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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

Sometimes, I am genuinely happy that the Tsars and the Communists denied the Russians democracy, if only to spare future generations from having to trace out overly detailed Russian electoral maps.
 
Sometimes, I am genuinely happy that the Tsars and the Communists denied the Russians democracy, if only to spare future generations from having to trace out overly detailed Russian electoral maps.
The annoying thing about Russia IMO is that the parts that are annoying to trace are almost all parts where no one actually lives.
 
@Ares96 and @Thande will both appreciate that yesterday, I finally got hold of this book at Uppsala University library from which all Swedish election results on Wikipedia prior to 1900 directs to as their source: The Swedish Electorate 1887-1968. It was written by this fellow called Leif Lewin and two statisticians, and is quite remarkable, because Leif Lewin (a political scientist by trade) tries to apply computational and statistical models to study voting behaviour, which is quite cool, considering the book was written in the 70s.

Swed_freeTrade.png

Alas, the book doesn't make clear which MPs from which constituencies belonged to which parties, nor does it make clear how they got this information.

Fortunately, Prof Lewin (now in his mid-70s) yet lives in Uppsala. He is also one of the few public figures in Sweden who advocates electoral reform over to FPTP for Sweden. I am going to try my darndest to get him to agree to meet me over a cup of coffee.
 
@Ares96 and @Thande will both appreciate that yesterday, I finally got hold of this book at Uppsala University library from which all Swedish election results on Wikipedia prior to 1900 directs to as their source: The Swedish Electorate 1887-1968. It was written by this fellow called Leif Lewin and two statisticians, and is quite remarkable, because Leif Lewin (a political scientist by trade) tries to apply computational and statistical models to study voting behaviour, which is quite cool, considering the book was written in the 70s.

View attachment 9608

Alas, the book doesn't make clear which MPs from which constituencies belonged to which parties, nor does it make clear how they got this information.

Fortunately, Prof Lewin (now in his mid-70s) yet lives in Uppsala. He is also one of the few public figures in Sweden who advocates electoral reform over to FPTP for Sweden. I am going to try my darndest to get him to agree to meet me over a cup of coffee.
I've seen similar analysis for UK London elections from I think either the late 1960s or the early 1970s, in articles I found on JSTOR.
 
I've seen similar analysis for UK London elections from I think either the late 1960s or the early 1970s, in articles I found on JSTOR.

Quoting from the book (it's actually written in English) I find the following:

"During the earlier period, on the other hand, when members of parliament were chosen by the majority election method, the official statistics only contain particulars of the successful candidates, the number of votes received by him and the number of votes received by his runner up. No mention is made of parties. Extensive primary research was therefore necessary and consisted of establishing the partisan affiliations of the candidates in order to obtain data on the regional ties of the political parties. The study was conducted under my guidance in the form of a series of proseminar essays in 1968-69 at the Department of Political Science, University of Uppsala.

"Data on the partisan affiliations of candidates were obtained from 55 daily newspapers. These papers give extremely detailed accounts of election campaigns, candidates' political manifestos and election results, and exhibit, quite regardless of their own political convictions, a high level of agreement as to these facts. During this period, elections did not take place in the space of a single dat but were instead, at an early stage, spread over approximately two months, descreasing to one month towards the end of this era. It was therefore necessary to comb several months of newspaper reports for each and every election.

"The following students took part: Sören Bodén, Ola Buckardt, Marianne Grundestam, Lars Hjerpe, Dan Holmberg, Gunnar Håkansson, Birgitta Janertz, Gunnel Johansson, Margareta Larsson, Leif Norlén, Siw Olofsson, Lisbeth Olsson, Sture Palmborg, Anders Rajala, Lars Sköld, and Leif Zaars."
 
Data on the partisan affiliations of candidates were obtained from 55 daily newspapers. These papers give extremely detailed accounts of election campaigns, candidates' political manifestos and election results, and exhibit, quite regardless of their own political convictions, a high level of agreement as to these facts. During this period, elections did not take place in the space of a single dat but were instead, at an early stage, spread over approximately two months, descreasing to one month towards the end of this era. It was therefore necessary to comb several months of newspaper reports for each and every election.

A situation very familiar to me from looking at Long Eaton UDC.
 
Quoting from the book (it's actually written in English) I find the following:

"During the earlier period, on the other hand, when members of parliament were chosen by the majority election method, the official statistics only contain particulars of the successful candidates, the number of votes received by him and the number of votes received by his runner up. No mention is made of parties. Extensive primary research was therefore necessary and consisted of establishing the partisan affiliations of the candidates in order to obtain data on the regional ties of the political parties. The study was conducted under my guidance in the form of a series of proseminar essays in 1968-69 at the Department of Political Science, University of Uppsala.

"Data on the partisan affiliations of candidates were obtained from 55 daily newspapers. These papers give extremely detailed accounts of election campaigns, candidates' political manifestos and election results, and exhibit, quite regardless of their own political convictions, a high level of agreement as to these facts. During this period, elections did not take place in the space of a single dat but were instead, at an early stage, spread over approximately two months, descreasing to one month towards the end of this era. It was therefore necessary to comb several months of newspaper reports for each and every election.

"The following students took part: Sören Bodén, Ola Buckardt, Marianne Grundestam, Lars Hjerpe, Dan Holmberg, Gunnar Håkansson, Birgitta Janertz, Gunnel Johansson, Margareta Larsson, Leif Norlén, Siw Olofsson, Lisbeth Olsson, Sture Palmborg, Anders Rajala, Lars Sköld, and Leif Zaars."

Prof. Lewin answered my emails some thirteen minutes ago, saying that what with it being fifty years ago, he has no idea where the data is to be found, but that it may be somewhere at Carolina Rediviva. This doesn't bode well, seeing there's a lot of things known to be somewhere at Carolina Rediviva.

Carl Peter Thunberg, Linnaeus' disciple, in 1775 became the first Swede ever to visit the Empire of Japan, and during his travels in the country, he took many notes, not just on the botany of Japan, but of the people he met, what he got to know about the system of government, etc. He used this to produce some books, but the notes from the trip he donated to Uppsala University. And since that time, the University has most embarrassingly lost track of it. Not lost it, just lost track of it, because they think that it's still somewhere in their massive system, they just don't know exactly where it is and are hopeful that it might be rediscovered one day.
 
Prof. Lewin directed me to a particular Archivist at the University who would be my best chance for getting hold of the data. I’ve just met him now, and he explains that he cannot guarantee that the essays containing the data hasn’t been thrown away, he will nonetheless try to go through the archieve to find it for me.

It’s a bit bizarre, I must say, since the work in question was one of the things mentioned as motivation for making Leif Lewin Skyttean Professor at Uppsala University at the age of 31 (the Skyttean Professorship was instituted in 1622, about forty years prior to the Lucasian Professorship being instituted at Cambridge, so it’s quite prestigeous), and yet apparently, no one thought it useful to actually save the data on which the work was based.
 
It’s a bit bizarre, I must say, since the work in question was one of the things mentioned as motivation for making Leif Lewin Skyttean Professor at Uppsala University at the age of 31 (the Skyttean Professorship was instituted in 1622, about forty years prior to the Lucasian Professorship being instituted at Cambridge, so it’s quite prestigeous), and yet apparently, no one thought it useful to actually save the data on which the work was based.
Where does it rank in comparison to the Regius Professor of Chronology at St Cedd’s?
 
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