Max's election maps and assorted others

[Ares96]

We're still trying to find reliable maps of the early South African elections, so those will be a while, but before then I do have a prologue of sorts to share. Yesterday I found a link from Wikipedia to a master's dissertation from the University of Cape Town, written in 1980 by Alan John Charrington Smith (I don't know which of those are first and last names, so I'm just typing in all of them in full), which goes into excruciating detail about the last few legislative elections in the Cape Colony before unification, starting in 1898 and ending with the colony's final election in 1908.

Starting in 1898 makes a degree of sense, because while one can definitely say clear political lines of disagreement existed before then, 1898 is really the first election to be fought with a real party system. The Progressives, the Cape's first organised political party, was founded as a political vehicle for diamond magnate-turned-politician Cecil Rhodes, who had first been elected to the House of Assembly in 1880 and became Prime Minister ten years later. Rhodes has become relevant again in recent time owing to protests against his economic legacy in universities across the UK and South Africa, so he should need no further introduction, but to summarise briefly: his policies were staunchly pro-imperialist, both in the sense of supporting continued British rule and continued colonial expansion. Having made his money in the Big Hole of Kimberley, Rhodes was convinced it was his personal destiny and that of the British Empire to secure as much as possible of Africa's mineral wealth for itself, and for that purpose he founded the British South Africa Company to conquer and rule a large chunk of land in south-central Africa that he modestly christened Rhodesia. He was equally convinced that the black population's destiny was to provide cheap and expendable manual labour for Britain's colonial project, and to that end sponsored laws that raised the property qualification for voting (the Franchise and Ballot Act 1892) and imposed strict limits on the amount of land a black person could own while also dissolving the pre-existing communal land tenures held by indigenous villages (the "Glen Grey Act" of 1894). These laws are usually considered some of the first legislative precursors to apartheid, and did much to undermine the supposedly race-blind nature of the Cape electoral franchise.

However, Rhodes' influence did not extend across all of South Africa, and this fact haunted him throughout his political career. In the Witwatersrand, which at the time was part of the independent South African Republic, a huge seam of gold had been discovered in 1886, and this brought a large influx of settlers from the Cape and other British colonies. To Rhodes, this was an intolerable situation: a potentially world-changing amount of precious metals, sitting right outside his borders. Luckily, the strong presence of British workers and mining corporations in the Rand meant that the gold rush didn't necessarily threaten British dominance in the region, and in fact, might present an opportunity to seize control of the SAR and end the Boer self-government experiment once and for all. A plan was hatched whereby Leander Starr Jameson, the chief administrator of Southern Rhodesia, would lead a force of some 600 colonial militiamen into the SAR, where they would join up with an insurrection among the mineworkers in the Rand and seize control of the republic for Britain. Unfortunately, Rhodes and Jameson made no plans to actually bring about this insurrection, and it quickly became apparent that neither the miners nor the government in London had any interest whatsoever in supporting them. The "Jameson Raid" ended up an embarrassing debacle, with the force stopped dead by Boer commandos and its leaders taken prisoner.

There were some brief attempts to paint the Raid as an adventure and Jameson as a dashing colonial hero, but ultimately it was very hard to get past just how stupid it had all been. It had shown the SAR to be far more capable of defending itself than anyone had thought, and Kaiser Wilhelm sent a congratulatory telegram to President Kruger in which he seemed to offer his support if the republic ever needed to defend itself again. While Jameson was away, the Ndebele people launched an uprising of their own which would last eighteen months and claim many thousand lives. And back in Cape Town, not only was Rhodes forced to resign, the debates following the Raid led to the formation of the first-ever real opposition party in the colony.

The Cape was, of course, a very heterogeneous place then as now, and when the Voortrekkers left to establish the SAR and the Orange Free State, quite a lot of Afrikaners stayed behind, and continued to form the majority of the rural white population. Compared to the British settlers who dominated the cities and and the more recently annexed border regions, the Afrikaners were a lot less interested in the British colonial project - which isn't to say that they weren't racist, they just preferred not to take marching orders from London. The Jameson Raid raised particular ire, being directed against their "countrymen" in the SAR, and when Parliament was dissolved in 1898, the Afrikaner Bond's Cape section decided it would go into the election in direct opposition to the Progressives. The Bond was an organisation that existed across what would become South Africa, and was devoted to securing the rights of Afrikaners - that is, white Dutch/Afrikaans-speaking people who considered themselves African rather than European - against British encroachment. It also sometimes advocated for the formation of a unified South African republic outside the British Empire, although this was not a goal actively pursued by its members in the Cape.

