Abstract
Economic actors organize to influence public policy to their advantage. Geography factors into this process because the spatial distribution of economic endowments can shape what groups want, how well they organize, and how strongly their interests are represented. Political economy scholarship has long appreciated that interest-group politics has spatial dimensions, but space and place have only recently entered research designs systematically. Existing literature differs over the geography of collective action: some find that groups advance their interests best when members are concentrated—in close proximity or closely contested electorates—while others conclude that dispersion is more beneficial, leaving the advantages of geographic concentration and electoral dispersion unresolved. Another issue is the conditions under which geography cuts a line of cleavage between domestic coalitions. With advances in geographic software systems and proliferation of geocoded data, geography is poised to become a more central focus of political economy research.