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Max's election maps and assorted others

What's a Grey Panther? I'm really curious as to the various weird little parties now.
Senior citizens party I believe - I remember them being talked about in the brief heyday of those parties in the early 2000s, along with 50+ in the Netherlands and that one in Scotland. Obviously the German one has the best/most ridiculous name.

I've been reposting the ideology articles by @Uhura's Mazda and @Makemakean on the SLP sershal meedja, on reflection that's another obscure tendency they could have covered.
 
Senior citizens party I believe - I remember them being talked about in the brief heyday of those parties in the early 2000s, along with 50+ in the Netherlands and that one in Scotland. Obviously the German one has the best/most ridiculous name.

I've been reposting the ideology articles by @Uhura's Mazda and @Makemakean on the SLP sershal meedja, on reflection that's another obscure tendency they could have covered.
America actually did it first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Panthers
 
Senior citizens party I believe - I remember them being talked about in the brief heyday of those parties in the early 2000s, along with 50+ in the Netherlands and that one in Scotland. Obviously the German one has the best/most ridiculous name.

I've been reposting the ideology articles by @Uhura's Mazda and @Makemakean on the SLP sershal meedja, on reflection that's another obscure tendency they could have covered.
There was a Polish one in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it was an SLD scam. Although I guess you could probably get a funny paragraph out of the 1997 debacle where the right set up a rival party with a very similar name to split their vote and keep them out of the Sejm (as they were surging in the polls at the time) and IIRC even got Stanislaw Tyminski to endorse it.
 
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Sachsen-Anhalt 1946
And on a similar "red map" note, I remembered I made a crude version of this a while ago, so I dusted it off, brought the boundaries into line with what I now know the Kreise to have (roughly) looked like at the time, and added a proper key.

Sachsen-Anhalt 1946
val-de-st-1946.png

Consider it research for Die zweite Chance, if you will.
 
Not sure what else I'd expect from Duisburg really.
It looks like it could be Manchester or Liverpool, and as I found out while researching these maps, that's not really a coincidence. Well, obviously the party systems are similar because this is also a deprived industrial region, that's obvious, but the fact that NRW and Schleswig-Holstein are the only states to use single-member constituencies in local council elections is because the occupation authorities in the British zone imposed local government laws that were explicitly modelled on the British one. In NRW and Lower Saxony, the councils are (or were until the 90s) far more dominant bodies than they have historically tended to be in Germany, and the mayors were figureheads chosen by the councils alongside a dedicated chief executive who was in charge of the actual municipal administration.

Schleswig-Holstein instead opted for a collegial magistrate, a model now only used in Hessen and Brandenburg (hence why the Frankfurt city council has a different name from the others I've mapped) but which was standard under the Weimar Republic.
 
It looks like it could be Manchester or Liverpool, and as I found out while researching these maps, that's not really a coincidence. Well, obviously the party systems are similar because this is also a deprived industrial region, that's obvious, but the fact that NRW and Schleswig-Holstein are the only states to use single-member constituencies in local council elections is because the occupation authorities in the British zone imposed local government laws that were explicitly modelled on the British one. In NRW and Lower Saxony, the councils are (or were until the 90s) far more dominant bodies than they have historically tended to be in Germany, and the mayors were figureheads chosen by the councils alongside a dedicated chief executive who was in charge of the actual municipal administration.

Schleswig-Holstein instead opted for a collegial magistrate, a model now only used in Hessen and Brandenburg (hence why the Frankfurt city council has a different name from the others I've mapped) but which was standard under the Weimar Republic.

Britain just going all 'County Borough of Cologne, now' is amazing.
 
It looks like it could be Manchester or Liverpool, and as I found out while researching these maps, that's not really a coincidence. Well, obviously the party systems are similar because this is also a deprived industrial region, that's obvious, but the fact that NRW and Schleswig-Holstein are the only states to use single-member constituencies in local council elections is because the occupation authorities in the British zone imposed local government laws that were explicitly modelled on the British one. In NRW and Lower Saxony, the councils are (or were until the 90s) far more dominant bodies than they have historically tended to be in Germany, and the mayors were figureheads chosen by the councils alongside a dedicated chief executive who was in charge of the actual municipal administration.

