Elections

Electoral Politics and Religious Strife in Nigeria

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Map of Nigeria's 2011 Presidential Election

Map of Nigeria's 2011 Presidential ElectionFor the past week, GeoCurrents has demonstrated that the conflict in Ivory Coast cannot be reduced to a simple north/south, Muslim/Christian split. This kind of broad cleavage is more apparent in Nigeria, as shown by its recent election. But even in Nigeria, the contrast between a Muslim north and a Christian south is not as simple as it may appear. As in Ivory Coast, religious adherence in Nigeria is an uncertain matter. Most sources claim that the country has slightly more Muslims than Christians. Wikipedia puts the breakdown at 50.4 percent Muslim, 48.2 percent Christian, and 1.4 percent “other”; the CIA World Factbook states that 50 percent of Nigerians are Muslim, 40 percent Christian, and ten percent “indigenous.”

Map of Ethnic Groups in NigeriaAs these numbers suggest, Nigeria’s religiously indigenous population is proportionally smaller than that of Ivory Coast, although both sources quoted above probably understate it. Indigenous religion is especially prominent among the Yoruba of the southwest, one of the country’s main ethnic groups. Yoruba Religion may actually be expanding in Nigeria; its South American off-shoot, Candomblé, is certainly thriving in Brazil. Nonetheless, Islam is deeply entrenched in the north, and Christianity is dominant in the southeast. Southwestern Nigeria is mixed, with substantial Christian, Muslim, and Yoruba Religion communities, as is much of the central zone. Religious strife has long been most intense in the middle area and in the northern cities, where substantial Christian minorities reside. Despite the religious heterogeneity of Yorubaland, the region has seen relatively little conflict, in part because it is relatively homogeneous in terms of language and ethnicity.

Map of Sharia in NigeriaThe northern focus of Islam in Nigeria is clearly visible on the map of Sharia in the country. Since 1999, Nigeria’s constituent states have been permitted to institute Islamic Law as the basis of local civil and criminal court procedures. All twelve northern states have done so—nine over their entire expanse, and three over large areas with Muslim majorities. Today, the geography of Sharia cleanly cleaves Nigeria’s north from its south.

So too does the electoral map. On April 16, 2011, Nigeria’s incumbent president—Christian southerner Goodluck Jonathan—trounced his main Muslim opponent, former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, by fifty-nine to thirty-two percent. Every state in the Sharia belt gave a majority of its votes to Buhari; almost every other state massively rejected him. In partially Islamic southwestern Osun, the majority of votes went to another Muslim candidate, the anti-corruption stalwart Nuhu Ribadu. Ribadu polled well across Yorubaland and in parts of the country’s midsection, but he received only 5.4 percent of the votes nationally, and did even worse in the solidly Muslim north. (For returns by state, see Electoral Politics 2.0.)

Goodluck Jonathan crushed all other candidates across the southeast, receiving more than ninety-five percent of the vote in nine states, and more than ninety-eight percent in six. Jonathan also did surprising well over much the north, winning not just Christian votes. In the solidly Muslim state of Jigawa, he was favored by 36.7 percent of the voters.

But if many Muslim northerners were willing to vote for the Christian candidate, others were not willing to accept his victory. By all reports, the Nigerian election was relatively clean and calm, but the aftermath across much of the north was stormy. Post-election violence, directed mainly against Christians, may have taken 500 lives. In the north-central state of Kaduna, one estimate claims that 14,000 Christian fled their homes; in Katsina state, Buhari’s homeland, sixty-five churches have been burned or otherwise damaged, according to Christian sources.

The post-election carnage in northern Nigeria has been ascribed to several factors. Some sources emphasize high youth unemployment and the economic marginalization of the north. Christian sources point to radical Muslim leaders, arguing that the spasm of violence was not a case of “spontaneous combustion” but part of a planned campaign. Some Muslim activists stress anger over possible electoral fraud, dumbfounded that a supposedly Muslim-majority country would cast fifty-nine percent of its votes for a Christian candidate. Another source of anger was the supposed violation of the unwritten rules of Nigerian politics, which hold that Christians and Muslims must alternate in the presidency. This policy had been upended when the previous incumbent, Muslim leader Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, died in office before serving his full term. Yar’Adua was succeeded by vice-president Goodluck Jonathan, whose subsequent incumbency, some say, gave him an unfair advantage in the 2011 election.

