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Max's election maps and assorted others

This is going to be one of those 'and now I'm stopping because it stops making sense' cases isn't it.

You've reminded me that I've got the start of a Morocco map somewhere that floundered on not being able to find the right boundaries for Casablanca.
 
This is going to be one of those 'and now I'm stopping because it stops making sense' cases isn't it.
I mean, the party system quite brutally starts to make sense in 1964. It's really a very good example of how you should always be careful what you wish for when it comes to this kind of thing.
 
In one of those odd coincidences, these maps come just as I read a detective novel which includes throwaway mentions of how the inspector's plans rely on the baddy not following Brazilian politics (of 1927).

I feel bad that my first comment on this thread isn't responding to any of max's wonderful maps but what?

What kind of police plan relies on the criminal not following Brazilian politics?
 
I feel bad that my first comment on this thread isn't responding to any of max's wonderful maps but what?

What kind of police plan relies on the criminal not following Brazilian politics?
This is one of Freeman Wills Croft's Inspector French novels, which I may post about on the detective thread at some point. He'd found out the baddy (who'd stolen a lot of money) had applied for a Brazilian passport, and used this and other factors to trace him to having paid some of the money into buying Brazilian government stocks to set up a nest egg for when he fled the UK. French persuades the stockbrokers to let him send a telegram and letter to the baddy telling him there's been a political upheaval and the government stocks are about to crash, so they need to have an urgent meeting to discuss whether he wants to sell them off quick and do something else - which he uses to lure the baddy out to a faked meeting.

His internal monologue does indeed muse that this relies on the criminal not following Brazilian politics, which seemed like an amusingly out-of-context sentence to me at the time.
 
I still don't understand how they manage to count this at all, never mind only take a day or so.
Well, there’s no transfers involved, and presumably they count in the individual polling stations. That’s two points in their favour, and tbh, I have to assume there’s also very few voters who bother to distribute their votes instead of just putting the cross to a party list.
 
Well, there’s no transfers involved, and presumably they count in the individual polling stations. That’s two points in their favour, and tbh, I have to assume there’s also very few voters who bother to distribute their votes instead of just putting the cross to a party list.
Transfers seem easier than 3 votes to deal with to me, never mind 80 (unless you're going old Australian Senate).
Fair point on the distribution, but can't you put a cross to a party list and give(/deny?) some to specific candidates on it? That doesn't seem much less complex to deal with, and likely to be a lot more common.
And I guess it's easier now with Excel, but the idea of totting up all the votes from the different stations under this even with pocket calculators is terrifying.
 
Brazil 1945/1950/1955/1960 (P)
So Brazil's presidential elections during the Fourth Republic (otherwise known as the Populist Republic) were a bit of a mess. In 1945, the armed forces overthrew Getúlio Vargas and proclaimed free elections, in which Army general Eurico Gaspar Dutra and Air Force brigadier Eduardo Gomes stood as the main candidates. Dutra was supported by Vargas from behind the scenes, and endorsed by the PSD, which was essentially a formalised national organisation for the various Getulist political machines in the different states. This superior organisation turned out good enough to put Dutra in the presidential palace, and to give his allies in the PSD a majority in the Congress.

val-br-p-1945.png

Dutra's main achievement in office was the 1946 constitution, which maintained a system of government styled after the US, but with direct elections for President and Vice President (the latter on a separate ballot, which accounts for about half of the confusingness of the period) and the Chamber of Deputies elected by PR. The new constitution also gave women the vote, which they'd technically already had under Vargas, except that all suffrage under Vargas was a bit "lol".

With the tyrant Getúlio Vargas having been overthrown, democracy inaugurated in Brazil and the country's first democratically-elected president in twenty years (or possibly ever, depending on what you count as "democratically elected") served out his term in peace, the first regular presidential and vice-presidential elections were held in December 1950, returning a comfortable majority result in support of centre-left populist candidate (checks notes) Getúlio Vargas. His main opponent was Eduardo Gomes, who repeated his effort from five years before, and this time had an organised broad anti-Getulist party, the National Democratic Union (UDN) behind him. This would in time shed whatever tiny left-wing factions it once had to become Brazil's major right-wing conservative party.

val-br-p-1950.png

Vargas actually did alright as a constitutional head of state, kind of. He pursued economic nationalism, very similar to that of Juan Perón over in Argentina, and famously nationalised the petroleum industry in 1952 creating Petrobras, now notorious as one of the most corrupt institutions in the Western world. By 1954, though, he was on thin ice after his head of security was accused of putting out a hit on one of his political rivals. The armed forces again called for his removal from office, and Vargas decided to shoot himself in the head rather than give them the satisfaction of capturing him alive.

