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Max's election maps and assorted others

I am struck again by how it feels like America invented all the parts of proportional representation separately (the formula used for House apportionment, the idea of at-large elections for arguments like these ones, etc.) but never put them together.
Wasn’t list PR first used for municipal elections in Philadelphia in like the 1840s?
 
Wasn’t list PR first used for municipal elections in Philadelphia in like the 1840s?

Looking through 1849 newspapers gives no indication of there being PR, though the entire council was chosen at-large:

1627957388548.png

Additionally, during this time, mayoral elections where no candidate received 50% were thrown to the Council invariably resulted in the council voting unanimously for one candidate or the other. I can't say anything about anywhere or anywhen else, though.
 
I am struck again by how it feels like America invented all the parts of proportional representation separately (the formula used for House apportionment, the idea of at-large elections for arguments like these ones, etc.) but never put them together.


Los Angeles, twinned with Bristol.
Well, at least for at-large elections, part of it was to prevent The Wrong Sort of People from winning (sure it got rid of corrupt machine bosses, but it also effectively monopolized power in the WASP business elite more often than not).

And FWIW LA is back doing districts now.
 
Jönköping 1910 (wards), 1914
As I mentioned in other threads, last Saturday I visited the archive reading room in Jönköping, and came back with most of the resources needed to map most of their pre-1970 local elections. Now, like Växjö, the elections from before 1910 or so were nonpartisan at-large affairs, and so both very hard to map and uninteresting. Instead of bothering to trace all the old municipal boundaries I'm just going to start where things get interesting.

Jönköping's first ward division was introduced in 1909, and simply followed the local bodies of water (Vättern, Munksjön and the Taberg River) to trace a north-south line across the city's then-territory. This would at one point have been an equitable split, but industrialisation had led to huge growth most of which was in the west, around the matchstick factory and the Munksjö paper mill. So by 1909, this split already resulted in a 25-17 split between the west and east wards, which was dangerously uneven - 25 being the legal maximum number of seats possible to elect in a single ward at the time. So when the parish of Ljungarum, south of the city, was annexed into it the following year, a new division into three wards was drawn up, with the first ward covering most of the old east ward, the second straddling the Munksjön-Vättern canal and taking in the growing villa suburbs along the western shore of Vättern, and the third covering the workers' quarters along Munksjön's western shore as well as several more middle-class villa suburbs. This created a nearly-equal three-way split, and the council was increased from 42 to 45 seats, in part to divide more neatly into three.

jonk-valdistrikt-1910.png

These wards were not further divided into polling districts, which was hardly necessary anyway - turnout was extremely low due to the unequal voting system (see the first page of this very thread for a closer explanation of that), which made voting feel pointless (somewhat justifiably) for a lot of the poorer citizens who might qualify to vote but only get one vote as opposed to dozens for someone wealthier.

As an example of this, in a local history book I found a summary of the 1914 election results. It's worth noting immediately that elections were by halves at this point, so only 23 of the 45 seats were up - I haven't been able to find the composition of the other 22. Also, Jönköping's conservatives were divided into two different local parties, one of which (the Moderates) was allied to the Liberals in the coalition dubbed "Nykterhetens och sparsamhetens vänner" (The Friends of Temperance and Frugality), while the other stood a list of its own under the name Borgerliga valmansförbundet (The Citizens' Electoral League or, if you want a more direct translation, The Bourgeois Electoral League). The history book counts the Moderates and Liberals separately, so I've done the same here.

Suffice it to say that the BVF drew huge benefits from the electoral system. Although the Liberals won the popular vote by themselves, not even factoring in the Moderates, the BVF won nearly an absolute majority of the votes cast, and with 12 out of 23 seats, did win an absolute majority of seats on offer.

val-1914-jkg.png

The inset makes this one a bit weird, but there was really no good way to place it. I'm not sure this is the best way to map it though - in particular, it does kind of need to be highlighted that the third ward had a Liberal majority of 5pp over the BVF on the main map, but a majority of the same size over the Labour list in the inset. Pie charts may be in order, if I could make them look decent. Does anyone know if there's a way to easily render vector pie charts?
 
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Jönköping 1930
Anyway, so in 1919 the graded suffrage system was abolished and women given the vote for the first time. Turnout rapidly began to pick up over the 1920s, going from 33% in 1920 to 61% in 1930 (these figures are specifically for Jönköping), driven largely by fervent Social Democratic GOTV efforts that paid very clear dividends for the party. In places like Malmö and Helsingborg, they were able to take over the council immediately in 1919, although the role of the magistrates in urban governance meant their majorities were less significant than you might expect. Stockholm and Gothenburg followed soon after, and by the end of the decade most major cities had red council majorities.

