Territory and territoriality lie at the heart of both world politics and International Relations (IR) theory. In terms of IR theory’s geographical assumptions, one of the most influential studies to date has been political geographer John Agnew’s 1994 article on the ‘the territorial trap’ (TTT). While Agnew’s original insights and subsequent research has reached canonical status in political geography, mainstream IR scholarship has yet to fully engage TTT. Political geographers, in turn, have largely dealt with the consequences of TTT for our understanding of world politics. This study offers the first detailed account of the origins of TTT, which are hidden in broad daylight in IR’s own history. The origins of TTT and mainstream IR are intertwined in terms of two dynamics: the racist and colonial origins of IR, and the selective nationalistic ontology that dominated IR especially in the first half of the 20th century. The arguments offered in this study have a wide variety of implications for problematising the ways in which IR-as-epistemological-community approaches territory and territoriality as well as our understanding of the origins and evolution of the present-day global territorial order.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are often more successful in some regions of their countries than in others. However, previous research shows that the relationship between context and PRR support is not straightforward. We develop and test an expanded framework linking local conditions to PRR support through two causal mechanisms. First, we argue economic and cultural contextual factors can influence citizens by fostering a sense of perceived local decline, which in turn predicts both populist and nativist attitudes and, hence, PRR support (mediation). Second, we expect that citizens with fewer resources and stronger local embeddedness are more strongly influenced by the context in which they live (moderation). Combining geocoded survey data with contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, GB and NL), we show that the link between local context and PRR support is indeed mediated and moderated, providing a better understanding of the spatial distribution behind recent PRR success.

On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court ended enforcement of Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. As a result, over 3500 municipalities were released from the preclearance requirement to seek federal approval prior to enacting changes to elections. Despite the Court’s majority opinion that Section 5 was no longer needed, practices like enforcing strict voter ID requirements and last-minute polling place changes increased dramatically after Shelby County. However, one underexamined election change is changing municipal boundaries through annexations. Municipal annexations can weaken minority political representation in municipal elections if minority population shares decrease after annexation. Using difference-in-differences models, I analyze annexations for over 15,000 municipalities from 2007–2020 across all forty U.S. states with annexable land. I find no evidence that municipalities previously covered by Section 5 increased annexation activity or that they conducted more annexations that dilute Black and minority resident shares after Shelby County. Patterns of annexations pre-Shelby County suggest that the null finding can be explained by the limited effectiveness of Section 5 in preventing minority dilution through annexations when it was in place. This study underscores how municipal boundaries can be manipulated to perpetuate inequality and the limitations of federal legislation in preventing this practice.

Rural residents are typically construed as being more conservative than urban residents. Is this true, or do rural residents carry unique interests from Republicans or conservatives? Using the 2020 ANES, we compare responses from 22 national issues by interacting urban and rural residency with Republican and Democrat identification. We find that issue preferences are partisan, not place-based: rural Democrats resemble their urban counterparts and urban Republicans resemble their rural counterparts, rather than rural areas specifically being more Republican. However, rural Democrats are more conservative than urban Democrats on issues relating to immigration, transgendered people in the military, and income inequality. These results point to partisan nationalization in issue stances, with exceptions, and that rural is not always Republican.

The notion of ‘place’ has become a central concern in research on the populist radical right (PRR), but scholars seem to have different things in mind when talking about how geography affects individual political attitudes. In our paper, we therefore aim to structure the debate on the impact of place and to understand exactly how place affects PRR attitudes (nativism, right-wing authoritarianism, and populism). Conceptually, we identify four potentially relevant aspects of ‘place’ that underpin much of the current literature: place-related attitudes (localism and resentment), place-specific living conditions, socio-demographic composition, and characteristics unique to a particular place, i.e., its local history and culture. We also discuss how these aspects are related and how they may interact. Empirically, we assess the relative importance of these four aspects of place for PRR sentiment in Germany, a country that is particularly well suited to this type of analysis. Using fine-grained geocoded survey data collected prior to the 2017 election, we find that (1) there is considerable spatial variation and clustering in PRR attitudes, (2) a place’s socio-demographic composition and (3) place resentment account for much of this, while (4) localism has weaker effects. We find (5) no relevant interaction between localism and place resentment, (6) no substantial evidence that mediation through place-related attitudes leads to an underestimation of the other aspects, and (7) no evidence for effects of the unique culture or history of the places we studied. Moreover, (8) location in the former GDR still has a substantial impact, whereas (9) other place-specific conditions (deprivation, demographic decline, migration, rurality) that could be addressed by policy interventions have no or rather weak effects. We conclude that PRR sentiment in ‘places that don’t matter’ results also, though by no means exclusively, from a lack of recognition.