Rhodes was succeeded in office by J. Gordon Sprigg, veteran MP for East London, who had first been named Prime Minister in 1878 and now began his third stint in the role. Sprigg was, like Rhodes, an imperialist by inclination, but whereas Rhodes was a phenomenally wealthy mining speculator who stood for naked capitalism above all, Sprigg represented the interests of the Eastern Cape settlers who had first arrived from Britain in 1820 and who, in many ways, formed a totally distinct society from the rest of the colony. These areas had been conquered from the Xhosa over the course of several bloody "frontier wars" that lasted a whole century, starting under Dutch rule in the 1770s and ending with the surrender of the last guerrillas in the Amathole Mountains in 1879. Their inhabitants were still conscious of the military threat from the native population, however, and so they tended to favour a strong imperial connection as a way of defending their settlements. This was also Sprigg's position, and in fact he had presided over the defeat of those last Xhosa holdouts - however, he came to power with support from significant portions of the Bond as well as the Progressives, and his third premiership would be focused on more administrative issues.

Specifically, Sprigg supported a project to reform the way the House of Assembly was elected to reduce rural overrepresentation, and thus weaken the influence of the Afrikaners, whom he regarded as another threat to British supremacy in the colony. Although his redistribution bill passed second reading, it caused significant tension within his coalition, and Bond-affiliated independent MP William Philip Schreiner ended up successfully pushing a motion of no confidence against Sprigg's government in May 1898. As a result, the lower house was dissolved mere months after the Legislative Council elections, and the elections would be fought on the same wildly unrepresentative boundaries as had existed beforehand. The seats ranged in size from Cape Division, with 8,122 registered voters, to Victoria East with 782 - both two-member seats, as were the majority of constituencies in place. The only exceptions were Cape Town and Kimberley, whose 7,798 and 5,674 voters respectively elected four members each, and the border constituencies of Mafeking, Tembuland and Griqualand East, with 605, 2,110 and 1,333 voters electing one member each. In total, the House counted 79 members, and as mentioned earlier, they were elected under a nominally race-blind franchise, with every adult male citizen of the colony owning at least £75 worth of property eligible both to vote and to stand for election. In practice, however, every single MP elected throughout the House's existence was white.

The 1898 campaign was spirited, with issues ranging from the Jameson Raid and the future of British imperialism in southern Africa to the urban-rural and British-Afrikaner divides (closely related to one another) within the colony itself. The Bond accused the Progressives of being supported by the colonial administration, while the Progressives accused the Bond of taking secret funding from the Boer republics and the Germans. The other big issue were food import duties, which the Bond strongly supported while the Progressives were forced to take a compromise position to avoid upsetting either the urban or rural parts of its base. There was also the issue of Rhodes, who continued to be identified with the Progressive Party even in retirement, bankrolling a large part of their campaign expenses and making sporadic statements about his readiness to return the moment the people called for him. This was questionably realistic, not least because he was in terrible health at this point and would die just a few years later, so the Progressives focused their efforts on defending the Sprigg ministry.

Their success in this would be very limited. The elections were held on different dates over the course of August 1898, and when the returns were completed on the 5th of September, the Bond and their independent allies had won 40 seats - the narrowest possible majority - in the House. Sprigg held on as Prime Minister initially, but in October lost another confidence vote, and Schreiner took office leading a Bond-dominated ministry. He immediately made clear his desire to work towards a peaceful understanding with the Boer republics to settle the issues that had precipitated the Jameson Raid, but this would bring him into conflict with the colony's new Governor, Sir Alfred Milner, whose intentions were entirely different...

 

[Ares96]

It's done, I think.

