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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

And here we go! Slesvig's fourteen single-member countryside constituencies:

rect3872.png

I'll write down the populations in a nice manner later.

But here.

All the constituencies of the Nordic Empire should now be finished, @Ares96 ! We're free, free to-... err-... Start looking into the nitty-gritty of modelling elections...
 
Ares96 said:
And a few sacred cows later, here we are.

index.php


The lower chamber of the Unionsdag has 528 seats as of the inaugural election, which divide among the constituent countries as follows:

Sweden 198 (154 country, 44 burgher)
Denmark proper 95 (58 country, 37 burgher)
- Slesvig 19 (14 country, 5 burgher)
- Holsten-Lauenborg 28 (19 country, 9 burgher)
Norway 84 (61 country, 23 burgher)
Finland 82 (72 country, 10 burgher)
Pomerania 10 (8 country, 2 burgher)
Iceland 3 (elected indirectly by Althing)
Faroe Islands 1
Union County of Gothenburg 8
Click to expand...
 
Okay, so, for the modelling of the different constituencies. Örebro county, with its mining industry and so forth, seems like a suitable place to be a true Hat stronghold. Consequently, I've decided to model them after the State of Vermont, letting the Hats be the Republicans, and letting the Caps be everyone else. The Republicans were really strong in Vermont in the late 19th century. Insanely strong. In some parts never receiving less than 70% of the vote.

Since I couldn't get access to either congressional or presidential election returns for the period, I went for the gubernatorial ones instead. I picked a set of adjacent counties, added them together, and let them be the different constituencies in Örebro. This... This took quite some time:

republicans_in_vermont.png

...but I eventually came up with the figures sought for:

Oerebroian_seats.png

oerebro_constituencies.png
 
Nanwe said:
The big map is a thing of beauty guys, just one question, what is the electoral system for the multi-member districts? Block voting? SNTV?
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SNTV on the countryside.

In Gothenburg, they kind of in a sense do have electoral "districts", but not based on geographical location, but based on profession. Like, all grocers vote in the same electoral "district", so to speak, and so on. Within these districts, they do SNTV.

Complete and total fucking madness in Stockholm as they are refusing to abolish their system of electors.
 
Makemakean said:
SNTV on the countryside.

In Gothenburg, they kind of in a sense do have electoral "districts", but not based on geographical location, but based on profession. Like, all grocers vote in the same electoral "district", so to speak, and so on. Within these districts, they do SNTV.

Complete and total fucking madness in Stockholm as they are refusing to abolish their system of electors.
Click to expand...

Wait so then it's the local areas that determine franchise?
 
Makemakean said:
Complete and total fucking madness in Stockholm as they are refusing to abolish their system of electors.
Click to expand...
I'll just crosspost your own post from back in 2014 on how that worked, because it deserves to be seen:

How you Elect Representatives to the Estate of the Burghers of the Swedish Riksdag:

All cities are legally compelled to adopt a system as close to that of Stockholm which is described below, with certain guidelines as to how far they are allowed to depart from it.

It is to be declared before the council house and in all the churches that there is on the appointed date to be a general election, and on that date every burgher of the city is to come to the council house for the vote. A burgher is a person who is either an official or has received a charter to do commerce in the city[1] and has paid his or her tax to the crown and the borough. If you do not come, your vote will be considered forfeited.

At the council house, the voters are now to be divided into forty-eight classes according to their trade, wealth and position. There are to be twenty-four classes of people involved in commerce and twenty-four of those who are officials and civil servants. Each class elects one elector. Of those twenty-four elected by the merchants, twelve are to be grocers, and twelve are to be of the other trading guilds. There are specific rules regarding the eligibility to be elected an elector: You have to have been born in Sweden, you have to have lived in the city and been a burgher for a minimum of seven years.

Now these forty-eight electors are to elect the ten representatives of the city. This is done in the following fashion:

Six are elected by block-vote, wherewith the grocers have two votes, those of the other guilds have one vote, and the officials have three votes. Those six with the greatest numbers of votes have then become elected representatives. Interestingly, the law stipulates that this election is to be by secret ballot.

Now, in order to ensure a specific representation by the magistrate of the city, the forty-eight electors are to nominate six candidates out of the mayor and the council. Once these six candidates have been nominated, the magistrate are to elect four of these. The four of these to receive most votes are now become elected representatives as well.

And that is how you elect your Third Estate MPs!

[1] This mercantilist rule actually meant that women could in theory be allowed to vote, and in some places, like Kristianstad, they actually did and played prominent political roles.
Click to expand...
 
Nanwe said:
Wait so then it's the local areas that determine franchise?
Click to expand...

