msmp
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This is my shocked face...
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Max's election maps and assorted others
- Thread starter Ares96
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- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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Started trying to map the districts of South Tyrol as of circa 1914. This is drawing off a basemap provided by deviantart user r-r-eco, so credit to them for making it (and [redacted] them for making me pay a comically small amount of the DA token things to download the full-sized ones).
The colours and the black borders indicate the administrative districts (politische Bezirke), whose seats are indicated by stars and underlined text, and the middle-grey borders indicate judicial districts (Gerichtsbezirke). The latter especially were unequal in size due to the geography of the area and the fact that people had to be able to reach the courthouse in all seasons - as such, some districts included only one or two municipalities.
As you can tell, the border established in 1919 didn't actually follow the existing administrative boundaries - the Sterzing and Taufers districts also included some small areas that are now part of the adjoining municipalities within Austria.
The colours and the black borders indicate the administrative districts (politische Bezirke), whose seats are indicated by stars and underlined text, and the middle-grey borders indicate judicial districts (Gerichtsbezirke). The latter especially were unequal in size due to the geography of the area and the fact that people had to be able to reach the courthouse in all seasons - as such, some districts included only one or two municipalities.
As you can tell, the border established in 1919 didn't actually follow the existing administrative boundaries - the Sterzing and Taufers districts also included some small areas that are now part of the adjoining municipalities within Austria.
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- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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I have some high quality maps for Bohemia and Moravia if you need them.
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- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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And because I found the 1907 electoral law, here's the equivalent area divided into constituencies.
No, the urban constituencies make no damn sense whatsoever - seat 5 is the cities of Meran and Bozen proper, while seat 4 includes some of both of their suburbs as well as all the other towns in German South Tyrol that were deemed significant enough to include (including a big swath of villages in the Dolomites, which honestly has me completely stumped as to why that was).
Rather handily, the election results were the same in terms of party affiliation for both the 1907 and 1911 elections (the only ones held under universal manhood suffrage and using these constituencies). German Tyrol was always extremely Catholic, and as such a very firm stronghold for the Christian Social Party, while the Trentino obviously voted for Italian candidates. The result was that there just weren't that many marginal seats in this region - the only one that might count would be seat 5, if it weren't for the influence of the enormously influential Mayor of Bozen and leading Tyrolean pan-Germanist, Julius Perathoner. Perathoner won the seat himself in 1907, then stepped back in 1911 and secured the election of his ally Emil Kraft to the seat. Trent, meanwhile, was held by two separate Italian-speaking social democrats, the second of whom (Cesare Battisti) left his post in 1915 to join the Italian Army as a volunteer. The following year, he was taken prisoner by Austrian troops and executed for treason.
No, the urban constituencies make no damn sense whatsoever - seat 5 is the cities of Meran and Bozen proper, while seat 4 includes some of both of their suburbs as well as all the other towns in German South Tyrol that were deemed significant enough to include (including a big swath of villages in the Dolomites, which honestly has me completely stumped as to why that was).
Rather handily, the election results were the same in terms of party affiliation for both the 1907 and 1911 elections (the only ones held under universal manhood suffrage and using these constituencies). German Tyrol was always extremely Catholic, and as such a very firm stronghold for the Christian Social Party, while the Trentino obviously voted for Italian candidates. The result was that there just weren't that many marginal seats in this region - the only one that might count would be seat 5, if it weren't for the influence of the enormously influential Mayor of Bozen and leading Tyrolean pan-Germanist, Julius Perathoner. Perathoner won the seat himself in 1907, then stepped back in 1911 and secured the election of his ally Emil Kraft to the seat. Trent, meanwhile, was held by two separate Italian-speaking social democrats, the second of whom (Cesare Battisti) left his post in 1915 to join the Italian Army as a volunteer. The following year, he was taken prisoner by Austrian troops and executed for treason.
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His Diocesan maps are pretty good.
All this is giving me flashbacks to when I went up there in 2018 and reported back to people as "Yes, in the summer I went on holiday to Italy and Austr..." (momentarily wrinkles brow in confusion) "No, I never actually left Italy, did I?"
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- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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- Location
- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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And the reason why I got onto Tyrol in the first place - I added Austria to the new German basemap:
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All of Tyrol is now done.
I don't think I'm going to carry on at this scale, except maybe for the Littoral (which was of course also Italian after the war).
I don't think I'm going to carry on at this scale, except maybe for the Littoral (which was of course also Italian after the war).