Surprisingly, the biggest question turned out to be how to depict those outer branches only served by express trains - I decided to label all stations along them as express stations, as I think that's what makes most sense to the casual observer, but it technically misrepresents them on a technical level, since "express station" usually implies a station with through tracks, which are obviously absent from these two-track lines.

 

[Ares96]

Back to South Africa, and before we get into the South African War and its effects on the Cape's electoral politics, it is worth reminding ourselves that the House of Assembly was only half of a bicameral legislature. The upper house, the Legislative Council, had been set up at the same time, and was intended to provide the same kind of sober second thought that the House of Lords (theoretically at least) provided in Westminster. The Cape, of course, did not have a hereditary aristocracy, so instead the colonial administrators turned to the next-best thing: the landed rural elite, which very much did exist in the Cape and was a huge economic factor in the colony's internal life. To make sure that men of property and influence formed the backbone of the Council, the property qualification to stand for election to the upper house was set at a very hefty £2000, although AFAICT the qualification to vote was the same £25 (raised to £75 under Rhodes' electoral reforms) as for the lower house - in any case, Alan John Charrington Smith treats the voting figures for the two types of election as directly comparable, so I assume the franchises weren't too dissimilar.

The Council was elected separately from the lower house, although its electoral cycle was also five years, and unlike many upper houses in British colonies (looking at you, Australia - of course, the Victorian parliament was set up around the same time as that of the Cape, and resembled it in many ways), all seats were up for election at once. Initially, the Council had been elected from two large electoral divisions - the Western Province and the Eastern Province - which each covered about half of the colony, but over time this came to be regarded as a liability since the two provinces had strong regional identities and sometimes clashing interests, so in 1874 they were subdivided into seven new provinces. The old Western Province was divided into the Western, North-Western and South-Western Provinces, while the Eastern Province similarly became the Eastern, North-Eastern and South-Eastern Provinces. The Karoo and Orange River areas, which straddled the two old provinces, were made into a new Midland Province, and it was hoped that this would provide balance by supporting neither of the old provincial interests. Of course, by this point the diamond rush in Kimberley was well underway, and the influx of new English-speaking settlers would soon realign the Cape's politics from the old east-west divide to the Anglo-Afrikaner divide.

The other oddity of Legislative Council elections, and the probable reason they decided against staggered elections, was the use of cumulative voting. Under this system, while each voter got as many votes as there were candidates just as in lower-house elections, they could choose to give more than one of those votes to a single candidate. If voters chose to "plump" for a candidate, i.e. give them all three of their votes, that candidate would need only a third as many votes to get elected as would normally be the case, and this made it easier for minority interests to win representation. AJCS calls this "a crude form of proportional representation", and we can see the effects on the map below, as only one province (the Port Elizabeth-based South-Eastern Province) gave all its seats to the majority party.

By 1898, the Cape had expanded its territory significantly, with both the two Griqualands and British Bechuanaland being added to the colony. Griqualand East was merged into the Eastern Province, but the other two territories were made provinces in their own right, electing only one member each. This was in spite of the fact that Griqualand West, home to Kimberley and its diamond industry, had nearly as many voters as the smaller three-member provinces. Of course, these new provinces elected their members by FPTP, and in any case they were both dominated by Rhodes and the Progressive Party at this point.

The 1898 Legislative Council election was actually held several months before the lower-house election, in March of 1898, so these two maps are out of chronological order. Unlike the lower-house election, it returned a relatively healthy Progressive majority - 14 out of 23 seats - and while the upper house could not vote confidence in the government, this obviously did not make W. P. Schreiner's life easier when he took power later that year.



(A quick note - the provincial boundaries may not be 100% accurate, as I'm basing them off of the fiscal divisions as of circa 1910 and quite a few of them looked different at this point)

 

[Ares96]

So here's something unrelated to the previous (take a shot, everyone): I've taken my very best shot at bringing the big basemap of Swedish parishes back to 1863, the year the Municipal Ordinances came into effect and civil and ecclesiastical administration was separated. These laws applied throughout the country except in Lapland, where the sparse and "uncivilised" nature of the local population meant it took another eleven years before the reform was implemented.

