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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

You’re an excellent writer.Lindroos sounds like an interesting character.

I'm pleased that you feel that way, as I kind of worried that he just seemed to be yet another cliché "no-nonsense cop".

I kind of wanted to work in just how controversial police forces actually were in the mid-19th century when they started to appear, when many elements of society, conservative, liberal, socialist, all tended to look at them with much scepticism, as akin to "So, the state now feels it proper to have an occupying army keep their own people in check?" (The Times once called for the abolition of the London Metropolitan Police for this very reason, actually.) And how furthermore, much of the early police force genuinely were made up of the same people who otherwise genuinely would be criminals since no other career prospects were on the horizon for people of their particular skills/lack of other skills.

My idea for Lindroos is that he is a "reverse rogue cop", a fellow who feels the need for a professional police that does its job properly, but that at the same time, he has empathy for the fact that most of civilized society has a very low view of police officers and the police as an institution. He's also meant to be a bit of a critique of the how pervasive the whole notion of judging by one's "gut feeling" is in most American procedural shows. Lindroos keeps himself cool and detached at all times, refuses to even have a gut feeling, going where the evidence leads, and not just cutting corners and going for the easy solution when it presents itself.

He's plainly and simply an honest man who wants to do his job properly.
 
I'm pleased that you feel that way, as I kind of worried that he just seemed to be yet another cliché "no-nonsense cop".

I kind of wanted to work in just how controversial police forces actually were in the mid-19th century when they started to appear, when many elements of society, conservative, liberal, socialist, all tended to look at them with much scepticism, as akin to "So, the state now feels it proper to have an occupying army keep their own people in check?" (The Times once called for the abolition of the London Metropolitan Police for this very reason, actually.) And how furthermore, much of the early police force genuinely were made up of the same people who otherwise genuinely would be criminals since no other career prospects were on the horizon for people of their particular skills/lack of other skills.

My idea for Lindroos is that he is a "reverse rogue cop", a fellow who feels the need for a professional police that does its job properly, but that at the same time, he has empathy for the fact that most of civilized society has a very low view of police officers and the police as an institution. He's also meant to be a bit of a critique of the how pervasive the whole notion of judging by one's "gut feeling" is in most American procedural shows. Lindroos keeps himself cool and detached at all times, refuses to even have a gut feeling, going where the evidence leads, and not just cutting corners and going for the easy solution when it presents itself.

He's plainly and simply an honest man who wants to do his job properly.
A logical man,no matter what to put simply.Perfect for a police officer.

Thank God for Mr Peel and his actions in creating a police force.Oh and his Peelian principals.

Seriously,modern society owes a lot to him in retrospect.
 
Thank God for Mr Peel and his actions in creating a police force.Oh and his Peelian principals.

I've long admired Peel, but that mainly for his courageous decision to break with his own party and abolish the Corn Laws. It is first very recently that I have come to appreciate just how equally courageous it was of him to go through with and institute a professional police force.
 
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And there the 60 seats of Finland (72 minus the 12 ones for the Governate-Generalship of Karelia (Generalguvenörsämbetet Karelen)) done. In addition to the modifcations to Vaasa County in @Ares96 's original map, I also moved one seats from Oulu County down to Turku County, in line with Björnstjernian thinking that wealth also ought to be a factor in determining the size of the constituencies.

path841.png

The basic backstory relevant to this part is that Magnus Björnstjerna in the 1830s reformed the Riksdag to so that the constituencies were divided up between the counties in line with how much revenue each of them brought in to the Crown (this was a view OTL Björnstjerna advocated for parliamentary reform), but during the Kalmar Conferences in 1861-65 establishing Nordic Union, since Norway and Denmark had their constituencies based on population rather than tax revenue, one of their demands were that the Swedes enact some measure of reform in a more popular direction for the new union parliament (Unionsdag).

Whereas the Swedish mapmakers relatively faithfully tried to adhere to a conservative approach of not dividing up any of the old hundreds, the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, whose representation would be greatly reduced by this reform, went for a more pragmatic approach, and gerrymandered the shit out of the Finnish coast.

This turns out to dovetail nicely with the story I have set up for Åbo/Turku. The Hattimander (Elbridge Gerry was born well before the PoD and would in all plausibility have engaged in similar shenanigans in TTL as he did in OTL) is the source of quite some furore among the Finnish-speaking community in western Finland, and in a city with almost equal numbers of Swedish- and Finnish-speakers as Åbo/Turku, coupled with the backstabbing and politicking that has been going on in the city's local branch of the Cap Party, there is much tension in the air, with the Åbo Police Force fearing that a riot will break out if the city elects two Swedish-speaking Hats for their two burgher seats.

What with the results to be announced at 8 o'clock in the evening, the Police Force has rescheduled things so that Mikael Lindroos' shift ends at 6 o'clock, and he is to have nothing to do with the preparations, as the Police Force are very keen to be able to say that he has nothing to do with such a delicate situation.
 
My father was not particularly impressed with the Hattimander. He just shrugged and said, "Have you seen what actual, real electoral districts in America actually look like?"

Yeah, but you need really detailed census results to get that sort of nonsense. And usually computer algorithms.
 
My take is that those Swedish dominated Finnish majority districts are going to see some Troubles in the future.

Nah, it’s not going to be a Northern Irish situation, more like a Québécois situation. There’s going to be grumbling, and anger, and railing against the Hattimander is going to be a cause célèbre, but once the early 1880s roll around, Sønderheim’s Reform Bill is going to do away with the Hattimander, the Mining Constituencies, give Stockholm STV (though Stockholm retains its archaic system of local government for another decade) and break up some of the Dual Member constituencies. And then things appear more or less static until STV is introduced in full everywhere in the early 1920s.