Originally in Sweden, both in OTL and TTL, interference in how constituencies elected their representatives was seen as a rather inappropriate thing to do. Even though things have changed, in particular with Björnstjerna reforming the constituencies to make them more equal in size, too much meddling is still likely to provoke cries of bloody murder. Though Björnstjerna wanted to reform Stockholm too, this met with so much resistance that he eventually had to step back and let the old capital keep its archaic electoral system lest the entire enterprise of Electoral Reform failed.

But yes, suffrage is still to some extent determined by what kind of a constituency in which you live. The qualifications to vote in a countryside seat are different from the qualifications to vote in a burgher seat.

Other cities have also been allowed to keep some aspects of their old electoral systems. In Visby, for instance, people's votes are weighed exactly in terms of how much the voters paid in tax, meaning that in Visby in 1867, as in Sweden in OTL during the 18th century, results are recorded not in votes but in cold, hard currency.

For the most part, however, the franchise is determined by the regional government. In Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, suffrage is at around 15% (of which 14.5% is male, 0.5% is female). In Norway, somewhat more egalitarian, the franchise is at 30% (29.5% male, 0.5% female). (Though those figures may come to be revised.)

The only addition on federal level, of course, is that all people who pay federal taxes over a certain figure are themselves also allowed to vote even though they may not have the vote by the conditions set up in their respective countries.
 
So, after some discussion with @Ares96 we have decided to reduce the suffrage in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to the figure of a mere 10% of the population, after looking at the actual suffrage at the time (which was around 5%) and concluded that 10% is in all likelihood the most generous number we can have within the bounds of what we ourselves consider reasonably plausible for our purposes.

Norway fares a little better with 15%.

Looking over the old statistics for Sweden, it is remarkable how poor voter turnout actually was even for the very limited suffrage. In many constituencies, we're talking about only a couple of hundred people actually bothering going to the ballot box. In a few, we're actually only looking at a little over one hundred people actually voting.

We'll probably have better voter turnout here, but that being said, I doubt there will be particular many of those 24,000-ish people constituency where they ever actually record more than, say, 2,000 votes in total.
 
moth said:
The fact that anybody remembers those crummy graphics actually makes me feel like I'm dissociating.

Good stuff.
Click to expand...

Oh, those were excellent graphics. Proper minimalist stuff that perfectly encapsulated all that needed to be encapsulated in an elegant, yet understated way.

I wavered a lot before deciding on using them, to be frank, I was worried you'd take offense at me stealing such a good idea.
 
Makemakean said:
So, after some discussion with @Ares96 we have decided to reduce the suffrage in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to the figure of a mere 10% of the population, after looking at the actual suffrage at the time (which was around 5%) and concluded that 10% is in all likelihood the most generous number we can have within the bounds of what we ourselves consider reasonably plausible for our purposes.

Norway fares a little better with 15%.
Click to expand...

That sounds about right. As part of the research for the Spanish 1869 election, I noticed that even though it had "universal" male suffrage for the over 25 (21 after 1873), that meant just 25-27% of the total population. So indeed, your numbers do make more sense now.

Makemakean said:
Looking over the old statistics for Sweden, it is remarkable how poor voter turnout actually was even for the very limited suffrage. In many constituencies, we're talking about only a couple of hundred people actually bothering going to the ballot box. In a few, we're actually only looking at a little over one hundred people actually voting.

We'll probably have better voter turnout here, but that being said, I doubt there will be particular many of those 24,000-ish people constituency where they ever actually record more than, say, 2,000 votes in total.
Click to expand...

I was surprised myself at discovering that was the case for most elections in the 1830s-1850s/1870s-1890 in Spain, even though 3-5% of the population could vote, they did not bother to, which to me seems weird. Indeed, 30%-40% turnouts were common, which is terrible, unless we're talking of a US election.

Interestingly, by expanding the franchise, at least in Spain, turnout also went up.
 
Nanwe said:
That sounds about right. As part of the research for the Spanish 1869 election, I noticed that even though it had "universal" male suffrage for the over 25 (21 after 1873), that meant just 25-27% of the total population. So indeed, your numbers do make more sense now.
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Yeah, the document we got the figures for Sweden from also showed proportion of legal adult males (the only legal adult women being widows and unmarried women above 25 at this point) to the general population, and it was generally in that neighbourhood.
 
Ares96 said:
Yeah, the document we got the figures for Sweden from also showed proportion of legal adult males (the only legal adult women being widows and unmarried women above 25 at this point) to the general population, and it was generally in that neighbourhood.
Click to expand...

I mean, it makes sense, once you exclude women, that's half your population. And then, by the simple fact that European countries at the time were undergoing demographic transitions it meant most of the population was very young, like in most African countries today. In a country where you can't vote until you're 25 and the average age is 18, well, plenty of people won't be able to vote.
 
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