Assuming that the election results were accurate, several issues call for further investigation. Why did Jonathan poll as well as he did in the north, winning a substantial minority of Muslim votes? Why did southern Muslims decisively reject the main Muslim candidate, Buhari, and why did northern Muslims equally rebuff the Muslim reformer, Ribadu? Tempting as it may be to delve into these issues, our next post will return to Ivory Coast before GeoCurrents moves on to another part of the world.

Ethnic Dimensions of the Conflict in Ivory Coast

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Map of Ethnic Groups in Ivory Coast

Map of Ethnic Groups in Ivory CoastCareful map analysis reveals that the conflict in Ivory Coast cannot be reduced to a split between the Muslim north and Christian south, as is routinely suggested in the press. But it is structured around ethnic differences that have religious aspects. Today’s post seeks to demonstrate the struggle’s cultural parameters by comparing maps of electoral returns from the 2010 presidential election with those depicting Ivory Coast’s ethnic geography.

Before examining maps of the 2010 election, it is worth revisiting the basic ethnic divisions of Ivory Coast. Ivorian ethnicity is a complex matter, as the country has an estimated sixty-plus distinct ethno-linguistic groups. Most maps thus simplify the situation, as was the case with the Wikipedia map posted yesterday. Further simplification is useful for revealing role of ethnicity in the 2010 election. The map posted here highlights both broad, linguistically defined cultural divisions as well as the most politically charged ethnic groups. (For further explanation of the map, see the comments at the bottom of this post.*)

Map of the Ivory Coast Election, Round 1Thanks to the efforts of Electoral Politics 2.0, detailed maps of the 2010 Ivorian presidential election are readily available. Posted on the left is the pattern of the first round, in which only four of fourteen candidates garnered more than two percent of the vote. A quick comparison of this map with that of ethnic territories reveals close correlations. To highlight those connections, the next map abstracts areas in which one candidate scored an overwhelming victory in the first round (winning more than 70 percent of the vote) and overlays them on a lightened version of the ethnic map. Major candidates’ own ethnicity is also color coded; thus the areas that voted overwhelmingly for Laurent Gbagbo, who is Bété, are marked with diagonal purple lines, echoing the purple used to depict the Bété region, and so on.

Map of ethnic groups and electoral returns, Ivory CoastLayering in this way reveals several interesting patterns. For starters, three of the top four vote-getters fully dominated the election in their own ethnic homelands. The central Baoulé people, long Ivory Coast’s politically dominant group, voted overwhelmingly for their own candidate, Henri Konan Bédié, a former president of the country (1993-1999). Bédié, who had been accused of “stratospheric levels of corruption” while in office, polled reasonably well throughout southern and northeastern Ivory Coast, but not in the northwest and north-center. Those regions were dominated by Alassane Ouattara, of Dyula paternal descent, who won more than 70 percent of the vote even in animist Senufo country. Ouattra polled fairly well in most of the rest of the country, but in the Baoulé heartland he received less than ten percent of the vote. Finally, Albert Mabri trounced all other candidates in the relatively small area occupied by the Dan. The Dan are one of the “peripheral Mande” peoples; although their language is in the Mande group, they lack the heritage of political centralization found among the Malinke and they are largely non-Muslim. Although a small group, the Dan have played a significant role in Ivorian politics, largely due to the career of Robert Guéï. (Guéï was a military leader of Ivory Coast who became the country’s third president after the violent overthrow of Henri Bédié in 1999; he and his family were killed in the opening hours of the Ivorian Civil War in 2002.)

