• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Max's election maps and assorted others

A quickie - the constituencies used for the First Protectorate Parliament in 1654. I believe they were the same for the Second Protectorate Parliament two years later, but I'm unsure.

These parliaments have often been considered ahead of their time, drastically reducing the number of boroughs and apportioning county seats very roughly by population - in England. Scotland and Ireland were, shall we say, more questionable, as a result of being assigned only 30 MPs each. This in spite of the fact that Scotland had about a million inhabitants at the time, Ireland between two and three million (I only have figures for 1700, but suffice it to say I doubt Ireland grew that heavily during the 17th century) and England and Wales around five million.

Every time I am reminded of just how much the population of Ireland declined during the 19th century (and still hasn't recovered), I am so ever deeply saddened.
 
A quickie - the constituencies used for the First Protectorate Parliament in 1654. I believe they were the same for the Second Protectorate Parliament two years later, but I'm unsure.

These parliaments have often been considered ahead of their time, drastically reducing the number of boroughs and apportioning county seats very roughly by population - in England. Scotland and Ireland were, shall we say, more questionable, as a result of being assigned only 30 MPs each. This in spite of the fact that Scotland had about a million inhabitants at the time, Ireland between two and three million (I only have figures for 1700, but suffice it to say I doubt Ireland grew that heavily during the 17th century) and England and Wales around five million.

View attachment 7139
This was also, I believe, the first time (and the last in a while) in which County Durham was represented at Westminster - Cromwell obviously not being entirely keen on the Palatine powers of the Prince-Bishops of Durham.
 
This was also, I believe, the first time (and the last in a while) in which County Durham was represented at Westminster - Cromwell obviously not being entirely keen on the Palatine powers of the Prince-Bishops of Durham.
I actually reflected on that while I was making the map. Relatedly, was the North of England really that sparsely populated back then? Lancashire having twice as many seats as Rutland felt a bit, um.
 
I actually reflected on that while I was making the map. Relatedly, was the North of England really that sparsely populated back then? Lancashire having twice as many seats as Rutland felt a bit, um.
Suspect that this was partially just the standard anti-Northern malapportionment, partly a result of the North having been generally supportive of the Royalists.

Population 'data' is hard to come by but by 1761, Lancs was over 300,000 and Rutland was less than 16,000, and I can't imagine the ratio would have changed sufficiently in 90 years to make that seat count fair.
 
Russia 1917 (provisional)
val-ru-1917.png

Just three territorial constituencies left now - Yakutia, the Amur (which included the Maritime Province and Sakhalin, in spite of local leaders crying foul, and featured some insane list splits as a result of this), and Kamchatka. Of course, there were also constituencies covering the different military formations, which elected 81 deputies between them and were generally Bolshevik strongholds, with the exception of the Romanian and Caucasus fronts which elected majorities of SRs.

There was also an extremely dank FPTP constituency for the workers on the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was based in Harbin and allowed elections to go through in spite of the local Tsarist administrators having tried to proclaim an "All-Russian Emergency Government" in March of 1917. The elections featured the aforementioned railway administrator standing for the Kadets, a Jewish businessman as the SR candidate, the chairman of the Harbin Soviet as the Bolshevik candidate and a local union agitator as the Menshevik candidate - the latter managing a narrow upset over the Bolshevik, the only constituency they won except for Transcaucasia.
 
Sverige 1921 (FK)
Another oddity the Swedish government reforms of the 1910s threw up was the last full elections for the First Chamber, held in September 1921 alongside the general. The reform that had seen female suffrage introduced and the constituencies merged into bigger ones also included merging the 30 existing First Chamber constituencies into 19 new ones, and also extending the term to eight years. The system of indirect election by county councils continued, with one notable change - cities outside county councils, which were previously eligible to send their own delegates to the First Chamber, now had to choose electors whose number matched the apportionment they would have if they were part of their county council. Stockholm and Gothenburg were exceptions to this, and continued to be constituencies in their own right.

