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The Rotterdam Enigma: Dutch Cities in the 2023 General Election
In the United States, electoral patterns increasingly correlate with population density, with voters in metropolitan cores favoring the left and those in more peripheral areas preferring the populist right. Does this pattern hold in the Netherlands? The answer is partially…
The Relative Lack of Regional Voting Differences in the Netherlands – And the Partial Exception of Friesland
The Dutch general election of 2023 reveals a low degree of regional political differentiation, with most parties receiving relatively similar vote percentages across the country. The main exception is the special Dutch municipalities in the Caribbean: Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and…
The Shift Toward Rightwing Populism in the Centrist Electorate of the Netherlands
The recent Dutch election sent out political shockwaves that extend well beyond the Netherlands, as noted in media outlets both left and right. A headline in right-leaning Spiked Online reads “The Humiliation of the Dutch Establishment: The Victory of Geert…
Melbourne Vs. Sydney Revisited
Australia is an unusual country in having two metropolitan areas of roughly equal population that overshadow all others. As the tables posted below show, Melbourne and Sydney each have around five million inhabitants, roughly twice as many as third-ranking Brisbane.…
Australia’s Centrist Teal Alternative – and a Possible Center-Populist Alternative to the Alternative
The center-right Australian Liberal Party has long been a major political force, leading Australia’s government, in coalition with the agrarian-focused National Party, from 2013 to 2022. In 2022, however, it suffered a sharp reversal, losing 17 seats in the House…
Australia’s Indigenous Voice Referendum Vote in Greater Melbourne
As noted in previous posts, Australian voters decisively rejected the Indigenous Voice referendum in October 2023. As our electoral analysis of greater Sydney revealed, many areas that usually support the Labour Party, which endorsed the measure, voted against it, some…
Explaining Seeming Anomalies in the Indigenous Voice Referendum Vote in Greater Sydney
In Australia’s 2023 Indigenous Voice Referendum (see the two previous posts), a significant number of solid Labour electoral divisions voted “no,” some by a significant margin, even though the Labour Party strongly supported the measure. It was a different story…
The Metropolitan Concentration of Support for Australia’s Indigenous Voice Referendum and the Melbourne/Sydney Divide
Australian electoral geography, like that of many other countries, is increasingly structured around the metropolitan-peripheral divide. Consider, for example, the map of the 2022 federal election in Western Australia and South Australia (below), in which Labour victories were limited to…
Mapping Australia’s 2023 Indigenous Voice Referendum, Part I
On October 14, 2023, Australian voters decisively rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have recognized the country’s indigenous population by creating a federal advisory body to represent the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The 60 percent…
Surprising Findings in a Study of Post-COVID Urban Recovery Rates in the United States and Canada
I recently came across a brief report by the University of Toronto’s School of Cities on the recovery of urban cores in the U.S. and Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic. The study’s methodology is intriguing: The recovery metrics on these…
Journalistic Hyperbole and the Electoral Geography of Poland
Although The Economist magazine is to be commended for analyzing and mapping the role of Poland’s old imperial divisions in its current electoral geography, it succumbs to unnecessary and misleading simplification and exaggeration, as is so often the case when…
Mapping the Results of Poland’s 2023 Elections by Political Parties and Coalitions
Poland, like many other countries with parliamentary systems of government, has many active political parties, most of which belong to broader coalitions. Five of these coalitions, one on the left and center-left, two in the center, and two on the…
Former Imperial Boundaries and Population Density in Poland’s 2023 Election
Poland’s October 2023 election saw a sharp rebuke to the country’s illiberal, governing right-wing coalition. The United Right (ZP), led by the Law and Justice Party (PiS), saw its vote share* drop from 44.6 percent in 2019 to 35.4 percent,…
Neighborhood Stereotypes and Recent Voting Patterns in Auckland, New Zealand
Today’s post employs an unusual strategy for analyzing electoral geography, that of comparing local election results with neighborhood stereotypes. Here we look at the Auckland vote in New Zealand’s 2023 election, doing so in light of popular perceptions of different…
Auckland’s Electoral to the Right – and Comparisons with U.S. Cities
As noted in the previous post, the Auckland metropolitan area, like New Zealand as a whole, experienced a significant electoral shift to the right in the 2023 election. This swing is glaringly evident in the party-list vote (see the previous…
New Zealand’s Striking Electoral Shift to the Right
The conservative National Party of New Zealand scored a major victory in the country’s October 2023 general election, with the governing Labour Party suffering a historic defeat. As described by The Guardian, “New Zealand voters have delivered a forceful rejection…
Small But Densely Populated American Cities & the Transformation of Cudahy, CA
