Xiaomin Meza, a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, and Daniela Sanchez-Ortega, professor of political science and the study of the political landscape at the University of California Santa Barbara, found that there are few strong relationships among states in the United States. “This is not a surprise – the United States is a federation of many contiguous States,” they wrote in the journal The American Political Scholar.

However, Meza and Sanchez-Ortega note that the nation – and indeed the entire world – is a network of interconnected regions. Each state plays a role in the functioning and development of this network. They were inspired by the work of the anthropologist Kenneth Ollinger, whose work on “political geography” helped them to understand that political geography could only be an integrated domain that could be applied to the entire continental community. In their study, they examined regional “network economics”; the way that regions influence and benefit from one another. “This study demonstrates the importance of network economics in understanding, explaining, and predicting the political landscape,” they explained. In other words, the network, in contrast to the macroeconomic, global economy, is fundamentally political. “Network economics is a framework for analyzing the interplay between networked actors, and networked networks are central to understanding the political geography of the world,” they explained.

This map is based on information gathered from the study.

This map of the political geography of the world was produced based on information gathered from the study. “This map is based on information gathered from the study. This map is based on information gathered from the study.

The researchers focused on the North American region and analysed the political geography of the US, Canada, and Mexico as well as the Atlantic region through an ethnographic and geographical approach. With the help of data gathered from the World Values Survey, they were able to model, predict, predict correctly and correctly, the geopolitical network of America, and the global network by identifying which regions are linked or inextricably link each other. In each case where the relationships between different regions had to be broken down, they found that those processes could be explained through information theory as a whole, an approach that Meza and Sanchez-Ortega would later recommend in their research. To their surprise, Meza and Sanchez-Ortega discovered that regions that are connected in economic, political and social terms are much more interconnected than those