Jönköping, however, was cut from different cloth. True, it was a heavily industrialised city, but it also had a large administrative and military apparatus present, and significantly, a huge percentage of the population were some flavour of evangelical Christian, from the low-church Lutheran revivalists of the Evangelical Fatherland Foundation to the Methodists and Baptists to the fledgling Pentecostal movement, which came to Sweden in the 1910s and quickly began poaching members and even whole congregations from the existing Baptist community. This, coupled with the still fairly restrictive laws around free religious practice (it had been fully decriminalised in the 1880s, but there were still restrictions on the types of political office religious dissenters could hold in 1930), meant that a large chunk of the lower middle classes in Jönköping were fiercely loyal to the Liberal Party, which at the time was the leading voice of religious pluralism in Swedish politics. Some 88% of the city voted for prohibition in the August 1922 referendum, and the Moderate-Liberal coalition retained a fairly robust presence on the council even as the Liberals were taking a drubbing in most other places.

The result was that the 1930 election saw a relatively comfortable 25-20 majority for the combined right, dividing into 14 seats for the BVF (the conservative list) and 11 for the Moderate-Liberal coalition, whose evangelical orientation can be discerned from the label "Friends of Temperance and Frugality" (Nykterhetens och sparsamhetens vänner). However, the Social Democrats were in fact on the rise, most of the city's industrial workers evidently caring more about economic issues than religious ones. They won some 44% of the vote, making them the most-voted single list by more than a 10pp margin, and their voteshare would only increase as the 1930s dragged on.

val-1930-jkg.png
 
SVFI: val 1921 (ny)
I've been fucking around with the Swedish Finland TL again, mainly changing some dates around to make the time gap between the Great War and the present day smaller, so with that in mind, have a map.

svfi-val-1921.png

The 1921 elections to the Lower House of the Riksdag would be the last before the Great War, and the last to take place using essentially the system of elections devised under Gustav III. The Lower House was formed out of the old Estates of Burghers and Peasants, and urban and rural areas remained strictly separate for electoral purposes. Two-thirds of the house was elected from single-member constituencies based on judicial districts, with all landowners eligible to vote, while the other third were elected from the cities with an electorate of property holders as well as those earning above a certain income bracket. This was a result of the freedom of enterprise reforms of the Ungern-Sternberg ministry in the 1880s, prior to which the urban members had been elected by the guilds and magistrates of each city. The only other significant change happened before the 1914 elections, at which point the three major cities switched from bloc voting to a majoritarian list system whereby the largest party would receive two thirds of the seats and the runner-up the remaining third. Although this looks like a benevolent reform, it was in fact done to exploit divisions in the urban Cap organisation, and it would serve this function admirably for the three elections the system was in use.

The preceding elections had been held in 1917, and saw an enormous landslide for the Hats (officially known as the National Party since the 1860s), which turfed out the previous Cap (Liberal) minority administration of Alexander von Friesen and won a number of constituencies formerly regarded as Cap strongholds. This was particularly true of the rural south, which was naturally inclined towards religious conservatism and protectionism, and grew more and more alienated by the Caps focusing on free trade and liberal reforms in government. The loss of their conservative wing would presage the second great split of the Liberal Party after the War.

The first great split had already occurred, creating the Radical Party, occasionally called the "Phrygians" as a nod to the type of cap worn by the French revolutionaries. The Radicals had formed as early as the 1870s, and indeed there had more or less always been an awkward squad of urban liberals positioning themselves to the left of the Caps. The New Liberal Party had formed in the 1830s to push for free trade and free enterprise against the conservative Cap leadership of the time, and folded into the Liberal Party alongside the "Peace Caps" after Gustav V's War in the 1860s - at the same time as the Hats and "War Caps" formed the National Party. The Liberals would soon turn out to be simply the Caps under a new name, leading disenchanted radicals to bolt out once again and form their own party. This carried on as a minor third party until the fall of the Friesen ministry in 1917, which left the Caps and the Phrygians nearly equal in seat share and raised the serious question of who would actually be the main opposition.

But these questions would be settled by the 1921 elections, which did see the Hats re-elected, but the Caps crawling back in the north and east to reclaim their status as the clear opposition. The Phrygians did keep their standing in the major cities, but in industrial districts they were coming under fire from an entirely new force. Although there had been various labour candidates elected in 1914 and 1917, some with Phrygian support and some not, 1921 saw the first foray of the Swedish Labour Party as an organised nationwide force. Although held back by the restrictive franchise, twenty-three Labour candidates were able to win seats, and the party would only keep growing in the years that followed.