The 1955 elections went off without a hitch though, which is honestly kind of striking, and the right-Getulist PSD formed an alliance with the left-Getulist PTB to nominate Juscelino Kubitschek, a rural doctor from the backcountry of Minas Gerais, for president with João "Jango" Goulart, a rural lawyer from Rio Grande do Sul who'd been a protégé of Vargas (they were both from the same town) and who had made himself a hero of the working classes as Vargas' Minister of Labour, for vice-president. The ticket won a fairly comfortable victory in a three-way race with the UDN and the PSP of Adhemar de Barrios, the fabulously corrupt but politically savvy former governor of São Paulo.

val-br-p-1955.png

Kubitschek had the most successful presidency of the entire period - for one thing, he managed to serve his full five years without either getting forced out of office or killing himself. He's probably most well-remembered for beginning construction on Brasília, a new capital way out in the backcountry of Goiás (coincidentally not far from where Kubitschek grew up over in Minas), but he also initiated loads and loads of other development projects, possibly pocketing quite a bit of money for himself in the process or possibly not. It was, however, enough to make him a target of anti-corruption populists.

One such man was Jânio Quadros, the eccentric former governor of São Paulo (notice a pattern here?), who had a reputation for wearing dishevelled clothes, eating mortadella sandwiches (a popular Paulista street food) during his public appearances, and waving around a broom to symbolise his promise to sweep out corruption. His nomination was supported by the UDN, which could find no credible candidate of its own after three consecutive losses, while the PSD nominated Field Marshal Henrique Teixeira Lott, who'd been one of Kubitschek's most trusted advisers.

The 1960 election is the most confusing of the era, because while Quadros handily defeated Lott for President, the vice-presidential ballot looked very different. There was a large working-class movement that called for a "Jan-Jan" (Jânio-Jango) vote, and they were successful enough to ensure that Goulart was returned as Vice President for a second term even as his running mate went down in flames. As such, the most left-wing candidate had won in both races, and the conservative establishment was inevitably going to sit up and take notice.

val-br-p-1960.png

Quadros, while a successful state governor, quickly turned out to be way beyond his depth as President. He resigned in August 1961, citing "terrible occult forces" working against him - this might or might not have been a bluff intended to boost his popularity, but the Congress called the bluff and allowed him to resign. This passed the presidency to João Goulart - Goulart, who had spent his entire term as vice-president championing social reforms in the Senate and building relations with the Communist bloc, and who was right now, at this very moment, on a state visit to the People's Republic of China. The right-wingers in the Congress initially wanted to physically prevent Goulart from assuming office, but a compromise was reached where Goulart would be allowed to take power, but not before constitutional amendments had been passed turning Brazil into a parliamentary republic with a Prime Minister who handled just about all actual policy-making.

Goulart was able to strengthen his hand once in office though, and in 1963, he called a plebiscite to confirm the amendments. They were rejected by over 80% of voters, and were nullified, allowing Goulart to assume the sum of executive power. He immediately set about on an enormous reform programme, creating a state electric company, redistributing land to rural peasants, and massively expanding public education with the goal of eradicating illiteracy (additionally important because the 1946 constitution made literacy a requirement for voting). This was to be funded by a big corporation tax hike, which obviously didn't play great with the sort of right-wing establishment types who already basically thought Goulart was a crypto-Communist. It also didn't play well with the United States, which was famously quite jumpy around any Latin American leader who might be construed as somewhere to the left of Attila the Hun.

On 31 March 1964, tanks rolled out into the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Goulart was kicked out of the city, tried to make a stand in Brasília, but ultimately fled to Uruguay as the Congress passed a resolution deposing him from office. The Congress then elected Field Marshal Humberto Castello Branco, Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Army, to the presidency for the remainder of Goulart's term (well, Quadros' term, really) - he promised to uphold Brazilian democracy and do his utmost to combat abuses of power. Which, er, yeah.
 
NZ 1890
I've been off doing another New Thing, with some help from @Uhura's Mazda - well, quite a lot of help, really. He dug out a book of old NZ electoral boundaries going back to the deep mists of Victoriana, scanned this, pointed me to some results resources, and wrote the below.

