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Contextualising the BES – is there a role for Geographic Information?

Contextualising the BES – is there a role for Geographic Information?. Richard Kingston Centre for Urban Policy Studies The University of Manchester. Outline. What is GIS? Can it help in understanding voting behaviour?

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Contextualising the BES – is there a role for Geographic Information?

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  1. Contextualising the BES – is there a role for Geographic Information? Richard Kingston Centre for Urban Policy Studies The University of Manchester

  2. Outline • What is GIS? • Can it help in understanding voting behaviour? • Can it explain why people vote and also why they vote for certain parties? • How statistical analysis tools can help us understand the issues

  3. What is GIS/GISc? • A Geographical Information System is any system that captures, stores, analyzes, manages and presents data that are linked to location. • GISciencethe academic theory behind the development, use, and application of GIS. It is concerned with people, hardware, software, and geospatial data.GISc addresses fundamental issues raised by the use of GIS and related information technologies (Wilson and Fotheringham 2007).

  4. John Snow’s Cholera map of 1854

  5. McHarg’s 1967 Design with Nature

  6. What can geography tell us? 10 & 20% most deprived neighbourhoods 2007 Population Density 2010

  7. “Most study of British voting behaviour focuses on class and other compositional influences on party choice, paying relatively little attention to contextual influences — spatial variations in patterns of party choice.” • “How Britons voted in 1997 reflected just as much on where they lived and who they lived among as on what social categories they belonged to.” Johnson et al 2001, Political Geography 20 (2001) 85–111

  8. Geo-demographic populations – is there a relationship with voting? • Dan Vickers, University of Sheffield • http://areaclassification.org.uk/

  9. 1997 General Election

  10. 2010 Result

  11. 2010 Result

  12. 2008 US Presidential Election • Map on left fails to allow for the fact that the population of the red states is on average significantly lower than that of the blue ones • Map on right is a cartogramwhich the sizes of states are rescaled according to their population showing Obama’s majority

  13. Results by US County • More stark

  14. Strength of vote • Colour shading to show proportion of republican vs. democrat

  15. Can GIS analysis help us understand behaviour? • We can easily map and measure turn out and votes • We can easily map a range of socio-economic-environmental attributes • But can the latter explain the former? • ecological fallacy • the assumption that an individual from a specific group or area will exhibit a trait that is predominant in the group as a whole. • modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP) • “the areal units (zonal objects) used in many geographical studies are arbitrary, modifiable, and subject to the whims and fancies of whoever is doing, or did, the aggregating” Openshaw, p.1, 1984

  16. A method for examining spatial relationships - GWR • Regression is a common statistical method for examining the relationship a series of independent variables have with an independent variable e.g. vote choice. • BUT • “In regression models where the cases are geographical locations, sometimes regression coefficients do not remain fixed over space.” • “However, this is surprising in some respects, as the technique itself takes no account of location in its analysis of relationships between variables.” Brunsdon et al, p. 431, 1996

  17. Using GWR

  18. Brunsdon et al 2002

  19. Finally… • So how and why might GIS be applied to the BES? • It really comes down to the spatial scale of analysis

  20. References and sources • C.F. Brunsdon, A.S. Fotheringham, and M.E. Charlton (2002)“Geographically Weighted Summary Statistics – A Framework for Localised Exploratory Data Analysis”, Computers Environment and Urban Systems, v26, pp501-524. • Dan Vickers’ Output Area Classification @ http://areaclassification.org.uk/ • See http://www.worldmapper.org/ for a view of the world from a different perspective • McHarg, I. (1969) Design with Nature. • Openshaw, S. (1984). The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Norwich: Geo Books. • R.J. Johnston, C.J. Pattie, D.F.L. Dorling, I. MacAllister, H. Tunstall, D.J. Rossiter (2001) Social locations, spatial locations and voting at the 1997 British general election: evaluating the sources of Conservative support. Political Geography, 20 (2001) 85–111. • Wilson, J.P. and Fotheringham, A.S. (2007), The Handbook of Geographic Information Science, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 3–12

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