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Yeah, those city constituencies aren't making any more sense with the whole of Tyrol.
I suppose it's a leftover from the previous election systems, but the Austrian electoral law (and the monographs on the 1907 and 1911 election results) make a point out of separating rural areas from urban areas and grouping urban areas at the cost of logic or common sense.
Also, fun fact, the seat allocation in the A-H elections was not done on the basis of population, but on share of the taxes paid into the Cisleithanian state. As such, Bohemia was overrepresented whereas Galicia and Lodomeria were underrepresented. Also, parallel Czech and German constituencies in Moravia or the three-round system for rural seats in Galicia (where each constituency chose 2 MPs to try and represent both Poles and Ruthenians).
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- Das Böse ist immer und überall
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Yeah, of all the systems I’ve previously mapped, I think the one most similar to this was the British Raj. Make of that what you will.
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If you accept the underlying logic of separating all urban areas from all rural areas, the groupings do vaguely make sense - two constituencies for Innsbruck, one for Trent, one for Bozen and Meran, and then one seat each for the smaller towns in North Tyrol, South Tyrol (including Lienz) and the Trentino.
Makemakean
Mr Makemean
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- Logical, unlike those in German
Didn’t know the FDP and Parti Radical were united already back in 1919! Always assumed that unification of Francophone and Germanophone parties happened sometime much later.
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Switzerland never really had a tradition of separate political parties in the different language areas. The Liberals were always a lot stronger in French Switzerland than in German Switzerland (mainly because of the lack of another good right-wing anti-FDP alternative), but they were also quite strong in Basel. Really I think the only explicitly language-regionalist party Switzerland has today is the Lega dei Ticinesi, and they only came around in the 90s.
Wien 1907/1911
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Some more Austria, and I believe it's time to tag @ajross once more.
Vienna was not technically its own state yet - it was formally part of Lower Austria - but as the Imperial capital and by far the largest city in Austria, it enjoyed a lot of privileges and autonomy that other Austrian cities lacked. In 1892, a state law had seen it expand to take in most of its right-bank suburbs, and in 1904 the annexation of Floridsdorf across the river followed, bringing the city to the boundaries it would retain for the next forty years. Just before the Floridsdorf annexation, the city passed two million inhabitants, which made it the largest city proper in the German-speaking world (although only because Berlin still had loads of independent suburbs).
As such, it was entitled to no less than 33 seats in the Reichsrat, which were assigned in such a way that each of the city's twenty-one districts got at least one seat each, and then just completely nonsensically after that. The old inner city, for example, was split into four seats with around two to three thousand electors each, while the districts of Margareten, Meidling, Hietzing, Rudolfsheim and Hernals, with over 20,000 electors each, were all left undivided. I suspect this is where @Nanwe's point about the seats being distributed based on tax revenue comes in, because the inner city was among the richest parts of Vienna while all the other districts mentioned (except arguably Hietzing) were working-class suburbs. Either way, it was very dumb and strange, in what's becoming something of a recurring theme here.
Vienna's party politics, too, were quite different from what we've come to expect from its later history. In 1907, the city was still in the grips of its extremely popular, long-serving and, er, questionable mayor, Karl Lueger. Lueger was one of the leaders of the "populist" wing of the Christian-Social Party, which sought to break with the party's clerical-conservative forebears to become a party for the Catholic, non-socialist masses. To this end, it employed a bit of Rerum novarum-inspired welfarism coupled with heaps and heaps of racism and sectarianism. Lueger was particularly famous for his virulent antisemitism, which Adolf Hitler would later cite as an inspiration in the formation of his own politics. It's been argued that Lueger was less of a true believer in scientific racism than he was a populist who happily went after the Jews as a vote-winning tool. He did have quite a lot of Jewish friends in his personal life (I know, I know), and when asked to explain how this squared with his political views, he's famously supposed to have replied "Wer a Jud' is, bestimm i" ("I decide who's a Jew").
Still, it's pretty much inarguable that the political climate of Vienna was drowning in antisemitism in the early 20th century, and that it was one of the most important cudgels used to keep the city's voters in line behind Lueger and his programme. The result of this was that the Christian Socials swept the city in the first free Reichsrat elections, successfully bullying the pan-Germanist bloc into standing down for them in most of the working-class areas. The goal was to deny the Social Democrats the chance at a runoff, and this was broadly successful. Only six seats went to a runoff in 1907, and overall, the Social Democrats only went away with ten of the 33 seats.