The list of the most densely populated incorporated cities in the United States has some interesting features. The top four entries are all small cities (less than 1.5 mi sq; fewer than 70,000 inhabitants) located just to the west of…
Capturing the Size and Density of New York City and Environs on a Map of Major U.S. Cities
As mentioned in the previous post, depictions of the population density of major U.S. cities tend to under-emphasize the significance of New York City. New York is clearly the most densely inhabited major city in the United States, with 29,303…
U.S. City Size, Density, & Population Change, 1950 to 2022 – and the Dream of the “15-Minute City”
Many environmentalists now advocate the development of “15-minute cities,” urban areas dense enough to allow residents “to access most of the places [they] need to go within a 15-minute walk or bike.” This vision has much to recommend it. Many…
Mapping the Development of the Urban Framework of the United States, 1790-1830
I am currently working on an online historical atlas of the development of the urban framework of the United States. The maps and commentaries that will constitute this atlas will be posted gradually over the next few weeks or months,…
Mapping the Population of U.S. Cities in 1840 – and the Philadelphia Problem
I am currently working on a large set of GeoCurrents maps that will depict the current and historical demographic patterns of U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. Several problems, however, have arisen in data selection and visualization. Most troublesome is the…
Insurgency in Paraguay – and Genocidal Agitation Against Brazilians in the Country
Wikipedia’s “list of on-going armed conflicts” (see the previous post) had some surprises for me, as it includes a few insurgencies that I had thought were over. One example is that of the Paraguayan People’s Army, or EEP Rebellion (from…
Mapping Recent War Fatalities and the Persistence of Current Armed Conflicts
As noted in the previous GeoCurrent post, the civil war in Burma/Myanmar is one of the bloodiest conflicts in the world today. According to a comprehensive Wikipedia table, its death toll thus far in 2023 is 10,790, the fourth highest…
Successful Resistance Against the Regime of Burma (Myanmar) by the Karenni People
The civil war raging in Burma (Myanmar) is one of the world’s longest running conflicts, stretching back to 1948, the year of Burma’s independence from Britain. But as hostilities ebb and flow in both time and place, the current war…
The End of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) and the Continuing Reduction of Armenian-Populated Lands
Let us begin with a paradox: “On September 20, 2023, the world political map underwent a significant change, but that change is not reflected on the world political map.” This seemingly nonsensical statement makes sense with the addition two Latin…
Who Are the Gagauz, Where Is Gagauzia, and Why Are They in the News?
The “Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia,” located in southern Moldova, rarely makes the news. On September 25, 2023, however, the New York Times ran a full-page article on the region under the vague title “Fugitive Oligarch Gaines Surprise Foothold in…
Non-Metropolitan Patterns of Population Change in the United States, 2020-2022
Earlier this year Axios published a revealing map of population change in all counties in the United States from 2020 through 2022. This map, unlike the ones that I made and posted earlier this week, allows one to assess population…
Striking Patterns of Population Change in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 2020-2022
The 2020 to 2022 COVID period saw major population changes in the metropolitan areas of the United States, with some experiencing rapid gains and others rapid losses. Wildwood-The Villages, Florida, for example, saw a staggering 11.75 percent population increase, whereas…
Patterns of Income Inequality in Major U.S. Metropolitan Areas and Population Change, 2020-2022
The four U.S. states with the highest levels of income inequality are, in order, New York, Connecticut, Louisiana, and Mississippi. When mapped at the county level, however, New York and Connecticut appear to have lower levels of inequality than Louisiana…
Air-Conditioning Needs and Cartographic Failure at the Washington Post
The Washington Post recently ran an article entitled “Addicted to Cool: How the Dream of Air Conditioning Turned into the Dark Future of Climate Change,” which features three maps of “Summer Days Requiring AC” in the U.S. at different periods…
Geographical Patterns of Income Inequality in the U.S. at the State and County Levels
I have long been intrigued by the geography of income inequality in the United States. As maps of the GINI coefficient show, income inequality is highest some of the country’s richest states (New York, Connecticut) and in some of its…
Explaining Seeming Discrepancies on County-Level Income Maps of the United States
When working on a recent GeoCurrents post that involved maps of income in the United States, I noticed a few unusual patterns. A number of counties, for example, are mapped as having relatively high per capita personal income and relatively…
How Well Can ChatGPT Analyze a Complex Map? Part 2: Rich Counties in Red States
In the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the neighboring states of Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah all strongly supported Donald Trump, giving him respectively 70, 64, and 58 percent of their votes. But in all three states several counties opted for Joe…