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Max's election maps and assorted others

Was there just no reapportionment during the de Gaulle era? The boundaries look precisely the same (to my eyes, anyways) as the 1958 map you'd done earlier. Even Paris seems to be identical, the city and both courrones.
The Parisian departments were rearranged in 1967, but the constituency lines only changed where the new departments bisected existing constituencies (so only in the western suburbs). Lyon was similarly rearranged in 1973, and a seat was added in Corsica when the island was bisected in 1976. Other than that, the metropolitan French seats kept the same boundaries for every election from 1958 to 1981. After the brief experiment with PR under Mitterrand, the boundaries were redrawn to add about eighty new seats, which were in turn kept in place unchanged until 2012.

When I get to 1981, I plan to make a map of electorate sizes - it's going to be wild, even in 1967 there was probably close to a 2:1 disparity between the largest and smallest constituencies.
 
Japan 1947
val-jp-1947.png

The Japanese general election of 1947 is the one that brought the Socialists to power for the first time, just two years after the ban on all socialist organising was lifted by the American occupation government. The JSP were able to win a narrow plurality of seats despite coming second in the popular vote, because they were generally better at managing their candidacies to benefit from the SNTV electoral system than the bourgeois parties were. But it wasn't enough to govern alone - the JSP had to form a coalition with the more liberal-minded bourgeoisie of the Democratic Party (note: this is not the same Democratic Party that merged with the Liberals to form the LDP, I know it's confusing) and the National Cooperative Party. This coalition lasted about eighteen months in government, led first by the JSP's leader Katayama Tetsu and then by the Democrat Ashida Hitoshi. It succeeded in making quite a few social reforms, helped by the broadly sympathetic New Deal Democrats who ran the occupation authorities, but eventually fell owing to internal Democratic opposition to its plan to nationalise the coal industry. The Liberals returned to power under Yoshida Shigeru, who would govern Japan until 1954 and lay most of the groundwork for the post-war economic consensus that dominated Japan until the 1990s.
 
Always wondered, is the fact that there are so many Democratic parties in Japan the result of lack of imagination by the Japanese political elites or just down to translation?
 
Always wondered, is the fact that there are so many Democratic parties in Japan the result of lack of imagination by the Japanese political elites or just down to translation?
They all used the same kanji (民主党, Minshutō), so I think it's just a very popular word to use - in the 40s and 50s, more than anything, I imagine it helped mark distance from the pre-war governments a lot of the people involved had been part of.
 
I think I'm going to add a couple more insets to the French maps, covering Nice and Strasbourg - I'm also editing the Lyon inset to actually properly show the 6th (Villeurbanne) district as it was, covering five more communes besides Villeurbanne itself. I'm wondering, do you all think any other cities could use one? Nantes would be the other obvious candidate, but I think it might be just big enough not to need one.
 
Looking at the last map, I don’t see any other areas that would require an inset to be honest.
I usually try not to overdo them, but in this case I’m not sure I can do the boundaries in either city justice without blowing them up a bit. Strasbourg actually had non-contiguous cantons, and as for Nice, it’s definitely going to need an inset come 1988, so I may as well put one in now.
 
Huh Djibuti stuck for a long time. I wonder if it would had remained French with a relatively easy POD.
I could imagine endless internet arguments over "French Djibouti is imperialist" vs "but it is stable and developed whereas all the countries around it keep having chaotic civil wars" given what happened to the Horn in OTL - a bit like the Somaliland vs Somalia thing crossed with "Israel is an outpost of democratic civilisation surrounded by fascist dictatorships" from the 2000s.
 
NSW 1984 (Sydney)
In 1984, the NSW Labor government was re-elected to its fourth term, although on a reduced majority - there was no third "Wranslide", and most of the ancestrally-Liberal seats on the North Shore returned to the fold. Wran himself would resign in 1986, by which point the wheels were well and truly coming off, and in 1988 the Coalition returned to government.

val-au-nsw-1984.png
 
NSW 1988 (Sydney)
The 1988 election followed two important changes: firstly, the parliamentary term was extended from three to four years, and secondly, to keep up with population growth and suburbanisation without having to make overly-disruptive changes to Sydney's electoral geography, the Assembly was expanded from 99 to 109 members.

Neville Wran retired in 1986, at just about the right time to protect his own reputation as the Labor government was consumed by corruption scandals. The new Premier, Barrie Unsworth, was nowhere near as charismatic, and when he was parachuted into the Assembly for the nominal safe seat of Rockdale, he only scraped through with a 54-vote margin. The simultaneous by-election to replace Wran as MLA for Bass Hill was won outright by the Liberals.