The 19 constituencies were divided into eight groups, which were to replace their members in staggered elections as had been done by the six previously-existing constituency groups. But in order to inaugurate the new system, and because local election suffrage had also been equalised, all eight groups voted in 1921, and their members served out unequal terms. The members for Stockholm and Uppsala counties as well as Västerbotten and Norrbotten only sat for one year before their term was up, and the chamber continued to be gradually renewed each year until its abolition in 1970. Over time this came to benefit the Social Democrats greatly, as they held a consistent majority from around 1940 until the end, but this wasn't yet visible in 1921. The compact conservative majority that had characterised the old chamber, though - the one whose electorates were chosen by weighted suffrage that included corporate voters - went away here, and instead the Liberals were placed on the knife's edge, just as they were in the Second Chamber.

val-fk-1921.png
 
Last edited:
Sverige 1911 (FK)
The compact conservative majority that had characterised the old chamber, though - the one whose electorates were chosen by weighted suffrage that included corporate voters - went away here, and instead the Liberals were placed on the knife's edge, just as they were in the Second Chamber.
To wit, the other post-1900 countrywide elections, held in 1911 with councils elected by the 40-point franchise:

val-fk-1911.png
 
Has anyone ever done a FPTP South Africa map? I'd be interested to see what that looked like.
I would like to clarify at this point that this is meant to be a thread for me to post my election maps and assorted other work, rather than a discussion of election maps in general. Which isn't to say your post is unwelcome - it's an interesting enough thing to speculate on - but it would probably go better somewhere like the Global Elections Thread.
 
Another oddity the Swedish government reforms of the 1910s threw up was the last full elections for the First Chamber, held in September 1921 alongside the general. The reform that had seen female suffrage introduced and the constituencies merged into bigger ones also included merging the 30 existing First Chamber constituencies into 19 new ones, and also extending the term to eight years. The system of indirect election by county councils continued, with one notable change - cities outside county councils, which were previously eligible to send their own delegates to the First Chamber, now had to choose electors whose number matched the apportionment they would have if they were part of their county council. Stockholm and Gothenburg were exceptions to this, and continued to be constituencies in their own right.

The 19 constituencies were divided into eight groups, which were to replace their members in staggered elections as had been done by the six previously-existing constituency groups. But in order to inaugurate the new system, and because local election suffrage had also been equalised, all eight groups voted in 1921, and their members served out unequal terms. The members for Stockholm and Uppsala counties as well as Västerbotten and Norrbotten only sat for one year before their term was up, and the chamber continued to be gradually renewed each year until its abolition in 1970. Over time this came to benefit the Social Democrats greatly, as they held a consistent majority from around 1940 until the end, but this wasn't yet visible in 1921. The compact conservative majority that had characterised the old chamber, though - the one whose electorates were chosen by weighted suffrage that included corporate voters - went away here, and instead the Liberals were placed on the knife's edge, just as they were in the Second Chamber.

View attachment 7230

The idea of having Kristianstad län and Blekinge as a single district is a complete fuck you to the principle of "natural community". Also, Halland and parts of Småland?

What horrendous monstrosity is this?!
 
The idea of having Kristianstad län and Blekinge as a single district is a complete fuck you to the principle of "natural community".
I don't know, honestly. Kristianstads län is itself badly shaped, but I can certainly see a core region of northeast Scania and western Blekinge working as a natural community. It's just that Karlskrona, Simrishamn and Ängelholm all being lumped in with this is obviously insane.

That said, I don't think anyone was paying attention to natural communities when these boundaries were drawn. You have to remember that a) they had to have roughly equal constituency sizes, and b) since the county councils were the electors, it was impossible to split counties.
 
I've started picking through the FPTP spreadsheets, given that this Riksdag might not make it into the new year at the rate it's going. So far I've only done Blekinge, and the Social Democrats win every seat there, but the difference from 2014 is still quite stark. The SD get within two percentage points in both Lister and Ronneby under the party vote, while the Alliance nearly flips Karlskrona C under the bloc calculation.
 
