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Max's election maps and assorted others

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Nanwe said:
It is amazing how they all somehow shift to vote the same - Albertans don't seem to tolerate division very well.
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My best guess is that culturally there isn't actually that much difference between the sort of people who live in Edmonton and those who live further out in the sticks, especially in this period.
 
Alex Richards said:
My best guess is that culturally there isn't actually that much difference between the sort of people who live in Edmonton and those who live further out in the sticks, especially in this period.
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The alternative theory is that this is still an era when horse trading between individual representatives in the legislature still is the main venue through which government policy is shaped and implemented, as opposed to "there is a party conference, the agenda is set, then the representatives vote to carry it out in the legislature". In such an environment, if it looks like the PC are going to form the government anyway (and are going to win by a ridiculous landslide to boot), it "makes sense" to vote for a PC representative for your constituency, because that means that local concerns will have an influence in government policy, giving the constituency a greater voice, so to speak.
 
Alex Richards said:
My best guess is that culturally there isn't actually that much difference between the sort of people who live in Edmonton and those who live further out in the sticks, especially in this period.
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Edmonton would go on to become the primo opposition stronghold (which we can kind of see the seeds of in 1955) - Premier Getty lost his Edmonton seat in 1989 despite winning the election, and the NDP swept Edmonton in particular in 2015 and held most of the seats in the region in 2019. Now, Calgary on the other hand…
 
Ares96 said:
Edmonton would go on to become the primo opposition stronghold (which we can kind of see the seeds of in 1955) - Premier Getty lost his Edmonton seat in 1989 despite winning the election, and the NDP swept Edmonton in particular in 2015 and held most of the seats in the region in 2019. Now, Calgary on the other hand…
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I think this is true today but it's a relatively recent phenomenon - I remember my impressions of Alberta in the early 90s certainly fit Alex's idea of it all being one demos. I think even the most urban people were culturally thinking of themselves as frontier cowboys. It probably helps the sense of urban-rural commonality that back then it was a lot more mono-ethnic (at least in terms of visible minorities, obviously there's the Ukrainians and so on).
 
Thande said:
I think this is true today but it's a relatively recent phenomenon - I remember my impressions of Alberta in the early 90s certainly fit Alex's idea of it all being one demos. I think even the most urban people were culturally thinking of themselves as frontier cowboys. It probably helps the sense of urban-rural commonality that back then it was a lot more mono-ethnic (at least in terms of visible minorities, obviously there's the Ukrainians and so on).
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Yeah, it is worth noting that the Liberals only swept Edmonton in the 80s and 90s because a) they went way off to the right of the federal party and basically tried to out-Tory the Tories, and b) their leader was the former mayor of Edmonton.
 
I must say, putting the FUQ to the right of the BNL seems a bit odd, frankly. The FUQ weren't really neo-fascists as much as a mix between M5S and libertarianism, like a populist version of the PLI, and neutral on the monarchy question.

One of the more interesting suggestions by Giannini was a directly-elected Supreme Court that would also function as a Constitutional Court, so like a state-level Supreme Court in the US.
 
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Nanwe said:
I must say, putting the FUQ to the right of the BNL seems a bit odd, frankly. The FUQ weren't really neo-fascists as much as a mix between M5S and libertarianism, like a populist version of the PLI, and neutral on the monarchy question.
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It’s a fair point - I based the alignment on the Poujadists being on the far right of the French chamber diagram in 1956, but as you say there’s probably a case to be made that neither group was on the far right as such. You’re the one who’s actually studied them, so I’m going to move them to the left of the BNL.
 
Ares96 said:
It’s a fair point - I based the alignment on the Poujadists being on the far right of the French chamber diagram in 1956, but as you say there’s probably a case to be made that neither group was on the far right as such. You’re the one who’s actually studied them, so I’m going to move them to the left of the BNL.
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They're fascinating actually because as you say they both had a similar social base, but the UDCA/UFF radicalised whereas the FUQ collapsed, largely down to their respective founders, Poujade came from an Action française background whereas Giannini was a liberal journalist half-Neapolitan, half-British, and who thought the PLI leadership too upper-class and elitist (he wasn't wrong) and the upper bourgeoisie too willing to compromise with the left.

The Uomo Qualunque is a very genuinely odd entity, perhaps very southern Italian in its anti-political nature (so like the M5S), and although there was a strategy by neo-fascists to infiltrate the movement (as it lacked, in the beginning, any internal discipline deliberately), Giannini would then began to push strongly against the phenomenon through purges.

UFF was definitely on the far-right of the French spectrum by 1956 though, and by 1958 it cannot be questioned. But when the UDCA started in 1954, there were many accusations, not wrongly, of being yet another Communist front (the PCF did try to infiltrate them).
 
And something I normally try to avoid - a WIP. I'm going home for the weekend and there's just no way I'm finishing this before then, but I still thought I'd post what I have because it's sort of interesting.

val-it-1948-sen.png

The 1946 electoral law for the Italian Senate was... weird. As best I can tell, the idea was to create a German-style MMP system, which would let candidates stand for election as individuals in single-member constituencies while also allowing for proportionality in each region. There was just a pair of slight caveats insofar as a) there were the same number of single-member constituencies as there were senators, which obviously scuppered the idea of local representation somewhat as it forced some winning candidates to not be able to take their seats, and b) the only actual threshold for a candidate to be guaranteed their seat was if they won 65% or more of the vote. This was obviously a bit of an ask in a multi-party system - a fair few rural DC candidates managed it in 1948, but by the 60s it was essentially just the SVP who were able to elect their candidates in this way. For everyone else, the system worked more like the Danish one, with the constituencies essentially only serving to nominate local candidates and get them elected within their party lists - there was a D'Hondt distribution at the regional level (unlike the Chamber, which used largest-remainder with the Imperiali quota), and the seats within each party's allocation went to the most successful local candidates rather than being distributed through a regional list.

Essentially, it was a system that encouraged as much local pork-barrelling as a senator could muster while also allowing local voters no direct input on who represented their local constituency except under extraordinary circumstances. No wonder Tangentopoli happened.
 
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Ares96 said:
On the Chamber maps you can usually see the outline of the Venetian Republic, but that's not true here because Trentino by itself is just as deep blue as the rest of the region, but it gets much lighter when the SVP are in the equation.
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And except for the Rovigo area, in the mouth of the Po, apparently that area of Veneto was so poor as to be considered the Mezzogiorno of the North. The PSI had a strong presence in the area before WWI, but I imagine that as elsewhere most of that support went to the PCI
 
Nanwe said:
And except for the Rovigo area, in the mouth of the Po, apparently that area of Veneto was so poor as to be considered the Mezzogiorno of the North. The PSI had a strong presence in the area before WWI, but I imagine that as elsewhere most of that support went to the PCI
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IIRC a lot of that activity was among rice growers, who a) proliferated in the Polesine, which was warm and humid enough to make rice growing feasible, and b) were to a large extent women. This example of women workers organising themselves was of interest to the Swedish women's movement in the 70s, who took one of their anthems and made it their own:



Alex Richards said:
That very narrow district in Rome is... odd.
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In general they seem to have gone for a "just draw slices of the city" approach, which I would normally fault them for, but AFAIK a lot of Rome's suburban structure genuinely worked like that at the time. Of course, the absolutely massive post-war growth (IIRC, in 1948 Rome was only just barely the largest city in Italy) messed with that, but you could say that about any number of these boundaries really. And yet they stayed unchanged until 1992 everywhere but Friuli.
 
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