TERRITORIAL VARIATIONS OF RECENT ELECTIONS RESULTS IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA AS A FACTOR OF ITS MODERN POLITICAL-GEOGRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT

The social development of Bosnia and Herzegovina largely depends on the level of success in overcoming the existing political problems, which are originated in the recent or more distant past. The structure of political subjects and election results within the country clearly reflects a post-conflict state in society that is primarily divided by ethnical, and secondarily by ideological, regional and social lines, generated in the ambience of an extremely complex political-territorial structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a branch of political geography which among other things studies ways to define electoral units and spatial models of variations of voters behavior, electoral geography has emphasized competency in explaining these phenomena. This paper is thematizing a geographical component of the factual political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, i.e. spatial differentiation of voting affinities towards existing political options through the analysis of a complicated electoral system and election results for the highest government level – Parliamentary Assembly of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Considering that electoral geography of Bosnia and Herzegovina was completely neglected so far, results of this research can be used as a foundation for its further development. The selected data from the results of political subjects at the recent general elections were analyzed from the aspect of their election results at the local level, in municipalities and cities. In this way, territorial distribution of voter preferences and its general patterns are clarified.