The geography of support for the incumbent, by contrast, did not follow the pattern of the other candidates. Laurent Gbagbo carried the major districts of his Bété-speaking homeland, but not decisively; he took only half of the votes, with Ouattara and Bédié splitting the rest. The Bété region is home to large numbers of immigrants from other parts of the country, most of whom likely cast their ballots their own ethnic “favorite sons.” But Gbagbo did crush the other candidates across most of the southeast, the economic heartland of Ivory Coast as well as its most Christian region. He also did extremely well in some of the non-Muslim Mande areas of the west.

Overall, one could say that the voting patterns in the first round of the 2010 Ivorian election reveal low levels of national cohesion. In democracies with high cohesion, political parties compete across all regions, contending for votes on the basis of ideological and policy differences rather than ethnic solidarity or regional favoritism. To be sure, some parts of Ivory Coast did exhibit balanced voting in the first round. In the Zanzan region of the far northeast, Bédié received 30 percent of the vote, Gbagbo 36 percent, and Ouattara 26 percent. In the extreme southwest as well, all three candidates polled reasonably well. Significantly, both areas are marked by high levels of ethnic diversity, populated by small groups that have not been able to stake a claim in national politics.

Map of Ivory Coast Election The final round of voting was limited to the two top contenders: Ouattara, who received 32 percent of the vote in the first round, and Gbago, who got 38 percent (Bédié had received 25 percent). It was a foregone conclusion that Ouattara would triumph in the northwest and the north-center, and that Gbagbo would win in the economically vital southeast. The contest really came down to the Baoulé core, a region that had spurned both Ouattara and Gbagbo in the first round. Recall that the Baoulé are a partly Christian but mostly animist group that dominated Ivorian political life for the first four decades of independence. As Ouattara is usually said to represent the hitherto largely excluded northern and Muslim elements of Ivory Coast, one might have expected the Baoulé to rally around his opponent. But that did not happen. Bédié eventually threw his support to Ouattara, who captured the Baoulé region decisively in the final election. To clarify the relationship between ethnicity and voting in the final round, the last map depicts the districts won by Gbagbo overlain on the map of ethnic divisions. As this exercise reveals, Gbagbo took most of southern Ivory Coast, crushingly so in a number of districts, but he failed in the Baoulé heartland. Why this happened is a question for another post.

 

Ivory Coast ethnic election map(*The GeoCurrents ethnic map of Ivory Coast first partitions the country into four linguistically based divisions, indicating with coloration the zones in which local languages fall into the Gur, Kwa, Kru, and Mande sub-families of the Niger-Congo language phylum. It also distinguishes the most important ethnic group within each of these broad divisions with a darker shade of the same color: Baoulé (Kwa), Bété (Kru), Malinke (Mande), and Senufo (Gur). Several other groups are noted with labels only: the Dyula (closely linked to the Malinke), the Dan, the Akan complex of ethnicities (which is sometime defined as including the Baoulé), and the so-called Lagoon complex in the southern Kwa region. Ivory Coast’s most important cities are also shown. Note that the ethnic territories so depicted are by no means absolute, as widespread migration has resulted in considerable mixing in many areas—one of the main factors in the recent unrest.  Note also that some linguists think that the Senufo dialects form their own language family, rather than belonging to the Gur group.)

Disparate Interpretations—and Misinterpretations—of the Conflict in Ivory Coast

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Map of the Division of Ivory Coast in 2007

Map of the Division of Ivory Coast in 2007Understandings of the recent conflict in Ivory Coast (officially, Republic of Côte d’Ivoire) vary significantly among different sectors of the news media. Mainstream sources in the United States often mention the Ivorian Civil War of 2002-07 that effectively divided the country in two (see map), but they focus primarily on the presidential election of 2010, which the defeated incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to honor. The framework applied is generally one of political obstruction and transformation, with Gbagbo representing the old order of unaccountable African strongmen, and election-winner Alassane Ouattara depicted as upholding democratic rule and responsible governance. In this reading, honoring the verdict of the Ivorian people required the military intervention of France, with the approval of the United Nations. Reports from the African press, however, present a much less sympathetic picture of Western military involvement. As detailed in a recent Le Monde article (translated and reprinted in The Guardian), journalists in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal welcomed the downfall of Gbagbo but not the foreign intervention that ended his rule. Ghanaian and Cameroonian newspapers, on the other hand, more often denounced the regime change as a French neo-imperial power-grab, stressing the atrocities allegedly committed by Ouattara’s forces. Ghanaian reportage can indeed be harsh, as demonstrated in a recent GhanaWeb post—which may set a record for the most lavish use of exclamation marks in an article:

