Effect of Physical and Human Geographical Features on the Results of Elections-Comparative analysis of Different Countries

Abstract

Electoral Geography is a new and interesting sub-direction of Human Geography. It includes finding out the tendencies that are revealed by electorate at the polling stations. Then, election results and tendencies in general, are transferred into Geographical space. The main goal of electoral geography is to reach conclusions from pondering these tendencies. These conclusions are interesting for people who work in Human Geography, also for candidates and political parties and for ordinary people, who are interested in the results of upcoming elections, results can be easily predicted if we know the tendencies of electoral geography of our country. Unfortunately, electoral geography as a science is not developed in Georgia. That is the main reason why I have decided to choose this topic for our conference. I have also decided to choose Georgia as one of the countries while conducting comparative analysis of electoral geography of different countries in this survey. Despite being young state, from the electoral map of Georgia we can find out some interesting tendencies. I think my decision will be a good donation in the process of developing Electoral Geography as a science in Georgia. My survey will not be only about the dependence of election results on Human Geographical features such as Language, Religion of the people, Culture and Ethnicity, but also on the Physical Geographical features, such as terrains and proximity to the sea. We will find out if the countries show similar or different tendencies. In this thesis we will use different research methods: Historical Analysis will be massively used, because while speaking about the electoral tendencies of different states, we need to compare election results of different years to one another. Also, we will have a general cartographical description of regions and subdivisions of countries which have been chosen. We will also analyze detailed electoral maps region-by-region, city-by-city. In survey the most important Human Geographical features of regions will be observed, such as density, Literacy rate, Average salary, Average age of the population, HDI, Ethnicity, Religion, Language…. The Method of data comparison will be used, as the aim of the research is to find out electoral tendencies of different countries, we must compare the results of elections of different years and reach interesting conclusions.