THE NEIGHBOURHOOD EFFECT IN A LOCAL ELECTION

One of the more popular ideas in electoral geography is that there is a positive correlation between residential proximity and voting behaviour. Often referred to as the neighbourhood effect, the idea is quite simply that individuals within a given local area tend to vote similarly. The process involves, it is suggested, social contacts between neighbours leading to political discussion and information flow which exerts an influence on the way people vote. Closely related to, but distinguishable from the neighbourhood effect is the friends-and-neighbours effect whereby neighbours of a particular candidate will tend to know him better, discuss him more, and support him more avidly than they will other candidates. Since the concepts of the neighbourhood effect and the friends-and-neighbours effect have been adopted into the literature of political geography, and have become central as explanatory models for certain spatial patterns of voting behaviour,¹ the rather inconclusive and contradictory findings of researchers using these concepts require examination, and the concepts and process require an empirical test.     

Book reviews

In Search of Khayyam. By Ali Dashti (translated by L. P. Elwell‐Sutton). New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. 276pp. $11.00.

The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946. By Vartan Gregorian. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969. 398pp. $17.50.