns and came to many conclusions. The point of the matter being, some governmental systems simply are not good environments for certain science fields. Apparently communism is bad for political geography. But this also makes me think, if this is the case, what sciences or thought process are we missing being democratic? Capitalistic? What could we think about without such governmental controls? I believe it would have mostly to do with people, since that is what government controls, people. So I think government affects the sciences of the people; psychology, sociology, anthropology and of course human geography. But governmental controls could are found that reduce the productivity of biologists, chemists, geneticist, and quite a number of other fields. They do this because the government deems their research unethical. I read an article last week about a research project at Oregon State that was modifying the DNA of rams which would only mount other rams. They were trying to modify the genetic material enough to encourage the rams to mount sheep. This was halted by the governing body because it was encouraging research on gays and could have a negative reaction from the gay community.

Political cartography will live as long as there is a decent electoral body to map. If nobody votes, if nothing is passed, if no issues present themselves before congress, then political cartography will die.

Citation:
Kolossov, Vladimir. 2004. “American geography and the rise of political geography in Russia” GeoJournal 59: 59 – 62.