By the time of the next election, Lueger had died, and the Viennese Christian Social organisation was thrown into chaos as a result. This meant that the three camps of (German-)Austrian politics competed on something resembling equal footing for the first time, and the number of runoffs increased massively. Which in turn meant that the Social Democrats swept most of them, since the German nationalists tended to support them against the Christian Socials. The reason for this is that the two blocs shared a common antipathy to the Habsburgs and the Church, and the German nationalists had a pretty strong liberal streak, especially in Vienna. This support was reciprocated in most of the bourgeois districts, which correspondingly swung from the Christian Socials to the German nationalists. As a result, the party that had dominated the city just four years earlier was reduced to four seats in the city, and would never quite recover.
Vienna was not technically its own state yet - it was formally part of Lower Austria - but as the Imperial capital and by far the largest city in Austria, it enjoyed a lot of privileges and autonomy that other Austrian cities lacked. In 1892, a state law had seen it expand to take in most of its right-bank suburbs, and in 1904 the annexation of Floridsdorf across the river followed, bringing the city to the boundaries it would retain for the next forty years. Just before the Floridsdorf annexation, the city passed two million inhabitants, which made it the largest city proper in the German-speaking world (although only because Berlin still had loads of independent suburbs).
As such, it was entitled to no less than 33 seats in the Reichsrat, which were assigned in such a way that each of the city's twenty-one districts got at least one seat each, and then just completely nonsensically after that. The old inner city, for example, was split into four seats with around two to three thousand electors each, while the districts of Margareten, Meidling, Hietzing, Rudolfsheim and Hernals, with over 20,000 electors each, were all left undivided. I suspect this is where @Nanwe's point about the seats being distributed based on tax revenue comes in, because the inner city was among the richest parts of Vienna while all the other districts mentioned (except arguably Hietzing) were working-class suburbs. Either way, it was very dumb and strange, in what's becoming something of a recurring theme here.
Vienna's party politics, too, were quite different from what we've come to expect from its later history. In 1907, the city was still in the grips of its extremely popular, long-serving and, er, questionable mayor, Karl Lueger. Lueger was one of the leaders of the "populist" wing of the Christian-Social Party, which sought to break with the party's clerical-conservative forebears to become a party for the Catholic, non-socialist masses. To this end, it employed a bit of Rerum novarum-inspired welfarism coupled with heaps and heaps of racism and sectarianism. Lueger was particularly famous for his virulent antisemitism, which Adolf Hitler would later cite as an inspiration in the formation of his own politics. It's been argued that Lueger was less of a true believer in scientific racism than he was a populist who happily went after the Jews as a vote-winning tool. He did have quite a lot of Jewish friends in his personal life (I know, I know), and when asked to explain how this squared with his political views, he's famously supposed to have replied "Wer a Jud' is, bestimm i" ("I decide who's a Jew").
Still, it's pretty much inarguable that the political climate of Vienna was drowning in antisemitism in the early 20th century, and that it was one of the most important cudgels used to keep the city's voters in line behind Lueger and his programme. The result of this was that the Christian Socials swept the city in the first free Reichsrat elections, successfully bullying the pan-Germanist bloc into standing down for them in most of the working-class areas. The goal was to deny the Social Democrats the chance at a runoff, and this was broadly successful. Only six seats went to a runoff in 1907, and overall, the Social Democrats only went away with ten of the 33 seats.
By the time of the next election, Lueger had died, and the Viennese Christian Social organisation was thrown into chaos as a result. This meant that the three camps of (German-)Austrian politics competed on something resembling equal footing for the first time, and the number of runoffs increased massively. Which in turn meant that the Social Democrats swept most of them, since the German nationalists tended to support them against the Christian Socials. The reason for this is that the two blocs shared a common antipathy to the Habsburgs and the Church, and the German nationalists had a pretty strong liberal streak, especially in Vienna. This support was reciprocated in most of the bourgeois districts, which correspondingly swung from the Christian Socials to the German nationalists. As a result, the party that had dominated the city just four years earlier was reduced to four seats in the city, and would never quite recover.
msmp
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I believe Lueger only ever took office because of the Pope's intervention in the political crisis in Vienna; Franz Josef repeatedly refused to commission him as Mayor because of his antisemitism (and, perhaps more importantly given the era, his populism). Seeing how the CS collapsed after his death is pretty interesting.