The Ordinances created 2,358 rural municipalities, most of which were derived from one whole Church of Sweden parish, although there were a few exceptions where small parishes (mainly in Västergötland and Östergötland) were merged to make administration more efficient. Even then, most municipalities were very small, counting only a few hundred residents - this wasn't that big of a deal, since local municipalities had limited powers in rural areas and mainly administered poor relief. There was no planning outside of towns at this point, roads were maintained by local landowners, and schools continued to be run by the Church until 1930. To handle issues too wide-ranging or costly for the local municipalities, mainly agricultural aid and public health (and later on also hospitals), a related ordinance set up county councils (landsting) which were elected by the same census franchise as the local municipalities, had a number of councillors that were in fixed proportions to population (one per 5,000 urban residents and 7,000 rural residents, at least later on), and would additionally serve as electors for the First Chamber of the Riksdag when that was created in 1866.

There were also a large number of very illogical and impractical boundaries still in place at this point, some of which were exclaves (mainly in Dalarna and other sparsely-settled areas), but most of which were to do with parishes being split between multiple hundreds, and in some cases, multiple counties. The south of Sweden was particularly notorious for this, with boundary-crossing parishes practically being the norm in both Scania and Småland. Småland even has a dialect word (skate - that's pronounced with two syllables) meaning "a part of a parish that's separated from it by a higher administrative boundary". One of these - the Skårdals skate area directly across the river from Kungälv, just north of Gothenburg - had even been in a separate country from the main part of the parish until 1658, when Bohuslän belonged to Norway. Residents of the area were said to be "Norwegian in body and Swedish in soul", since they paid taxes to the Norwegian crown but went to church across the border in Sweden.

What about urban areas, then? Well, the 88 towns in Sweden had already had some form of self-rule, but the Ordinances standardised the form of governance across the entire country and removed the role of guilds and other social corporations in electing town councils. Along with the 1864 law establishing freedom of enterprise throughout the country, this ended the privileged role of the towns in the economy, but they continued to be distinguished from rural areas in law. Broadly speaking, we can say towns were more powerful than rural municipalities, but also less autonomous. On the one hand, they had authority over things like planning, public health and fire safety, but on the other hand, the city council's power over these matters was tempered by the presence of the magistrates, who were judges appointed by the central government and, in addition to running the local judiciary, had effective veto power over the council's decisions.

In addition to towns and rural municipalities, there was also a secret third thing - köpingar, which were marketplaces (under the old trade laws predating the freedom of enterprise) that didn't have full town status. Most of these were lydköpingar, which were ruled by a town in the local area, but there was also a small number of friköpingar which had their own councils but lacked several of the powers given to towns. Seven of these - two lydköpingar (Ronneby, which had sorted under Karlskrona, and Mönsterås, which had sorted under Kalmar) and five friköpingar (Arvika, Lysekil, Malmköping, Motala and Örnsköldsvik) were given autonomy by the Ordinances and allowed to form councils with essentially the same powers as rural municipalities - in later years, they would gain power over planning and fire safety, and the right to voluntarily implement the other powers of towns, but they remained under rural jurisdiction throughout their existence. Over the years, a great many more köpingar would be established, usually in industrial settlements that weren't thought big enough for full town status, and in many cases leading on to the granting of town status later on.

 

[Ares96]

Any questions about the context for this map should be addressed to @Heat, she might know the answers and I almost certainly don't.

 

[Ares96]

Touched up an unfinished draft I'd had lying around for quite some time. I can't find the remaining results in UP and Jharkhand, mainly because I haven't gotten the ECI website to work properly in ages (maybe it still works for people in India?), so I decided to give up and just post what I have.

In 2009, the INC-led government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh won a second term, seeing a huge increase in seats over the very narrow 2004 election that had originally brought it to power. The UPA, the alliance formed to support the INC in its bid to retake power in 2004, won almost half of the seats - 262 out of 543 - but with the support of the "Fourth Front" parties and the BSP, they were able to form a stable majority government. The global financial crisis coupled with a number of corruption scandals eventually made this government deeply unpopular in the country, setting the stage for the landslide victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP in 2014.

