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Max's election maps and assorted others

Norway has a long and proud tradition of boldly going where no one had bothered to go before, and space isn’t any different. Plus Norway didn’t get all the oil revenue to itself ITTL, so it’s still the poorest member state.

Right, so out they go to search for the plentiful fish of Mars? Honestly, without oil, Norway has fish and wood, I guess?

If you wanted to very alien, there could always be nynorsk, bokmal and marsnorsk. Also fun scenario, "the lingua franca of Earth is English, as it has been the case for the 150 years; but surprisingly in Mars, there has been widespread adoption of Norwegian as a common exchange language"
 
Right, so out they go to search for the plentiful fish of Mars? Honestly, without oil, Norway has fish and wood, I guess?
There's a reason there are as many Norwegians living in the United States today as there are in Norway. The only country in Europe that had a higher rate of emigration was Ireland.
If you wanted to very alien, there could always be nynorsk, bokmal and marsnorsk. Also fun scenario, "the lingua franca of Earth is English, as it has been the case for the 150 years; but surprisingly in Mars, there has been widespread adoption of Norwegian as a common exchange language"
It's definitely more common there, but the Scandinavian sector is still far smaller than the US and Soviet ones.
 
View attachment 26365

@Lavidor, any mistakes in the Hebrew?

I'm probably (hopefully...) not going to end up having to use most of these shades. The ones on the map are Likud, Zionist Camp, Jewish Home, Shas, UTJ and Joint List, and I don't think any of the others are the sort of parties that tend to top the polls anywhere.
It's great!

The Knesset diagram is a tiny bit off, 1 over for Meretz, 1 under for Shas, 2 Kulanu miscoloured,
 
It's great!

The Knesset diagram is a tiny bit off, 1 over for Meretz, 1 under for Shas, 2 Kulanu miscoloured,

So many parties hovering around six seats, I guess I must’ve split the difference. The fact that it had gone 2am probably didn’t help either.

Is there a good place to get boundaries for the individual settlements in the countryside, BTW? I’d like to do them, but the base I’m working off of only shows regional council boundaries.
 
Sverige 2018 (R) (prov)
One of the things this new basemap lets me do is map elections at the regional level without having to resort to insets (well, outside of Stockholm anyway). So, I've done that, as far up as the base currently goes.

Regional councils in Sweden are technically a fairly new thing, but of course there have been county councils (landsting) in place since the reforms of the 1860s, very likely modelled on the French general councils. These were originally local consultative bodies elected by weighted census suffrage and mostly relevant because they elected the First Chamber of the Riksdag, but over time they came to be given significant power over two specific areas: public transport and healthcare. Because of this very specific orientation, the county councils came to be seen as a nice sinecure for older politicians to move to when their careers in the actually significant parts of government were on the wane. Partly because of that, and partly because of the increased need to coordinate policy at a level above municipal, in 1998 the new county councils in Skåne and Västra Götaland, as well as the unitary authority on Gotland, were given special planning powers normally reserved for the central government and rebadged as "regions". The first Löfven cabinet appointed a royal commission to investigate implementing the regional system across the country, planning to merge the 21 counties then in existence into around half that number of regions (I forget if it was nine or ten now), but this went over about as well as things like that usually go over, so instead of implementing its recommendations they decided on a compromise solution of transforming the existing county councils into regions.

The way regional councils (and county councils before them) are elected is kind of a hybrid between the Riksdag election system and the municipal election system - there's semi-open list PR, with a threshold lower than that for the Riksdag, and the council itself decides whether or not to subdivide itself into constituencies for the regional elections. This last part is quite new, constituencies used to be required, but the parties (especially the smaller parties) tended to ignore them and stand the same list across the county, so maybe it made sense to let them skip the pretence. The threshold is 2% if there's no constituency subdivision and 3% if there is, and for councils with constituencies, a tenth of the total seats are reserved as levelling seats. Oh, and resident non-citizens get to vote just like they do for the municipal councils.

Aside from that, the big thing that marks the regions out from other levels of government is the presence of sjukvårdspartier, or "healthcare parties" in English. This is a phenomenon that somewhat resembles a cross between the Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern and the Free Voters in Germany - basically, local lists usually headed by actual health professionals, who support "common-sense politics" and typically call for both increased public healthcare funding and a freer policy toward private options. They first arose in the 90s, and back then they tended to have more fun names than they do now, but there was a quixotic effort to pull a national list together for the 2006 Riksdag election that resulted in a lot of the groups adopting a common identity and pooling their campaign resources across county lines. Today, they're especially strong in the north - the Norrbotten branch, the oldest and most prominent one, actually beat the Social Democrats into first place in 2018 - but their results tend to depend more on specific local issues (like whether or not there's a hospital threatened with closure) than geographic or social factors. Northern Sweden is, of course, basically defined by its size and sparse population, so it does stand to reason that local health provision is just harder there than everywhere else.

val-lt-2018.png
 
Sverige 1966 (R)
Trying out a new representation diagram scheme, which I'm hoping will show majorities better than the little mans - it's essentially based on the "Westminster-style" scheme I use for Australian/Canadian/NZ/Indian etc. elections, but slightly adapted to fit how a Swedish council actually (typically) sits.