Russia 1906 (prov)
I talked to @Heat a while ago about the possibility of mapping the State Duma elections in the Russian Empire, and well, today I found the electoral law in a source citation on the Russian Wikipedia. Turns out it's quite a simple affair, because the elections were held in the individual guberniyas (provinces), which were for the most part not subdivided into constituencies. The exception was that the 20 principal cities of the empire formed separate constituencies, which used a distinct voting method from the "rural" constituencies. Both, however, were indirect - there was a highly conservative four-class franchise that looked quite a lot like something @Ciclavex might use in his TL. The following groups were entitled to choose electors:

- Landowners who held more than a certain amount of land (the limit was between 100 and 650 desyatiny, or about 250 and and 1500 acres) depending on where you were) or held immovable property worth at least 15,000 rubles formed the first curia, which chose one elector per 2,000 voters.
- Urban voters, who either owned immovable property above a certain limit or met certain other specifications (which presumably also differed from place to place), formed the second curia, which chose one elector per 4,000 voters.
- Self-owning peasants above the age of 25 who did not hold enough land to qualify for the first curia formed the third curia, which met in the volosts (traditional self-government units) and chose representatives to uyezd-level (between a guberniya and a volost in size, about the same as a modern raion or a German Landkreis) assemblies who in turn chose one elector per 40,000 voters in the uyezd.
- Workers above the age of 25 employed in businesses with at least 50 employees formed the fourth curia, which chose representatives for each individual enterprise who in turn chose one elector per 90,000 voters.

Obviously, this left out a fair few people. Women, most notably, but also small business employees, anyone below 25 who didn't own large amounts of property, some classes of civil servants (most notably the police and military), and of course, every group that was usually disqualified from voting in systems like this - anyone bankrupt, anyone convicted by a criminal court, anyone under legal guardianship, and so on.

The electors all then met in an electoral assembly (all four curiae in the rural constituencies, only the second and fourth in the cities), and chose as many deputies as the guberniya was entitled to send, which was anywhere from one to fifteen. The discrepancies between this and the Constituent Assembly apportionment were such that I think both of them can't have been purely by population, and well, I trust the Provisional Government over the Tsarists on that particular score.

You'd expect this system to return a massively right-wing assembly, wouldn't you? Well, not in Russia. Remember that there had just been a revolution on, which was the reason they were even holding elections at all. Before this they'd chugged along "fine" under the mostly-appointed State Council, and many conservatives made it very clear that they preferred it that way by abstaining from the Duma elections. Most of the left, too, were upset by the lack of genuine democracy, and sat the election out (although the very moderate Trudoviks did stand and formed the second-largest party, and a few Social Democrats won election as independents). The result was that the Duma as elected was more or less Peak Radical Centrism, with the Constitutional Democratic Party (or Kadets for short), sometimes also called the Party of People's Freedom, as by far the largest party with 179 of 478 seats. Including the Trudoviks to their left and the Progressives and Democratic Reformists to their right, a liberal-democratic bloc held a large majority in the First Duma.

The majority elected Sergei Muromtsev, a law professor and prominent Kadet, to the Presidency of the Duma, and he tried his very best to control proceedings, but it was a complete write-off from the start. The deputies were all very angry, might've disagreed on what they were angry about, but did mostly agree that the Tsar was to blame. They passed resolutions calling for freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and the immediate release of political prisoners, and over three hundred grievances were brought against the government by individual deputies. The Tsar dissolved the Duma within two months of its session, but a group of Kadets including Muromtsev moved their session up the rail line to Viborg, where they signed the "Viborg Appeal" calling for the Tsar to respect the democratic process. For their trouble, they were thrown in jail and barred from participating in the next election, which ended up looking quite different as a result.

val-ru-1906.png

I wasn't able to find information for the Caucasus, Central Asia (mostly) or eastern Siberia, because elections there were held under special legislation and the electoral law made no specific apportionment for them (this is probably also true of western Siberia, only I found a separate document for the elections there). That said, those should amount to about 50-60 seats, so we have the vast majority shown. It's also worth noting that only some of the brown little mans are actually independents - probably the majority are cases where I wasn't able to find anything out, either because I was unable to parse the blurb in the Russian-language catalogue of deputies I used to work out party affiliations, or because they just straight-up weren't listed.
 
Back
Top