کیومرث یزدان پناه درو

Electoral geography is often considered a major branch of behavioral geography, which takes into account certain political functionalities. This analysis is particularly important in the case of Iran, where political behaviors and social, behavioral, and geographical complexities take on a unique form. This in turn certainly impacts the combination and function of different political institutions in Iran, especially in the case of presidential elections, at various local, regional, and national scales. In this light, the present study proceeds with an exploratory analysis of spatial data on different electoral sectors to find a balanced spatial division (zoning) of Iran based on principles of electoral geography, which also provides certain indications into existing spatial inequalities. The analysis is based on the assumption that concepts of electoral geography-consisting of a diverse range of spatial-political aspects of election-integrated with exploratory analyses, may prove helpful in establishing fair elections in Iran. The results of this study reveal that the distribution of election votes shows a significantly positive general spatial autocorrelation, which is indicative of the spatial clustering of votes in Iran. Regarding the relationship between the distribution of votes and social and economic variables, votes tallied for Rouhani had positive and significant correlations with factors of relative population aged 25 to 64, relative student population studying at higher education, the ratio of university educated population, unemployment rates, rental rates, housing quality, and the rate of urbanization in all cities. However, for Raeesi, the analysis of the votes indicates a positive and significant correlation between relative population aged 0 to 24, population above 64, employment rates, ratio of households with disabled members, house ownership and ruralization.

After the 2015 refugee crisis, the far right parties are not marginal anymore and they have become mainstream in most of the European countries. The present paper aims to (1) portray a perspective of the rise of the far right in Europe with emphasis on their characteristics specially Euroscepticism, nationalism and xenophobia (2) provide a summary for the main cause for the rise of the far right parties (3) to come to some further insights about their supporters and social base by analyses and review of the prior researches. In this article, we focus on immigration and refugee crises as the main reasons for the recent success of Far right parties in Europe, the study reveals that these parties benefited from the protest vote and rise of dissatisfaction among the citizen toward the ruling elites, however, the refugee crisis and arrival of foreign immigrants to Europe, and particularly Germany, and poor performance of traditional political left and right parties are among the main causes for their rise.

The geopolitical competition between India on one hand and the China-Pakistan axis, on the other hand, have made various researchers investigate the different, unknown, and influential aspects of this competition. One of the fields that can influence the analysis of these competitions is political geography. Therefore, in the present research, the researchers have tried to create a new point of view regarding Iran's position in the geopolitical competition between China and India by relying on the sources and analyses that have been done by Indian authors and researchers regarding the issue of China-India competition and also Iran's position in this competition. The authors of this research adopted a meta-analytic approach to drive conclusions from the collected data. Authentic documents in books, scientific-research articles, reliable internet websites and important international news agencies were analyzed to collect the relevant data. The findings suggest that regarding geopolitical access, both China and India are persistently seeking to facilitate their connection to Eurasia through Iran and Pakistan and thus increase their geopolitical weight to enjoy a better position in world politics in the 21 st century.