Schleswig-Holstein instead opted for a collegial magistrate, a model now only used in Hessen and Brandenburg (hence why the Frankfurt city council has a different name from the others I've mapped) but which was standard under the Weimar Republic.
So does this mean that local government in NRW, at least in terms of its electoral structure, more closely resembles the federal Bundestag in merging a list and a single-member system (which, I'm guessing, is also the traditional British FPTP)? More than it resembles, say, any of the other länder in how they organize local government?
 
So does this mean that local government in NRW, at least in terms of its electoral structure, more closely resembles the federal Bundestag in merging a list and a single-member system (which, I'm guessing, is also the traditional British FPTP)? More than it resembles, say, any of the other länder in how they organize local government?
Yes.
 
Quebec 1989 (Equality Party)
Seriously thinking of doing heatmaps for at least the former, and I suppose some federal election maps too.
A promise long forgotten is fulfilled.

In 1985, Robert Bourassa was elected Premier of Quebec in a landslide victory over the ailing Parti Québecois, which had been defeated in their ambitions for sovereignty and seen the retirement of their leader and founder René Lévesque. Now, Bourassa's Liberal Party could count on near-monolithic support from anglophones and allophones (people whose first language is neither English nor French), who for understandable reasons have tended to be put off by sovereigntism, but the reason they were able to win was that francophone ridings which had supported the PQ under Lévesque turned to the Liberals. Bourassa was highly conscious of this fact, and while it's unclear to what extent Bourassa believed in much of anything, he was probably some kind of soft Quebec nationalist himself. During his first stint as Premier he'd attempted to dilute PQ support by passing laws supporting French language use, and he returned to power determined to defend Bill 101, the PQ's landmark achievement in government which declared French the sole official language of the province and imposed strict limitations on the use of English by government ans business alike.

This became significant following the Ford v Quebec case in 1988, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that it was unconstitutional to require Montreal shop owners to display signage in French only. The ruling met with outcry from Quebec nationalists of all stripes, and Bourassa's government responded by making minor alterations to Bill 101 and then invoking the "notwithstanding clause", a legal instrument in the Canadian constitution that allows a province to formally disregard judicial review. This is typically only done in extreme cases, and the invocation proved just as controversial as the ruling itself. Montreal anglophones suddenly found themselves unable to trust the Liberal Party, and in the spring of 1989, as Quebec prepared to hold provincial elections, they formed their own political movement to advocate a return to bilingualism on the provincial level.

The actual party affiliation of these "anglophone" candidates (for lack of a better term) was divided: in Montreal, eighteen candidates stood under the banner of the Equality Party (Parti Égalité), while sixteen candidates stood outside the metropolitan area under the Unity Party (Parti Unité). The former had some success, winning four seats and effectively depriving the Liberals of their stronghold on the West Island for the first time in decades. That being said, Bourassa won a second majority government, and Quebec was hardly moving in a federalist direction - Bourassa carried on Lévesque's attempts at negotiating a new constitutional settlement that would give Quebec expanded rights within Canada, which failed spectacularly by around 1990, and the next few years would see a massive revival for the sovereigntist movement. With the PQ resurgent, Montreal anglophones closed ranks behind the Liberals once again (it helped that Bourassa retired in 1993). The Equality Party died on its arse, never to return, but just as they'd won in spite of Montreal in 1989, they would lose in spite of Montreal in 1994.

val-ca-qc-1989-equality.png
 
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It does strike me as peak Quebec to decide to force Anglophone communities to display French signage.
It's a measure of how much I've been to Canada that I find it surprising that people don't already know this sort of thing goes on.

My favourite example is how Alberta has to use bilingual signage despite having more Ukrainian speakers than French ones.
 
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