For the record, my decision to implement STV as the electoral system in the Nordic Empire has nothing to do with a particular love for STV. For precisely the same reason as @Thande has mentioned before, STV strikes me as a rather distasteful electoral system as the calculations involving transfer of votes can lead to some rather bizarre and counterintuitive results after all has been assembled and computed. Among other things, even if a party proportionally has the number of first preferences votes that they should logically be granted all the seats of a given constituency, this is nigh impossible to obtain by design. But I do find STV to be a singularly interesting electoral system, and since the Danes were experimenting with it in the mid-19th century, it seems like an interesting "other way taken", since all Nordic countries have ended up adopting party list-PR after either the Saint-Laguë or D'Hondt model.

Personally I'm fairly satisfied with Sweden's current system (modified Saint-Laguë) and wouldn't really want to tinker with it, but it does strike me as a remarkably boring system of representation nonetheless when it comes to how the votes actually deliver the seat counts. Which admittedly, it's kind of designed to do anyway, so yeah...
 
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And there we have the 61 Norwegian countryside constituencies, all single member. Including Sønderheim's home constituency of Sogn in Nordre Bergenhus County, and delightfully enough Mandal is its own constituency.

path841.png
 
Updated the colour scheme for those parties that will win seats in the 1867 Union Election:

ColorSchemeNordic.png

The official in-universe story for why the Caps ended up with orange and the Hats with grey is a bit inspired by how the Republicans ended up with red and the Democrats with blue in the US in OTL.

Traditionally, the colour that the Caps had been associated with had in fact been red, as the red of the Phrygian cap, their party symbol, but they never made this official, whereas the Hats never used any official colour at all. For the 1832 Swedish elections, the Central Bureau of Statistics decided for their book detailing the outcome of the election to include a map of who had won where. At the time, the Central Bureau of Statistics made no distinction between parties, and just printed "Government" for the Hats and their nominal Crown allies, and "Opposition" for the Caps and everyone else. The idea was to use the colours of the Swedish flag, blue for Government and yellow for Opposition. However, due to wartime rationing still being in effect at the time, the Bureau opted for a cheap dye of blue which rather quickly turned into a grey hue with time, and worrying that once the papers began to yellow that readers wouldn't be able to see the yellow pigment indicating where the opposition had won, the printers decided to add just a speck of red to it to give it an orangey colour.

Since the 1832 election ended up a landslide victory for the Caps, many prominent and wealthy Cap supporters began ordering large-scale reprints of the election map, and soon enough the the idea of the Caps being orange and the Hats being grey stuck in the public mind, and from thence there has been no return.

The Crowns in the mid-30s reorganized themselves as the Skeptical Party, and after 1835 entered into a composition government with the Caps. Since then, the Bureau of Central Statistics have labelled them as purple to indicate their origins as a pro-royalist, pro-court party.

Of the Danish parties, only the Radikale Højre makes use of any particular colour for their campaign material, and they have for quite obvious reasons elected to go with the shade of red of the Dannebrog.

Though there is no official cooperation between the Caps and Venstre or between the Skepticals and Gamle Højre, the Bureau has for the 1867 election decided to simply use different shades of yellow-ish orange and purple to indicate ideological kinship. The Landmannpartei is brown in reference to how they're essentially the party of wealthy German landowners, and the Finnish Agrarians are green to indicate them being a party of farmers.
 
I anticipate that at some point, relatively soon after the Great War in the early 20th century, Swedish Pomerania and Holsten-Lauenborg will be granted independence after some referendum or another, while maintaining close foreign relations with the Nordic Empire as the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg already does at this point in history. For one reason or another, the Order of the Three Crowns judges that that is a prudent step to take that will in the long run advance their overarching plan.
 
I really don’t like having separate shades to indicate one or two elected members, especially not when you have similar colours in use for minor parties. Much better in my view to indicate multiple-member seats with symbols.
 
While I evidently still have Iceland and the Faroes still to do, those will have to wait until later. The reason is because, well, there are issues with the Mercator projection. Don't get me wrong, if I were a navigator on a ship at any point prior to the invention of GPS and computers, the Mercator would have been my favourite map to go by, for our purposes, it is a big ugly in how it doesn't scale area properly.

I was originally planning to transform the SVG so that you saw it as if you were looking at the Nordic countries on a globe, but that is a view I have come to feel increasingly uncomfortable with. For one thing, since you won't actually have a globe, but the surface a three-dimensional object superimposed upon a two dimensional sheet, it won't actually preserve area. Nor angles.

The projection they use for the American election map on Wikipedia would appear to be the Albers projection, which does preserve area, and so I figure that that is the most aesthetically pleasing:

euro_mammal_boundaries_lg.jpg


To make this thing work, I'm going to need to get into the nitty-gritty of how an SVG file is formatted. Specifically, how the path element is formatted.

This may take a while...
 
On the topic of 19th century map-making and population density and stuff, I did earlier today lear, much to my amazement, that in 1859, Jernvägs-Undersöknings-Kommittéen commissioned a map of dividing Sweden into countless little perfect spheres and denote the population density in each one:

Insane Map.png

Meaning that theoretically, it would be possible to draw up a crazy "American style" electoral map of Sweden anno 1859, but, oh well, that's for another time that...
 
For the case of the six single member constituencies of Norway's capital of Christiania (since I have for some reason decided that the Norwegians are very rigid on only using single member constituencies for some reason), I've had to use a bit of handwavium, since the precise expansion of the city will probably be most prone to butterfly effects, and well, they seem to have changed the borders of the different menigheds every so often according to the specific streets as the city expanded. Nonetheless, I figure that this division, doing only some slight modifying of the borders and numbers available to me should appear plausible:

path94.png

I anticipate that the Norwegian Unionist Party have a pretty solid control of all of them.
 
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