Right now, the elected president according to Ivorian law has been kidnapped by the French and Ouattara’s men and, there is no outrage! No pride! Very few men of integrity who have spoken out!! All of this while in essence a precedent has been set which states that in Africa our laws don’t matter! Our constitutions are toilet paper, and if the west does not back who wins their UN neocolonial army will bomb you out of power!!!!

Despite differing interpretations, the mainstream media, whether in the United States or Africa, tend to frame the conflict as one of national party politics and international geopolitical maneuvering, downplaying ethnic and religious dimensions. Religion, however, is emphasized in certain highly partisan segments of the media, which see the contest as one between Christianity (Gbagbo) and Islam (Ouattara). Here France again gets singled out for censure, though for opposite reasons in different quarters. Muslim reporters have long castigated France for supporting Ivorian Christians while thwarting its Muslim population; today’s anti-Islamic websites denounce France for supporting Ivorian Muslims and thwarting its Christian population.

A 2000 Islam for Today article lays out the former perspective most explicitly. According to its author, Muslims constitute sixty percent of the Ivorian population, yet have been systematically excluded from the government. Instead, up to the turn of the millennium, “power has rotated among the Christian Baoule people of central and eastern Ivory Coast, who account for about 22% of the 16 million citizens…” France, the author contends, was largely to blame: “The Islam-phobic French empowered the mainly Christian Baoule at the cost of the Muslim majority. Today, the country’s Muslims are determined to reclaim their due.”

Anti-Muslim websites dispute the direction of French favoritism, while agreeing about Muslim designs and French perfidy. A recent posting in the hard-right website Atlas Shrugs claims, “We are witnessing an Islamic takeover of the Ivory Coast. And the French (and the UN, US, and Europe) are helping them. Sick.” The post further contends that Ivory Coast is “about to toggle” from being a Christian-majority country to a Muslim-majority country, largely because of unrestrained, illegal immigration from Muslim lands to the north. Such commentators often denounce the close personal ties between the French political elite and both Ouattara and his Algerian-born French wife, Dominique Folloroux-Ouattara—although rumors that Nicolas Sarkozy himself presided over the couple’s wedding are apparently not true.

As the disparate figures used in these articles indicate, the religious demography of Ivory Coast is highly debatable. Overall, the entire conflict is much more complex than is indicated by most recent media reports. Religion does play a role, but so do a number of other factors. GeoCurrents will thus delve into the Ivorian situation over the next week, examining maps of ethnic identity, religious adherence, electoral returns, and migration flows in hopes of bringing some clarity to an intricate, murky, and important situation.

Extremism and Voting Behavior in South Punjab, Pakistan

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The culturally and linguistically distinctive southern half of Pakistani Punjab is, as noted yesterday, a hotbed of Islamist radicalism. According to Bill Roggio, “South Punjab teems with radical mosques and madrassas, which are used to indoctrinate Pakistani youths to join the jihad. Tens of thousands of members of these terror groups who have gone through training camps are said to be active in South Punjab.” Why south Punjab would be so much more inclined to extremism than North Punjab – or any other part of Pakistan outside of the Tribal Areas – is an interesting matter. North Punjab is a more agriculturally productive and prosperous area than South Punjab, but correlations between poverty Islamic radicalism are generally weak. Deeper issues are almost certainly at play.