Adolf Lagerheim, the "golden boy" of the Hats who had now led them to two election victories, looked set to spend five years implementing his party programme. However, his dreams would be cut short when the latest wave of unrest in Turkey led to Russian intervention, which activated the anti-Russian defensive alliance between Turkey, Britain, Prussia and Sweden and, in turn, the Franco-Russian defensive alliance against Prussia, sending Europe into cataclysmic war and effectively ensuring that the thing Lagerheim would be most remembered for would be neither his great election victories nor his benevolent social reforms. By the time the war was over, Sweden looked very different from before...
 
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Helsinki 2021
And something from OTL to go with that.

Back in June, Finland held municipal elections - I haven't been following Finnish politics quite as closely of late, I'm sorry to say, and so it kind of slipped me by. But now I've done the first local contest, and it's a place that's been sorely missing from my portfolio up until now: the capital itself, Helsinki.

Helsinki's location resembles Stockholm's, being coastal cities surrounded by islands and rocky peninsulas, but whereas Stockholm has been the capital of Sweden since the Middle Ages, Helsinki was a provincial backwater until Tsar Alexander I designated it as the capital of Finland in 1812, largely because he thought it would be shrewd to create a new capital rather than allow the Fenno-Swedish aristocracy to carry on as normal over in Åbo and potentially form pro-Swedish conspiracies. He ordered the German architect Carl Ludwig Engel, who happened to be stopping by at the time, to draw up a plan for a grand neoclassical city in the mould of Saint Petersburg, and even today much of central Helsinki is in a distinctly Russian neoclassical style. When Åbo burned down in 1827, the university and most of the remaining institutions (with the notable exception of the Lutheran archdiocese - Helsinki would not get a bishop until 1959) were moved over as well. Most of the Nyland coast, including Helsinki, was traditionally Swedish-speaking territory, and as most bureaucrats and educated people were Fenno-Swedes, it remained so until the 1880s, at which point industrialisation drove massive numbers of Finnish-speakers to move from the rural interior to the capital. This pattern of movement continues to this day, and today only about 6% of the population speaks Swedish natively.

Politically, the city is traditionally divided between the main Helsinki peninsula, which is wealthy, dominated by professionals and historically was largely Swedish-speaking, and as such leans conservative, and the suburbs in the northeast, around Hakaniemi and Kallio, which were entirely Finnish-speaking from the beginning, were heavily working-class and extremely dense, and voted strongly for the left. Again, comparisons to Stockholm are not unfair - the area south of the city centre is Östermalm, Kamppi and Töölö are Norrmalm, and Kallio is Södermalm. Like Södermalm, Kallio was targeted for slum clearance after the war, and in 1946 the city annexed a huge swath of rural land to build new housing estates on, partly to rehouse people from Kallio and partly to house the massive amount of internal migrants expected to arrive in the city during the following decades. That was an accurate prediction - Helsinki doubled in population between 1940 and 1970 - and while Finland never had anything like a Million Programme on the national level, Helsinki's municipal housing policy again strongly resembles that of Stockholm in the same period. Although some new estates were built in the northwest, the vast majority of them were in the east, across the bay from the city, which means that the east-west divide continues to show up on the map. Kallio itself and its surroundings have been heavily gentrified in the past few decades, which creates an interesting second divide between gentrified working-class areas, which tend to support the Greens and the Left Alliance, and non-gentrified ones, which have both a strong Social Democratic vote and a rising True Finn one.

This division on the left means that Helsinki ends up looking quite right-wing on the map, but this is only sort of true - in 2021, the red-green bloc (if we can call it that in Finland) won 42 seats to 43 for the combined right. As with most national capitals, localism is not big in Helsinki, and the nine parties represented on the city council are the same ones that sit in Parliament.

val-fi-k-2021-hel.png

A note on administrative structures - traditionally, Helsinki had a Lord Mayor (ylipormestari) elected by the council who served as the chief executive of the municipal administration, theoretically as a non-political role, but in practice usually occupied by a politician agreed upon by the parties. This position has never been held by a member of the left, and the Coalition usually has it on lockdown. For the 2017 elections, Helsinki decided to join several other Finnish cities in adopting a position of Mayor (pormestari) who serves the same function but also chairs the municipal executive and is formally considered an elected official. Again, the Coalition has supplied both holders of this position, although it is worth noting that the current Mayor, Juhana Vartiainen, is a former Social Democrat who defected to the Coalition in 2015 because he thought Antti Rinne was too much of a radical. The Coalition, Social Democrats and Greens form a sort of informal grand coalition that controls the council, and in addition to Vartiainen as Mayor, the Greens' Fatim Diarra was elected to chair the council. Diarra is probably (I can't be entirely sure, but it feels like it stands to reason) the first black woman to hold such a high position in a major Finnish city, and had a long history as a feminist and anti-racist campaigner in addition to serving on the council since 2017.
 