The 2009 election was also the first one held on the set of boundaries currently used, which are based on population figures from the 2000 census. The government of Indira Gandhi, which oversaw the 1977 boundary review, was very keen (very very keen) on family planning, and in order to avoid punishing states for reducing their population growth, it was decided that the boundaries put in place then would remain in effect until after the 2001 census. The 2002 Delimitation Commission recommended no change in the apportionment of seats between states, instead simply redrawing boundaries within each state to bring them to rough parity. Even so, 499 out of 543 constituencies were redrawn for this election. The next Delimitation Commission is supposed to be appointed sometime after 2026, and will base its work on the results of the first census conducted after that point (presumably the 2031 census), so these boundaries will have a chance to become quite out of date themselves.

 

[Ares96]

The first election held on the set of boundaries that would last thirty years was also one of the most dramatic in Indian history. The Indian National Congress, which had ruled the country without much opposition since independence, had lost much favour over the previous six years, largely due to the increasingly heavy hand of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her closest associates in running both the party and the country. Indira had come to power in 1966, two years after the death of her father, India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Like her father, she believed in developing India in a socialist direction, relying on the country's natural wealth and partners in the Soviet Union and other formerly-colonised nations to forge a path separate from European influence. Her rise to power saw a populist turn in the ruling party, with policies including the nationalisation of the banking sector and the abolition of the privy purse (the system of annual payments to former rulers of princely states) being announced and implemented at breakneck speed with little public consultation. This brought her into conflict with a number of regional Congress leaders, who successfully persuaded the party bureaucracy to have Indira expelled in November 1969. Indira was not cowed by this, obviously, and the result was a split in the party, with Indira leading the Congress (R) and her opponents the Congress (O). Both parties entered the 1971 general election, but even though the Congress (O) and its allies stood candidates in every seat, Indira's Congress (R) trounced them everywhere except in Gujarat, where a number of Congress (O) leaders had their base.

Having gotten a clear mandate for her policies independent of the Congress organisation and name loyalty, Indira set about reshaping the country in her image. Part of this, to her credit, was delivering on the 1971 campaign slogan Garibi hatao, desh bachao ("remove poverty, save the country") - the 5th Five-Year Plan, beginning in 1974, included a number of policies designed to alleviate rural poverty and develop the country's education and utility infrastructure. Unfortunately, the 1973 oil crisis affected India just as it did the rest of the world, and the goal of garibi hatao was very quickly put on the back burner. Instead, Indira's government came to focus more and more on suppressing internal dissent, which was beginning to flourish owing to many of the same issues that had precipitated the Congress split in 1969. Put simply, Indira and her inner circle had gotten a reputation for disregarding democracy, which stemmed in part from them pushing through their preferred reforms without discussion or reflection, but also in part from the actual erosion of key democratic institutions under their rule. Back in 1967, the Supreme Court had ruled that those parts of the Constitution that dealt with fundamental civil rights could not be amended unilaterally by Parliament, and Indira's response was to pass a new amendment saying "yes we can" and promote a relatively junior Supreme Court justice, A.N. Ray, to the position of Chief Justice on the basis that he'd written the dissent in the original case. Ray's appointment was widely seen as a move to seize control of the judiciary, and raised such a furore among the legal profession that the Indian bar actually went on strike in 1976.

But it wasn't all questions of high democratic principle - Indira herself also came under attack at this point. After the 1971 election, the Prime Minister's main opponent in her own constituency of Rae Bareli, a Samyukta Socialist Party candidate and former independence activist named Raj Narain, sued her in court for electoral malpractice, arguing that the Congress (R) had bribed voters and used government employees as campaign workers. The case was tried at the Allahabad High Court, which in June 1975 ruled that Narain's charges were accurate and found Indira guilty of electoral malpractice, ordering her to resign from office within twenty days and barring her from standing for election for a period of six years. Indira appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, and two weeks afterward, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declared a nationwide state of emergency on her advice.

