ELECTORAL STUDIES OF BORDER TERRITORIES IN DOMESTIC SCIENCE: STATE OF ART AND PROSPECTS

Shestakova Marianna N.

Annotation

The article proposes the analysis of the national electoral geography research over the past quarter century. The emphasis is done on key concepts used in this special area of political geography, such as "electoral landscape", "electoral space", etc. Particular focus is paid to the methods, such as the splitting/delimiting method, the center - periphery model. The article covers the issue of borders and frontiers in the framework of the Russian science, stressing the original "dialectic" contradictions of these concepts. Particular attention is paid to such challenging and thus not fully studied issues as electoral research on the borderlands and the possibility of mutual influence in the electoral choice in neighboring border regions, which allow to reveal the behavior of voters living in the neighborhood, but belonging to different political systems. This is especially actual and relevant for the national school, since the Russian borders could be qualified as an extensive empirical basis for this kind of research.

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