Oh, and another thing - this January, as a result of the Marin government’s healthcare reforms, Finland will be holding regional elections (of a sort) for the first time ever. It’s been a goal of the Centre Party to set up elected councils on a level between the national and municipal since at least the Vanhanen government, when a trial scheme was set up in Kainuu, and as a result of their participation in the Popular Front, they’re finally being rolled out nationwide. Unlike the Kainuu test council, these are ad-hoc bodies that will run healthcare and healthcare only, but even so it’s an encouraging step - having all healthcare run by local councils is completely wild to me.

These will essentially be based on the regions created in 1997, but Uusimaa will be split four ways due to its size, and Helsinki won’t be part of any healthcare region at all.
 
Finland 1916
In 1916, Finland held its last elections under the rule of Grand Prince Nicholas II (better known outside of Finland as Nikolai II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias). It was also the only election held under universal suffrage in Finland that returned a one-party majority, in this case for the Social Democrats. Although Finland didn't fully participate in the Russian war effort, being exempt from conscription and protected from its local defence forces being sent outside Finland without the Senate's consent, the privations of life during a world war nonetheless made themselves felt, and by 1916 the Finns were just as sick of it as their Russian neighbours. The SDP's big victory came after several years of growth, aided by the short and unpredictable election cycles that were the result of the Diet constantly getting into conflict with the administrators appointed from Saint Petersburg who had the power to dissolve it.

The politics of 19th century Finland had been divided into two broad factions within the ruling class: the Svecomans, who wanted to maintain the traditional ruling elite and the Swedish language as a way to tie Finland more closely to the Germanic world, and the Fennomans, who sought to make Finnish the official language of the state and promoted the universal teaching of Finnish culture. The Russians gave tacit support to the Fennomans early on, seeing in them a way to break Finland off from Sweden culturally and thus reduce the risk of Sweden trying to reclaim its former province, and along with the robust Finnish-speaking majority everywhere but the coastal regions and the cities, this gave them the clear upper hand from about the 1860s onwards. The Svecomans switched tactics as a result, moving from defending the dominance of the Swedish language and culture to protecting the Swedish-speaking minority. Among other things, this meant giving the rural Swedish-speaking populations in Nyland and Ostrobothnia a look-in for the first time in decades, and promoting their traditional culture as a counterpoint to the Finnish national romanticism of the Fennomans. When universal suffrage was granted in 1906, the remaining Svecomans formed the Swedish People's Party (Svenska folkpartiet, SFP) as a way to advance the interests of all Swedish-speakers, and this essentially remains their function to this day.

By this point, the Fennoman movement was itself falling into discord. The loosely organised Finnish Party (Suomalainen puolue, SP) lost the support of Saint Petersburg as soon as it became clear that it was in a dominant position, and under Alexander III, the policy of the Russian government switched from supporting Finnish culture to Russification. In 1894, the Finnish Party split in half, with a younger generation of politicians demanding a harder line against Russia and support for immediate moves toward independence. This group formed the Young Finnish Party (Nuorsuomalainen puolue, NSP), taking its name by analogy to groups like Young Italy and Young Ireland, and quite soon a regional dichotomy emerged with the more socially stratified west supporting the "Old" Finnish Party and the more egalitarian east supporting the Young Finns.

The truly intense period of Russification started in 1899, after Nicholas II appointed Nikolai Bobrikov to the position of Governor-General of Finland. Bobrikov's instructions included reforming the Senate (the combined supreme court and main governing body) to bring it under tighter Russian control, introducing Russian as an official language and curtailing Finland's military autonomy, which brought such intense resistance that the period between 1899 and 1905 is known in Finnish history as the "Years of Oppression" (sortovuodet/ofärdsåren). Bobrikov's rule only ended in June 1904, when a young nationalist named Eugen Schauman assassinated him. Schauman killed himself immediately after killing Bobrikov, which made him an instant national hero - in 2004, he was voted the 34th greatest Finn in history in a nationwide poll conducted by Yle. Russification further cemented the divide in the Fennoman movement, as the Old Finns supported appeasement, arguing that to resist openly would invite the Russians to dismiss all remaining Finnish officials and replace them with Russians, while the Young Finns continued to favour resistance.