The Emergency, as it's become known, lasted for 21 months, and saw an enormous crackdown on politics and civil society, with tens of thousands of people arrested under national security legislation passed in the years before, many of them key opposition leaders. Many of these were tortured or otherwise mistreated in jail, and in general the police and security services, by now thoroughly loyal to the Congress (R) government, were let loose in the cities and towns. A key figure in this was Sanjay Gandhi, Indira's younger son, who was one of his mother's most important advisers despite holding no political office, and who would become one of the most powerful men in the country during the Emergency. Sanjay had very few qualms about respecting democratic norms, conferring only with a few trusted friends and using his untouchable status as the Prime Minister's son to impose his will on the country, and the city of Delhi in particular. In April 1976, when visiting the old town of Delhi, he complained to a city official that there were tenements blocking his view of the Jama Masjid, and the Delhi Development Authority proceeded to have the tenements demolished, displacing 70,000 residents with very little notice and killing some 150 of them when they protested and the police opened fire. In September, Sanjay led the implementation of a new "family planning" scheme, allegedly designed to address the IMF's concerns about overpopulation in India, whose centrepiece was a programme of sterilisation of lower-class (and lower-caste) people. On paper, the programme was always voluntary, with participants receiving either a straightforward cash payment or a housing loan on favourable terms from one of the nationalised banks in exchange for undergoing sterilisation. However, local governments were very eager to meet quotas, and reports of people being herded into camps and forcibly sterilised are so common that it's hard to argue there wasn't a systemic campaign of compulsory sterilisation going on. The sterilisation campaign is maybe the single most infamous aspect of the Emergency, and family planning remains a toxic subject in Indian politics to this day.

Despite the arrests, the press censorship and what few social programmes still remained despite the shift in priorities, opposition to the Congress (R) government (rebranded as Congress (I) during the Emergency, with I naturally standing for Indira) was growing by the day. As early as July 1975, Sikh leaders in Punjab had organised the Democracy Bachao Morcha (Save Democracy Front), which called for mass protests to oppose the "fascist tendencies" of the Congress, and which led to over 40,000 Sikhs getting arrested over the following two years, more than a third of all arrests made during the Emergency. This massive Sikh resistance didn't come out of nowhere - the group had been engaged in disputes against the central government ever since independence, for many different and complex reasons, but the long and short of it was that Sikhs, and Punjabis generally, had felt disadvantaged by the central government's actions for a long time before the Emergency and now saw their last chance to resist or watch India turn into a police state. This sentiment was echoed by many other groups in India, particularly in North India, whose river plains were and are the poorest and most densely-populated regions of the country, thus making them the epicentre of the sterilisation campaigns. Jayaprakash Narayan (popularly known as JP), a Marxist and former independence activist from the Bhojpuri region of Bihar, had led a mass movement against the state government of Bihar during previous years. When the Emergency was declared, JP's calls for a Sampurna Kranti (Total Revolution) against Congress excesses and social injustice attracted hundreds of thousands of people to his protest rallies and millions to his movement before he was jailed. He would be released in November 1975 to get treatment for kidney failure, and spent the rest of his life in very poor health, but by that point he was a nationally recognised symbol of democracy.

Far from uniting India behind her, Indira's heavy-handed policies had actually succeeded, if only for a short while, in uniting almost the whole political scene in opposition to her continued rule. Both the communist movement, which had been growing in states like Kerala and West Bengal thanks to massive rural poverty and anti-Vietnam War sentiment, and the Hindu nationalist milieu around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were targeted as potential cores of resistance, and both groups eventually agreed to join forces against Indira alongside the Congress (O) and related groups. This alliance was extremely heterogeneous, and for lack of a better unifying factor, the dissident Congress elements found themselves leading it due to their relatively centrist outlook. The RSS would never have accepted a leftist leader, the CPI(M) would never have accepted a Hindu nationalist one, but in the figure of Morarji Desai, former Finance Minister and Congress (O) stalwart, they found an acceptable compromise. Desai had reasonably good opposition credentials, having gone on hunger strike and been jailed due to his support for the Navnirman Andolan (Reconstruction Movement) protests in his home state of Gujarat, but he was also past his eightieth birthday and unlikely to rock the boat too much in either direction.