The 1966 local elections were the last held on a separate day from the general elections, and probably the most politically significant in history. At least in popular memory, they were largely fought on a single issue - the housing crisis. Prime Minister Erlander, who would celebrate twenty years continuously in office about a month after polling day, would coin the phrase förväntningarnas tyranni ("the tyranny of expectations") in his memoirs to describe the 1960s, as the economy grew at ever-higher rates and demands for reform and development outpaced the capacity of the governing party to deliver on them. This was especially true of the big cities, which had been growing at a breakneck pace ever since the war, and where the amount of available housing was nowhere near keeping pace with this growth.

Erlander was also caught off-guard by a new innovation during the local election campaign - SR announced that its round of interviews with the party leaders would, for the first time, be conducted by the same journalists for all the leaders. Previously, political interviews in radio and television had usually been done by a figure personally selected by the politician, and questions had been pre-approved and answers prepared in advance - about the same way you'd conduct an interview with a member of the royal family. In 1966, a new course would be followed, pioneered by the three journalists who became known as the "Three Os" (Lars Orup, Åke Ortmark and Gustaf Olivecrona). This would feature aggressive, unprepared questioning and pressing for answers even (especially) where the politician was clearly uncomfortable with a topic. Erlander's interview is particularly well-remembered, as the Three Os grilled him over the housing crisis, asking what his advice was to a young couple who wanted to move to Stockholm but couldn't get a home there. His best response: "well, they'd have to sign up to the housing queue, of course" - never mind that the waiting list was months if not years.

The Social Democrats went into 1966 defending a very good position - in 1962, they'd secured an absolute majority of voters nationwide - but the lacklustre 1966 campaign drove a lot of people away from the party. In the end, their vote would total 43 percent, and they'd lose control of more than half the county councils, most notably getting completely buried in Stockholm (both the city and county, though the city can't be seen on this map). It was a result that led to a lot of hope on the right, which would continue to fail to come together over the next few years, and a lot of soul-searching on the left. Not long after the election, the government would announce a plan to have a million new homes built by 1975, a massive increase by any measure. In the 1968 general election, Erlander's last as party leader, he led a resurgent campaign that saw the Social Democrats regain their absolute majority in the Second Chamber - the First Chamber was secure despite the losses in 1966. The 1966 campaign also convinced the Social Democrats that they were disfavoured by the system of separate polling days, which depressed turnout and thus helped the right (bear in mind that 1966 turnout had been 83.1% whereas the 1964 general election had seen 83.3% turnout, so the differential is hardly massive), and so the constitutional reform that created the unicameral Riksdag would also move general election dates to coincide with local elections starting in 1970.

View attachment val-lt-1966.png
 
If you're looking for feedback on the change, Ares, I really like it; the little mans weren't hard to parse, but this makes it more abundant a) what the balance of power is, and b) who is aligned with/sitting with whom.
It is probably worth putting an asterisk on the alignments - the Social Democrats and Communists didn't really trust one another, and neither did the three non-socialist parties, but they generally tended to prefer the parties on their own side to those on the other (with a kind of exception for the Social Democrats and Agrarians, but even there the coalition had broken down quite spectacularly over the pension issue in 1957, and there wasn't much love lost on either side through the 60s).

Of course, there also wasn't really any notion of majority rule in local and county councils at this point (it only goes back to the 90s in most places), so for the most part, the bloc division is the only productive one we can discern. Not to say everyone always agreed on everything, but to get an idea of where the left parties could and couldn't work together, you'd have to do some fairly serious kremlinology (no pun intended).
 
Colorado State House 2020
Here's the extremely dull Colorado House election, which saw the Democrats pick up a seat in suburban Denver while the Republicans gained one of the Pueblo seats, making zero net change and leaving the House at 41-24 Democratic, same as in 2018. Of course, this is still pretty stunning for a body that had a permanent Republican majority until Bush II, so think of it as consolidating CO's status as a safe blue state rather than a pure "no change" election.

val-us-co-house-2020.png
 
Indonesia 2019 (Java)
I was working on some old congressional elections, but I decided to move over to a country that makes more sense.

Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest country by population, and will very likely become the third-largest within a few decades. The majority of its population live on the island of Java, whose 140 million inhabitants cram themselves onto an island the size of England (not Great Britain, England). The tropical climate and strong, predictable monsoons make Java extremely fertile ground for rice cultivation, which is the island's main agricultural staple and the reason it supports such a massive population. Java is culturally divided between its eastern two-thirds, whose inhabitants speak Javanese, and its western third, whose inhabitants speak Sundanese. Both groups use Indonesian as a lingua franca, and both groups are overwhelmingly Muslim, falling along a spectrum between the more syncretic traditional practices of the abangan and the more orthodox "modernist" Islam of the santri. Jakarta additionally has well-established Chinese and Malay communities, and Christianity has a lingering presence from colonial times but doesn't quite dominate any part of Java the way it does some of the outlying Indonesian islands.