After the 1905 revolution in Russia, however, the authorities eased off the Russification programme and allowed direct elections to a unicameral Finnish parliament, which would continue to share power with the Senate. These elections were open to all adult Finns regardless of sex, which made it one of the first countries in the world to give women the vote (depending on your definition of "country"). This meant that the Finnish parties would have to stake out economic policies as well as cultural ones, which proved somewhat awkward for the Young Finns in particular. The Old Finns were largely paternalist conservatives, who were sceptical towards a complete free market as well as expanding workers' rights, but the Young Finns found themselves split between a conservative and a liberal faction. The "swallows" (pääskyt), led by the high court judge Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, supported a traditional social order as well as strict constitutionalism and resistance to Russian commands, while the "sparrows" (varpuset), led by civil servant and law professor Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, supported liberal reforms. This division would become completely untenable once Finland won its independence, which is why you don't see the Young Finns around today, but in 1916 the threat of Russification was still present enough that the party kept itself together.

The SDP emerged onto the scene around the same time, closely tied to the trade unions and associations of smallholders in the countryside - Finland was still overwhelmingly rural and agrarian at this time, but because it was also extremely poor, socialism held appeal for a lot of Finnish peasants. Like most social democratic parties of its day, it was modelled on the SPD in Germany, and like the SPD, it included elements ranging from moderate social reformers to outright revolutionaries. But like its bourgeois counterparts, the SDP was held together by its struggle against an outside enemy - though whether that enemy was the Russian autocrats or the Finnish bourgeoisie was very much in the eye of the beholder.

They weren't the only social movement to take root in rural Finland at this time, though, and really we'd be remiss not to talk about the Agrarian League (Maalaisliitto, ML). The Finnish Agrarians differ from their Swedish and Norwegian counterparts in that they had one clear early leader and ideologue: Santeri Alkio, a writer and former Young Finn from Ostrobothnia who left the party after concluding its ideology was too far out of step with the needs and interests of rural people. Alkio took a great interest in the education and self-improvement of the peasant class, while also opposing and fearing the growth of socialism in rural Finland - this led him to formulate an ideology that very closely resembles political Catholicism, only without the clericalist aspects (although Alkio was a devout evangelical Christian, he opposed the established church). The Agrarian ideology was focused around decentralisation, community self-improvement and self-organisation, and social and economic reforms to improve the lives of the peasants. Alkio also supported independence and democracy, generally following the Young Finn line on those issues while continuing to stress the importance of rural people organising themselves rather than following the dictates of Helsinki intellectuals. In time, the Agrarians would become one of Finland's natural governing parties, being in power from independence until 1987 with only a few interruptions, none longer than two years. It took them a while to gain traction though, and in 1916 they were the second-smallest party in the Diet, beating only the incoherent and faction-ridden remnant of the Christian Workers' League (Kristilinnen työväen liitto, KTL), which had once had ambitions of rivalling the SDP but now held only a single seat in Finland Proper.

The Diet elected in 1916 would serve for about a year and a half, sitting through the fall of Nicholas II in the February Revolution and the collapse of the Russian war effort under the Provisional Government, but met its end when it passed a law transferring all political power except foreign affairs and defence to its own jurisdiction, which caused the Provisional Government to order its dissolution. Although not all Finns agreed that they were still able to do so, early elections nevertheless went ahead in October. By then, events were coming to a head in Russia once again...

val-fi-1916.png
 
Ooh, I didn't know Finland had free elections under Russian rule.
Finland continued to be governed under the Swedish Instrument of Government (the 1772 one) right up until independence, for all that people like Bobrikov wished it weren't so. Even today it follows a purer version of the 1734 legal code than Sweden itself does.
 
I see the Holstein-Gottorp remain the reigning house?
Indeed - the PoD (although I have no real interest in fleshing out the immediate post-PoD parts of the TL) is that Gustav III isn’t assassinated, and goes on to reform the Riksdag to a bicameral system, which eventually leads the old parties to come back out of the woodworks when he dies.

Also, the whole thing where Napoleon goads Russia into taking Finland to punish Sweden for not joining the Continental System doesn’t happen, although Napoleon does still come to power and the Empire survives for over a century thanks to something like the Frankfurt Protocol getting implemented. It takes until the Great War in the 1920s for France to a) become a republic again, and b) lose the Rhineland (but not Alsace-Lorraine or any of OTL Belgium) to Prussia.
 
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