In January 1977, having extended the Emergency twice, Indira decided to lift some of the restrictions and give the people the chance to give her another mandate at the ballot box. She had little reason to suspect this wouldn't work - after all, everyone around her was telling her how popular she was, the press (censored by government order) was giving nothing but praise for her leadership and her government's programmes, and everyone who'd predicted her downfall in the 1971 election had been spectacularly wrong. But of course, 1977 was not 1971. As mentioned, India had been wracked by constant protests and resistance movements even before the Emergency was declared, and the appearance of armed troops in the towns and sterilisation camps in the villages had done nothing to make the government more popular. From the moment elections were called, the opposition alliance mobilised their forces - two days later, the Janata Party was formed as a unified organisation for all but the leftist and regionalist elements of the coalition. The core of the JP was the Congress (O), the centre-left Samyukta Socialist Party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Jana Sangh, and the Bharatiya Lok Dal, which was itself a merger of several anti-government factions including the liberal Swatantra Party and the Congress Socialist Party. The BLD would lend its electoral registration to the JP, since there wasn't time to register the alliance as a new political party, and it quickly hammered out a seat-sharing agreement with the Left Front in West Bengal, the Shiromani Akali Dal in Punjab, the Peasants' and Workers' Party in Maharashtra and the independent Congress (O) remnant as well as the DMK in Tamil Nadu.

Congress (I), meanwhile, spent the entire campaign getting increasingly rattled, with several cabinet ministers crossing the floor to the opposition and Indira offering very little except vague promises of future economic development, which rang more hollow than ever. From the very beginning, momentum was with the opposition, and when the people went to the polls in March, Congress was handed its worst defeat to date. The government did relatively well in the south and the northeast, holding majorities of seats in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Assam, and was relatively competitive in Maharashtra and Gujarat. In the north, however, they were utterly, utterly routed, with not a single seat in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana or Punjab staying with them, and only a couple of seats in West Bengal and one each in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Indira herself lost Rae Bareli to Narain, who stood again as the JP candidate and won convincingly (although it was still the weakest opposition majority in UP). The sweep in West Bengal can be attributed in large part to the Left Front, which would take power on the state level in June, inaugurating India's longest-serving communist state government.

Morarji Desai was sworn in as Prime Minister by Acting President B.D. Jatti on 24 March, four days after the end of polling. Aside from Akali Dal leader Parkash Singh Badal, who took office as Minister of Agriculture, the cabinet included only JP members - the other allied parties all went into opposition. Even so, and despite their stable majority in the Lok Sabha, the Desai ministry would only last a little over two years before internal divisions caused it to collapse.

 

[Ares96]

The first attempt to unite anti-Congress forces into a working government was a dismal failure. The Janata Party had performed well in the 1977 elections, sure, but their only unifying factor was the sense of urgency in preventing Indira Gandhi and her government from retaining power after the Emergency. Once Morarji Desai had come to power and completed the reversal of the Emergency, there were a thousand different voices within his own coalition on how to proceed, and ultimately, none of them would fully emerge triumphant.

Desai's first act in power was to release all those prisoners remaining in Indian jails whose charges were considered political, and to introduce constitutional amendments to strengthen human rights protections and prevent the abuses of power that characterised the Emergency from happening again. To further drive this point home, investigations were launched into leading government figures of the previous parliamentary term, including Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. Sanjay was investigated primarily for his role in running state-owned carmaker Maruti Motors Ltd., which had been started in 1971 with the goal of producing an Indian-made car that would be affordable to India's growing lower middle classes. Maruti had still never produced a single car by this time, but Sanjay Gandhi had made millions off his position as managing director and, given that Maruti had been given an exclusive licence to produce its proposed class of car, he could be expected to make even more if production ever started.

Indira had been offered a comfortable exile by the King of Nepal, but after some consideration declined this and decided to stay in India and fight back. In October 1978, the Lok Sabha seat of Chikmagalur in Karnataka was vacated by its sitting member, D. B. Chandregowda, explicitly to allow Indira to return to parliament. The Janata Party made an attempt to recruit Kannada cinema legend Dr. Rajkumar as their candidate against her, but he declined citing a desire to stay apolitical, and the by-election was a slam dunk for Congress. Shortly afterward, however, Union Home Minister Charan Singh issued warrants for Indira and Sanjay's arrests, charging them with corruption and abuse of power so vague that they would be almost impossible to prove in court - among other things, they alleged that Indira had plotted to have jailed opposition leaders killed. Far from immobilising Congress, the arrests were a huge tactical error, and made it look as though the Janata Party was out for revenge rather than justice. Matters were not helped on 20 December, when two Congress supporters hijacked an Indian Airlines plane between Calcutta and Lucknow demanding Indira's immediate release. This was not granted, but the hijacking ensured that Indira was already a martyr before her trial even began.

