Elections to the State Russian Imperial Duma of the third call: the possibilities of research on the base of GIS

The article reveals the possibilities of researching the elections to the State Russian Imperial Duma of the third call on the base of approaches, methods and technologies of historical geo-information science, such as creating geo-information systems (GIS) and using spatial visualization and analysis. The author created GIS maps which gave the possibility to define territorial allocation of Russian European provinces according to their modernization and other socio-cultural indexes, such as literacy, religion, social status, political preferences and connection of the results of elections to the State Russian Imperial Duma of the third call with these characteristics. The approach reveals how modernization and the mentioned socio-cultural characteristics influenced political preferences of electorate and the election results. The specific character of correlation between socio-cultural factors and the election results in the existing elector system has been discovered. In particular, the article underlines the specific interaction of socio-cultural factors and election processes and their results during the elections in the conditions of unequal electoral laws, which were still oriented on the representation of different groups’ interests. The article shows that, in the mentioned conditions, there was no influence of modernization level, literacy, religion, and social status on the election results, which is explained by the electoral laws and the control of the authorities. Only the factors determined by the electoral laws or flowing from them had a direct impact on the election results. These were the norms of representation, membership to certain social stratum, and land owning. The author concludes on the possibility of using the geo-information technologies in studying the elections in the last imperial period of Russia and demonstrates that GIS-systems can be an adequate instrument for visualization and analysis in such research.