Who gets represented in legislatures, and how does this depend on electoral institutions? Others have asked this question from the perspective of gender, race, and class. We focus on space, asking whether MPs disproportionately come from some places rather than others and how this depends on electoral rules. Using data on over 13,000 legislators in sixty-two democracies, we developed a new measure to determine whether the spatial distribution of MP birthplaces matched the spatial distribution of the citizens they represented. Contrary to received wisdom, single-member district systems do not have more geographically representative parliaments than multi-member district systems, while mixed-member systems perform significantly better than both. We attribute the higher spatial representativeness of mixed-member systems to the contamination effects in their single-member tier. We present evidence for this explanation from a within-country analysis of elections in Italy, the UK, and Germany.

Extant literature argues that ethnic minority representation in plurality systems will benefit from the presence of sizable co-ethnic populations. I argue that the threshold for election depends not only on a minority population's group size but a district's level of segregation. I show that residential segregation can facilitate the increased representation of ethnic minority populations. Contrary to the prevailing literature, however, I find that increased segregation levels in cities with sizable minority populations decrease the percentage of co-ethnics elected to office. I support this argument with evidence from an original dataset on the local representation outcomes of Muslims in England between 2011 and 2021, which covers 434 district council elections. Using threshold modelling, I introduce the concept of the population threshold, above which increases in segregation level decrease Muslim representation. This article contributes to the electoral geography literature on ethnic minority representation.

A growing literature has revealed a notable electoral advantage for congressional and gubernatorial candidates with deep local roots in their home districts or states. However, there is a dearth of research on the presence and impact of local roots in state legislative races. In this paper, we close that gap by demonstrating the consistent and significant electoral impacts that state legislators’ local roots have on their reelection efforts. We use data capturing a representative cross-section of state legislative incumbents (N = ~5,000) and calculate a novel index measuring the depth of their local roots modeled after Hunt’s (2022, Home Field Advantage: Roots, Reelection, and Representation in the Modern Congress) measure for the US House. We present evidence that state legislators with deep local roots in the districts they represent run unopposed in their general elections nearly twice as often as incumbents with no such roots. Of those who do attract challengers in their reelection efforts, deeply rooted incumbents enjoy an average of three extra percentage points of vote share. Our results have important implications for candidate emergence in state legislative elections during a time when so many are uncontested. They also demonstrate the limits of electoral nationalization for understanding state politics.

The article explores the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in Russia in 2011–2018. Using the theoretical framework of desecularization from above, which claims that church structures play a key role in the religious renaissance policy, we argue that the rise of the political influence of the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) may be explained by its capacity for dissemination of traditional values that ultimately results in votes for United Russia and President Vladimir Putin in national elections. This study reveals the emergence of a new area on Russia’s political map—the belt – into Belt, which combines higher levels of Orthodox religiosity and pro-Kremlin voting in national elections. Using multiple empirical strategies we construct an index of religiosity on the regional level and identify the Orthodox Belt regions, test the relationship between Orthodox religiosity and voting in the national elections in 2011–2018, and test the differences in value orientations and electoral support between the Orthodox Belt regions and other ones. Finally, two model regions of the Orthodox Belt—Tambov and Lipetsk—are explored. We conclude that non-Orthodox Belt regions in Russia with higher Orthodox religiosity, conservatism, and loyalty are an emerging trend in Russian political geography.

The link between objective facts and politically relevant beliefs is an essential mechanism for democratic accountability. Yet the bulk of empirical work on this topic measures objective facts at whatever geographic units are readily available. We investigate the implications of these largely arbitrary choices for predicting individual-level opinions. We show that varying the geographic resolution—namely aggregating economic data to different geographic units—influences the strength of the relationship between economic evaluations and local economic conditions. Finding that unemployment claims are the best predictor of economic evaluations, especially when aggregated at the commuting zone or media market level, we underscore the importance of the modifiable areal unit problem. Our methods provide an example of how applied scholars might investigate the importance of geography in their own research going forward.

Recent accounts of American politics focus heavily on urban–rural gaps in political behavior. Rural politics research is growing but may be stymied by difficulties defining and measuring which Americans qualify as “rural.” We discuss theoretical and empirical challenges to studying rurality. Much existing research has been inattentive to conceptualization and measurement of rural geography. We focus on improving estimation of different notions of rurality and provide a new dataset on urban–rural measurement of U.S. state legislative districts. We scrutinize construct validity and measurement in two studies of rural politics. First, we replicate Flavin and Franko (2020, Political Behavior, 845–864) to demonstrate empirical results may be sensitive to measurement of rural residents. Second, we use Mummolo and Nall’s (2017, The Journal of Politics, 45–59) survey data to show rural self-identification is not well-captured with objective, place-based classifications, suggesting a rethinking of theoretical and empirical accounts of rural identity. We conclude with strategies for operationalizing rurality using readily available tools.