«Ecological» School of Electoral Research: Formation, Current State and Prospects of Development

Purpose: to reveal the peculiarities of the formation of «ecological» (contextual, spatial) school of electoral research, characterization of its current state and determine the prospects for the development of this area of electoral studies. The results of the study: it was shown that the formation of the «ecological» school is associated with the expansion of the electoral corps in Western European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century in connection with the introduction of universal suffrage, as well as the strengthening of the role of elections in the political life of Western countries on the basis of representative democracy; determined that the predecessors of the «ecological» direction of electoral research were statistical scientists E. Engel and O. Fokardi, who studied electoral statistics through the prism of political and geographical approach; it is established that the founder of the «ecological» school of electoral research is A. Siegfried, who proposed a contextual («ecological») model of voting analysis, where the key factor determining the electoral position of the voter and his electoral behavior is the environment in which the voter is; proved that the institutionalization of the «ecological» school of electoral research is associated with the activities of F. Gogel, who formulated the basic credo of «ecologicalists» – any research in the field of electoral behavior should be based on comparing election results and factors that may explain these results; it is traced that the further development of the «ecological» school in the second half of the twentieth century – the beginning of the twenty-first century carried out by P. Bois, R. Aron, M. Dogan, R. Heberle, J. Sartori, G. Tingsten, and others. Conclusions: «ecological» (contextual, spatial) school of electoral research is mainly applied; it focuses on the development of statistical methods for the study of aggregated quantitative data for prognostic purposes; political and geographical approach to the analysis of voting results allows to identify spatial changes in voter behavior; prospects of «ecological» approach to the study of electoral behavior are associated with a combination of classical methods of «ecologicalists» with various techniques of applied analysis (including qualitative).