The most convincing explanation that I have found comes from P.K. Upadhyay, writing for the Indian Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis. According to Upadhyay, the key factors are institutional and political. As he explains:

Compared to the rest of Punjab, this area has remained backward and cocooned in a time warp. The government and its agencies have exercised lesser control over South Punjab and have left its tribal oriented feudal structure intact. … The hold of local chiefs was, however, getting eroded for many years due to the expansion in influence and activities of officially supported religious hard line groups. These groups have been setting up their base in the area to recruit cadres and train them in connivance with the state for carrying out pogroms against Shias and other religious minorities within as well as for the jehad in Kashmir. Over a period of time, the traditional [chiefs] were pushed to the background and jehadist groups came to dominate the area completely.

South Punjab, in other words, has long been a politically marginalized area, lacking the administrative structures of the modern state. Until recently, the region was even denied its own linguistic and cultural standing, treated merely as peripheral variant of the Punjabi norm. When the Pakistani state under the presidency of Zia began to push politicized Islam in the 1980s, the region’s antiquated political structures were unable to resist to the hard-core Islamist political networks. Dissatisfaction with the northern-dominated Punjabi provincial government and the Pakistani national government has no doubt aided the militants’ cause.

Although radical Islamists have established a firm base of power in South Punjab, their violent program is rejected by many of the area’s inhabitants. Such attitudes are indirectly revealed through voting behavior. As the ElectoralGeography.com map posted above shows, almost all of southern South Punjab voted in 2008 for the quasi-socialist Pakistani Peoples Party of the late Benazir Bhutto, an organization detested by radical Islamists. In contrast, northern South Punjab, like North Punjab, generally supported the moderately Islamist Muslim League parties. Pakistan’s one hard-core Islamist party, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, failed to take a single district in Punjab.

Some observers, however, expect that support for extreme Islamist organizations will soon increase in South Punjab, as well as in other parts of the country. Much of Pakistan has been devastated this summer by heavy monsoonal rainfall, and the flood crest is currently passing through South Punjab. Hard-line Islamic charities have proved more effective in delivering relief supplies than the government, enhancing their appeal. Due to the same dynamic, support for extremist groups increased in Kashmir following the 2005 earthquake.

Unfortunately, reliable information about South Punjab is difficult to obtain. As Bill Roggio reported in 2009:

“The Pakistani government has denied that terror groups are based in South Punjab. Just last week, the government barred foreign reporters from South Punjab, insisting they can only report from the area after obtaining a permit. ‘All foreign journalists are required to get permission from foreign affairs as well as from interior ministries for visiting any specific place especially in South Punjab,’ a senior officer of the Punjab government told the Press Trust of India. The official claimed that journalists published ‘twisted and unfounded’ facts about terror groups operating there.”

In general, finding any geographically specific information about Pakistan is a challenge, as we shall see in tomorrow’s post, the final one in this series.

Election Controversies and Ethnic Complexities on the Not-So-Tiny Island of Bougainville

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In June 2010, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG) voted out three quarters of its parliamentary representatives along with its president. Whereas the outgoing leader was a former revolutionary committed to independence, the newly elected chief executive favors continuing ties with PNG. Most sources, however, do not see a loss of interest in sovereignty. The election focused on governmental competence, which the voters of Bougainville evidently found wanting in the former administration. Another divisive issue was the future of the shuttered Panguna mine. While most candidates supported reopening, they disagreed over who should carry it out. Some favored returning control to the former operator, a subsidiary of global mining giant Rio Tinto; others argued for turning to Chinese investors.

Security formed another electoral concern. Interethnic strife remains deadly, although the body count has diminished in recent years. Violence is concentrated in southern Bougainville where, according to The Economist (June 10, 2010, page 47), “some 14 armed militia groups still openly carry arms.” During the election campaign, the successful challenger accused the incumbent of condoning the warlords who hold sway over much of the south.