1890

The 1890 election is often referred to as a watershed of New Zealand political history: before this point, Governments were formed of assorted factions of Independents, some of whom consistently brought down the Premier halfway through a term, and all of whom were more interested in development for their region and their seat than in matters of principle or ideology. Shortly before this election, the main Opposition factions got together in a caucus and pledged to support John Ballance as Premier over the incumbent, Harry Atkinson. These were the Liberals - the first organised party in New Zealand history.

So goes the received knowledge, anyway. In actual fact, Grey's Government of the late 1870s had been proclaimed as a Liberal Government and attempted to govern in a Liberal way (as the word was understood in New Zealand), but it wasn't a very good Government, so the Liberals of the 1890s tended to categorise it with all the others of the period. And relatively little changed in a meaningful sense in 1890 - members continued to agitate for roads and bridges and voted for Liberal ideological legislation as a quid pro quo for development and public works - the general effort of colonialisation.

Why, then, did people vote for the Liberals? Partly because the previous Government had made itself unpopular through the grinding years of Depression, notably by passing the Property Tax. They had also been hit by the first labour unrest that New Zealand had yet seen, which caused the Chicken Littles in the newspaper offices to warn of an apocalyptic showdown between capital and labour. By contrast, the new Liberal Party promoted itself as a non-sectional party of all classes, who could unite the country. When the formal Liberal organisation was formed, after - not before - the election, it was called the Liberal and Labour Federation, although some members took the 'Labour' bit more seriously than others.

They also promised all sorts of panaceas, chief among which was a land tax. Would it be graduated or flat? Would it replace all other forms of taxation or merely supplement them? Would it be based on the nationalisation of land or would farmers be able to retain their freehold? Different Liberal candidates would give you different answers - not only at this election, but for the entire duration of the 1891-1912 Liberal Government. The whole thing was based on an uncertain foundation - if the land tax was a punitive measure to force large landowners to 'burst up' their estates and put wannabe farmers on the land, then eventually everybody would theoretically fall below the payment threshold, but Liberals talked about it as the chief source of revenue for an endless list of roads and bridges.

Despite the evidence of this map, the outcome of the election was uncertain until the General Assembly was called - just like all previous elections, but like very few subsequent ones. The lines between a Liberal, and Independent Liberal, and a pure Independent, were quite vague, and it was perfectly possible that enough people would renege on their commitment to Ballance's leadership caucus that Atkinson might retain power. As such, he delayed the calling of the Assembly for as long as possible, and in the meantime he appointed a bunch of new members of the upper house, who could be trusted to block Ballance's radical Bills. This set the worrying precedent that a Premier without a proven mandate could advise the Governor on the use of royal prerogatives.

But the House met and Ballance was elected Premier. He is remembered as the first Liberal Premier of New Zealand, but as we've seen, George Grey had a solid argument to be remembered as such, and he often reminded Ballance of this from his cantankerous position on the backbench. Even Atkinson was regarded as a Liberal until the Liberal Party came along - he supported manhood suffrage, women's suffrage, proportional representation and even National Insurance. In truth, most of New Zealand's political scene regarded itself as Liberal: almost everybody had voted Liberal back Home, because you don't move to the other side of the world if everything's going well for you. As such, although the Liberal Party castigated its opponents as Conservatives, this map shows them as the Opposition, which is what they called themselves.

The Liberals flooded the towns and the mining seats, along with others dominated by small farmers, especially in the South Island, while the rural North Island voted for Atkinson's candidates, by and large.

Ballance formed a Cabinet including the Papal Knight Sir Patrick Buckley, the publican demagogue Richard Seddon, and the Fabian teetotaler William Pember Reeves - and not only would the personal contradictions shape the Liberal Government, but so would the internal contradictions of their ideas. Over the next three years, Ballance and his team would have to not only prove that their Liberalism had the answers - but also that partisan government was something worth doing in the first place.

And the map itself:

ddq20yc-00962b93-45bf-4b0f-9055-006465a04726.png
 
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I find the relative balance between the North and South Islands there interesting considering the trends over time.
The Gold Rushes in Otago and the West Coast gave the South Island a good majority of the population in the 1870s and that took a while to sink back down, especially as it was more difficult to acquire Maori land in the North Island.
 
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