That set a pattern for the next two years, as Liberal leader Nick Greiner began to rebuild his party's fortunes by promising to fight the three evils of corruption, crime and excessive government spending. Labor were especially troubled outside Sydney, where the party was seen as paying too much attention to issues like gun control and conservation rather than addressing economic issues. But when the 1988 election came, it would herald bad news for Labor even within the state capital, as the Liberals regained all their old seats and began to make headway in the Labor strongholds in working-class Western Sydney (somewhat foreshadowing the 1996 federal election).

One of the first things Greiner did in government was revoke the seat increase, and order a redistribution for 99 seats to take effect at the next election. As a result, this is the only election held on these boundaries.

val-au-nsw-1988.png
 
The 1988 election followed two important changes: firstly, the parliamentary term was extended from three to four years, and secondly, to keep up with population growth and suburbanisation without having to make overly-disruptive changes to Sydney's electoral geography, the Assembly was expanded from 99 to 109 members.

Neville Wran retired in 1986, at just about the right time to protect his own reputation as the Labor government was consumed by corruption scandals. The new Premier, Barrie Unsworth, was nowhere near as charismatic, and when he was parachuted into the Assembly for the nominal safe seat of Rockdale, he only scraped through with a 54-vote margin. The simultaneous by-election to replace Wran as MLA for Bass Hill was won outright by the Liberals.

That set a pattern for the next two years, as Liberal leader Nick Greiner began to rebuild his party's fortunes by promising to fight the three evils of corruption, crime and excessive government spending. Labor were especially troubled outside Sydney, where the party was seen as paying too much attention to issues like gun control and conservation rather than addressing economic issues. But when the 1988 election came, it would herald bad news for Labor even within the state capital, as the Liberals regained all their old seats and began to make headway in the Labor strongholds in working-class Western Sydney (somewhat foreshadowing the 1996 federal election).

One of the first things Greiner did in government was revoke the seat increase, and order a redistribution for 99 seats to take effect at the next election. As a result, this is the only election held on these boundaries.

View attachment 33462

Sorry, I’m a bit confused. Are you grouping the Nationals under the Liberals too, or is there something here I’m missing?
 
NSW 1991
For comparison, I have been able to find the full set of boundaries for 1991, although the map of rural NSW I found is useless, so there's been a fair amount of conjecture in the bush seats.

Greiner's first term in office saw a big slate of neoliberal and NPM reforms, as he'd promised during the campaign, as well as the institution of a standing Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) to investigate any current or future corruption claims and recommend legal action where necessary - basically a "corruption ombudsman". Some of these changes (like the ICAC) were popular, others (like the massive cuts to the state school system) much less so. The opposition, however, struggled to mount a response, or indeed find a capable and willing leader, most of their senior figures having either retired or lost their seats in 1988. In the end, the leadership fell into the lap of former Environment Minister Bob Carr, who absolutely did not want the job but agreed out of a sense of duty. He would go on to lead the party for almost twenty years and become the Premier with the longest continuous period of service in the state's history.

As mentioned, one of the many, many things Greiner did was bring the size of the Legislative Assembly back down to 99 seats, which he and his supporters saw as undoing the pro-Labor gerrymander of 1988. In any event, the redistribution brought massive changes to inner Sydney in particular, where several safe Labor seats were abolished. Hoping this would benefit the Coalition, and noting an uptick in polling numbers, Greiner had the Assembly dissolved a year ahead of schedule in May 1991. This wasn't his only institutional reform - on the ballot alongside the legislative elections was a referendum question on whether to reform the Legislative Council to be elected in halves rather than thirds, shortening the terms of individual councillors from twelve to eight years. The rules on how to mark ballot papers were also tightened considerably, with the result that over nine percent of all votes cast in the election were marked informal and discarded - there was a particularly high rate of informals in Labor-held marginal seats, which likely changed the outcome of the election in The Entrance (yes, there's a town in NSW called "The Entrance"). After the election, Labor would petition the result there and successfully force a by-election, which they won on a substantially lower informal vote.

Despite this, and despite being led by a deeply reluctant man, Labor had a fairly good election. They didn't return to power, but they won back a lot of the seats they lost in 1988, and were able to force a hung parliament. The balance of power was held by four independents, most of whom were right-of-centre and backed Greiner for a second term in power. Among their terms for supporting the Coalition was a fixed-term law, which was approved overwhelmingly alongside the 1995 election and ensured that the 1991 schedule is the one still in use.

val-au-nsw-1991.png
 
Australian place names are often great like that. "We have something with water on three sides, and a natural canal, what should we call it? The Entrance." Broken Hill is another one in that category, since no one really knows which hill it was named for, and they're all gone because of mining now anyways (I think we had a discussion of it earlier in this very thread, come to think of it).
 
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