Ethnic tension in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville is linked to pronounced cultural fragmentation. Roughly two dozen languages in three families are spoken by the region’s 175,000 inhabitants. Two of these families, North Bougainville and South Bougainville, may be unique to the island. They were formerly classified within the Papuan family, but linguists no longer think that the “Papuan languages” constitute a genuine group, descended from a common ancestral tongue. Other forms of cultural distinctiveness further divide the peoples of Bougainville. According to the delightfully discursive Wikipedia article, among the northern peoples of Bougainville, “Cheerful friendliness is the prevalent norm. Austronesian Bougainvilleans and especially Bukas value outgoing openness, chattiness, a generally friendly mien.” South Bougainvilleans, in contrast, are said to “value privacy, discretion, quiet. Just listen to the silence of their markets and religious and political gatherings. When they are contemptuous of ‘redskins’ and ‘mastas’ (i.e. white people) it’s not that they are vulgar racists as to the colour of your skin. It’s that they find noisiness and intemperate speech shocking and impolite.”

On an unrelated issue, Bougainville also offers a lesson on human perceptions of spatial scale. The otherwise excellent article on the island’s problems in The Economist magazine begins as follows: “The tiny troubled island of Bougainville has a new president …” Tiny? Bougainville is the 79th largest of the world’s roughly 100,000 inhabited islands. It covers more territory than such substantial islands as Cyprus, Crete, or Corsica. Bougainville is almost as large as Hawaii, which is called “the big island” in reference to the fact that it is seven times the size of Oahu, the state of Hawaii’s demographic, economic, and political center. Yet even Oahu, which covers almost 600 square miles, is almost never described as “tiny,” a term best reserved for islands like Australia’s Norfolk (13.3 square miles).

My point is not so much to chide the normally astute Economist for an uncharacteristic slip as to illustrate a common problem in geographical perception. Unfamiliar places far from one’s homeland tend to diminish in apparent size, as illustrated by Saul Steinberg’s famous “view of the world” New Yorker cover. A tendency to mentally shrink exotic places seems to be a natural human disposition. We should be vigilant against it if we want to remain geographically accurate.

The Geography of the Chilean Election

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As last Friday’s post noted, recent elections in Chile and Bolivia produced markedly different results. In Bolivia, socialist president Evo Morales was reelected in a landslide, whereas in Chile the center-left coalition that had run the country for more than two decades lost power to the center-right. Although Chile’s out-going president Michelle Bachelet remained extremely popular, her coalition’s candidate, Eduardo Frei, was widely viewed as uninspiring. The center-right’s candidate, Sebastián Piñera, gained votes by promising to return to the rapid economic growth rates that had characterized Chile in the 1980s and 1990s while retaining the social measures put in place by his immediate predecessors.

As the electoral map shows, Frei did well in the major mining regions of the north (Antofagasta and Atacama) and in the agricultural heartland to the south of Santiago (O’Higgins and Maule). Frei also did well in some urban areas, including Concepcion, Valdivia, and parts of Santiago (although not in Valparaiso). Piñera, however, won the metropolitan areas overall, as well as the entire south. He did particularly well in the extreme north, in the Mapuche Indian heartland of Araucanía, and in Aisén, where governmental hydroelectric plans are unpopular. The center-right’s victory in Araucanía is noteworthy, as conservative political parties rarely do well in heavily indigenous areas. The Mapuche, however, have been struggling with non-Mapuche residents of their region over forestry and land-rights issues, leading to high levels of political polarization.

What is most striking about the recent Chilean election is not which candidate won in which region, but rather the fact that the vote was so evenly balanced. In the map on the left, I designated darker shades to indicate regions in which one of the candidates received more than 55 and more than 60 percent of the vote. Just three regions fell into the former category, and only one in the latter. In most of Chile, the margin of victory was relatively slight.

Democratic countries in which national unity is challenged by regional or ethnic identity typically show geographically distinctive voting patterns. Bolivia with its southwest-east divide is one such country: Ukraine, divided east to west, is another. We have also seen how the Hungarian-populated districts in Romania overwhelmingly vote for Hungarian political parties. In more firmly united countries, regional voting differences are much less pronounced. By this criterion, Chile shows high levels of national coherence. Such cohesion was also demonstrated in 2006, when Bachelet bested Piñera in every region except Araucanía, but exceeded 6o percent only in Atacama and Antofogasta.