The politics of Java reflect its ethnic and cultural divides, with the Sundanese-speaking regions traditionally divided between moderate Islamists and right-wing secular nationalists, while the rural Javanese-speaking central region was the main stronghold of the Indonesian Communist Party until its dissolution and mass murder at the hands of the Army in the 1960s. The eastern end of the island, which is divided between Javanese and Madurese (an ethnic group originating on the neighbouring island of Madura), is known as a stronghold of the Nahdlatul Ulama movement, a moderate santri Islamic movement whose members (mostly) support a tolerant, pluralistic ideal of Islamic culture.

How does this translate to the electoral map, then? Well, Indonesia has gone through some things over its seventy-five years of independence, and of the countries I've mapped thus far, it probably most closely resembles Brazil - it's a young democracy whose party system mostly lives in the shadow of the former military dictatorship. In Indonesia, this was the New Order (Orde Baru) of President Suharto, who ruled from 1967 until 1998. Suharto took a pretty dim view of democracy in general, but he did allow closely-managed legislative elections between three state-sanctioned political parties - the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP), a holding pen for Islamists, the Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, PDI), which started out as a holding pen for secular nationalists but became dominated by the centre-left brand of such favoured by former president Sukarno and his daughter Megawati, and the Functional Groups (Golongan Karya, Golkar), a "non-party" composed of different social corporations who held a majority in the legislature throughout Suharto's rule, and had no proper ideology beyond vaguely-authoritarian capitalist developmentalism - the "functional group" that controlled the organisation in practice was the military.

After the 1997 Asian financial crisis brought down Suharto's government, free elections were held in 1999, and these featured a number of new parties in addition to the main three (Megawati rechristened the PDI as the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, PDI-P), but the PPP and Golkar carry on under their old names):
- The National Awakening Party (Partai Kebangkitan Bangsa, PKB) was established by NU leader Abdurrahman Wahid (also known as "Gus Dur"), and is essentially the political vehicle for the NU in about the same way as the Komeito in Japan is for Soka Gakkai. As such, they support a moderate "Islamic democracy", wanting a bigger role for Islam in Indonesian society and politics but stopping short of calling for an Islamic republic. Wahid was elected President by the legislature in 1999, but had to resign in 2001 after a corruption scandal, being replaced by Megawati, who had served as his vice-president.
- The National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional, PAN) is also a moderate Islamist party, but is supported by the Muhammadiyah organisation rather than NU and draws more support off Java.
- The Justice and Prosperity Party (Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, PKS) subscribes to a more radical form of Islamism, inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and while it doesn't outright support a Sharia-based Islamic republic, it's usually considered the most hardline of Indonesia's Islamist parties.
- The Democratic Party (Partai Demokrat) entered the scene in 2004 as the vehicle for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's candidacy in the first direct presidential elections in Indonesian history, in which Yudhoyono defeated Megawati convincingly. During his ten-year presidency, it became something of a party of power, replacing Golkar's authoritarian corporatism with neoliberal secular nationalism.
- The NasDem Party (Partai NasDem) is a political vehicle for media mogul Surya Paloh, who had previously been a Golkar member, and as you might expect from all these factors, it has no real ideology beyond vague secular nationalism. With Yudhoyono leaving office in 2014, there's now very little to distinguish NasDem from the Democrats (or, indeed, Golkar) in practice.
- Finally, the Party of the Great Indonesia Movement (Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya, Gerindra) is a political vehicle for General Prabowo Subianto, Suharto's former son-in-law and one of the principal movers-and-shakers in the late New Order's military support organisation. Prabowo formed a united front with Megawati to oppose Yudhoyono's re-election efforts in 2009, but after this failed spectacularly, Prabowo and the PDI-P fell out and Gerindra became one of the two principal players in presidential politics. Prabowo ran for president in 2014 and 2019, losing both times to the PDI-P's Joko Widodo.

In 2019, the legislature was elected on the same day as the President for the first time ever, and Jokowi cruised to re-election against Prabowo backed by all parties except Gerindra, the Democrats, the PAN and the PKS. The PDI-P made significant gains and defended its first-place status from 2014, helped by a strong showing in Javanese-speaking central and east Java, especially so around Jokowi's home region of Surakarta. Prabowo's popularity in west Java reflected itself in good results for Gerindra there, while the PKB did well in the NU strongholds in the east. The PAN and PKS took most of the Islamic vote in west Java, the PKS in particular getting first-place results in Bandung and suburban Jakarta.

val-id-2019-java.png
 
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