Pergamon Polrrical Geography. Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 129-146. I996 Copyright 0 1996 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0962-6298/96 $15.00 + 0.00 0962-6298(95)00076-3 Mapping politics: how context counts in electoral geography JOI IN AGNEW Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Aflairs, Syracuse liniuemip. $mxxse, NY 7.3244, USA AINILK-. %Xtoral geography. indeed political geography in general, has been largely concerned with mapping distributions which are then ‘explained’ by non-spatial factors. To the extent that spatial context itself ha5 counted, it has been largely in terms of locality or neighborhood effects which are presumed to work against ‘larger’ or ‘wider’ social processes. This paper takes issue with conventional mapping and locality-effect accounts of context on the ground that each involves a radical ontological separation of space and society that cannot be sustained. A concept of context-as-place is elaborated which abandons the identification of context with a single (local) geographical scale and provides a way of bridging the gap between abstract sociological and concrete geo- graphic’al analysis. The potential of the concept is explored in a series ot analyses of Italian electoral geography over the period 1947-04. It strikes me that a case can be made that Euro-American social science is going through the same kind of crisis of confidence that it did one hundred years ago. At that time neo- Kantianism called into question the comfortable positivism that had been a11 the fashion. Today theoretical and methodological pluralism are de rigueur. Established models of explanation are now perpetually on trial. That this coincides with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a world economy increasingly out of the control of the Great Powers suggests that the crisis in social science is in part a crisis of thinking that grew up around the nostrums and common sense about ‘theoretical cohrrence’ and ‘satisfactory methodology‘ of that long period of apparent political stability from 1945 to the 1970s. One manifestation of the crisis is the re-emergence of old intellectual debates that many thought were long since settled or transcended. An important example is the debate over the ‘universal’ versus the ‘particular’ in accounting for the features of a specific place or group of people. From the first point of view, wherever we are 011 the earth’s surface we arc subject to similar influences and as a result we are all more or less alike (and ever more so). Usually, a single transcendental factor or cause is invoked to account for a particular phenomenon irrespective of spatial variation in its incidence. From the second point of view. there are essential differences between peoples and places which art’ perpetuated because of persisting cultural and/ or economic divisions. These perspectives draw from two opposing traditions of social thought. The first, thdt of universal causes and effects, is usually associated with the physical sciences and positivistic social science. The second, that of particular reasons and intentions, is common to the’,humanities and