The United States has exhibited larger geographical voting variation than has Chile in recent elections. In 2008, one candidate or the other received more than 60 percent of the vote in fifteen states. In 2004, George Bush received more than 60 percent of the vote in ten states, and more than 70 percent in one (Utah).

The Geography of the Bolivian Election

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Latin American electoral politics have been trending to the left in recent years. Although Chile just confounded that tendency by voting in a center-right president, Bolivia overwhelmingly reelected its socialist president, Evo Morales, in December 2009. Morales, the champion of Bolivia’s indigenous majority, received 64 percent of the national vote, while his main challenger, Manfred Reyes Villa, received only 36 percent.

As the map shows, Morales trounced Reyes Villa in the southwestern highlands, Bolivia’s traditional center of population and political power, and the main seat of its indigenous population. An Aymara Indian, Morales won more than 90 percent of the vote in most of the Aymara speaking region (marked with a yellow “A” on the map), and did almost as well in the Quechua-speaking zone (marked with a green “Q”). The only highland province to vote for Reyes Villa was Oropeza, home to the country’s constitutional capital of Sucre, a largely Spanish-speaking city. Reyes Villa did reasonable well in Tomás Frías province, where the city of Potosí is located, and in his hometown of Cochabama (marked with a white triangle), although he lost in both places (for the voting base maps, see http://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/; linguistic divisions based on the Ethnologue map of Bolivia).

As expected, Reyes Villa won a much higher percentage of the vote in the lowlands of eastern Bolivia, where most people are of mestizo rather than indigenous background, and where agriculture is oriented toward commerce more than subsistence. Yet as the map shows, here too many provinces went for Morales, if narrowly. Reyes Villa did win a convincing victory in the city of Santa Cruz (outlined in black on the map), the lowland’s commercial center and major metropolis. He did even better along the eastern border, where economic interests look more to Brazil than to the rest on Bolivia. The city of Tarija in the south, center of Bolivia’s recently nationalized natural gas industry, also gave Reyes Villa the majority of its votes.

Bolivia has undergone a major political transformation in recent decades as democracy has become more fully entrenched and as power has shifted from the traditional elite to the indigenous majority. Such a transformation has generated substantial geographical divisions in Bolivian politics. Several years ago, as Morales rose to power, a major movement for autonomy gained strength in the eastern lowlands. But as the 2005 election map shows, the regional division in voting behavior was far more pronounced then than it was four years later in 2009. Calls for eastern separation are less pronounced now, as Morales’s popularity has grown in the east. In the urban highlands outside the Aymara zone, meanwhile, Morales has lost some of his support. As the regional political divide has lessened, the urban-rural divide seems to have grown.

Language and Voting In Romania

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As the previous post indicated, many Hungarian-populated areas lie outside of Hungary’s national borders. More than half of Hungary’s territory was stripped away in the post-WWI settlement, although most of the areas lost had non-Hungarian majorities. Hard-core Magyar (or Hungarian) nationalists who dream of reclaiming these lands often advertise their views by displaying maps of pre-Trianon Hungary (the 1920 Treaty of Trianon having reduced Hungary to its current rump status). Extreme nationalist candidates, however, typically receive fewer than 10 percent of the vote in Hungarian national elections.

In neighboring countries, ethnic Hungarians usually support their own political parties that call for language and cultural rights as well as local autonomy for Magyar-populated areas. In the Romanian presidential election of 2009, the correlation between ethnicity and voting was exceptionally strong; the map on the upper left shows Magyar populated areas in green, while the map on the right shows districts that voted for the Magyar-based political party in green as well. Political integration in Romania obviously has some way to go.

The map on the right was taken from an invaluable website called Electoral Geography 2.0 (http://www.electoralgeography.com/new/en/). Visit it to find a treasure trove of electoral maps.