By that time, the Janata Party was already splitting down the middle. As mentioned, the party had very little to unite it other than prosecuting Indira and the other key figures in the Emergency, and while Morarji Desai was able to achieve a few things as Prime Minister - notably normalising relations with China and Pakistan (though not to the point of settling border disputes with either country) and appointing the Mandal Commission to identify and propose policies to improve the lot of India's "socially or educationally backward classes" - there was no agreement within the government on how to deal with India's still-ongoing economic crisis. In late 1977, the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act was passed, imposing strict controls on currency exchange and effectively requiring multinationals seeking to do business in India to partner with domestic Indian companies. Economic nationalism was one of few principles shared by socialists, populists and Hindu nationalists, but the FERA failed to achieve its goals in multiple different ways: it did very little to stave off the multinational presence in India's economy in the long run, but in the short run, it caused a large exodus of cash and resources as American conglomerates scrambled to leave the Indian market before the new regulations went into effect. Most famously, Coca-Cola pulled out of India altogether, and for a brief time, the Indian state entered the soda market with a drink labelled "Double Seven" - believed by some to be a reference to the 1977 defeat of Congress, and making the drink immediately controversial.

Beyond selling soft drinks, it's hard to say the Desai ministry had any economic policy whatsoever. If anything, the two sides of the Janata Party - the secular socialists led by George Fernandes and Charan Singh on the one hand, and the Hindu nationalists led by L.K. Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee on the other - were more interested in preventing the other from achieving their goals than they were in advancing their own ones. The issue came to a head in summer 1979, when left-leaning members of the cabinet floated the idea that the Janata Party should ban its members from being part of any "alternative social or political organisation", a fairly direct reference to the RSS, which still counted most of the Hindu nationalist faction including Advani and Vajpayee as members. When Desai, fearing for his majority, refused to go along with this, Charan Singh and several dozen of his followers, including Fernandes as well as Indira's old foe Raj Narain, resigned both from cabinet and from the party, depriving the Janata Party of its parliamentary majority. Charan Singh, despite having been the driving force behind the arrests of Indira and Sanjay less than a year before, reached out to Congress and tried to make a deal whereby his faction of the Janata Party, now styling itself the Janata Party (Secular), would be permitted to govern with Congress support. Indira tentatively agreed on the condition that the charges against her and Sanjay be dropped, but Charan Singh refused to go along with this and was promptly denied confidence by the Lok Sabha. He resigned as Prime Minister after less than a month in office, and arranged to have the Lok Sabha dissolved pending elections in January 1980.

There were now two different Janata Parties heading into the election, and two Congresses as well - when Indira announced that Sanjay would be standing for election as the Congress candidate in Amethi, the seat bordering Rae Bareli, regional Congress leaders who hadn't been part of the inner circle during the Emergency balked. Karnataka chief minister D. Devaraj Urs went so far as to break off from the party and found his own, which became known as Congress (Urs) or Congress (U) and attracted support in a number of different states. However, Congress (U) never really became a mass party, and only attracted support in the constituencies of its own leaders. On the whole, the "official" Congress - Congress (I) - was once again the only nationwide force in India, and just about everyone predicted a landslide victory in spite of the still-fresh wounds of the Emergency.

They were right, too. Congress took 353 seats in the new Lok Sabha, a stronger majority than the Janata Party before it, and no other party reached the 55 seats needed to form an official opposition. Although the "official" Janata Party, which was supported by the RSS and its large ground organisation, placed a fairly solid second in the popular vote, both the Janata Party (Secular) and the CPI(M) won more seats than it. Taken alongside their Left Front allies and the tentatively-allied CPI, the communist bloc was the second-largest in the chamber, and candidates endorsed by the Left Front won all but four seats in West Bengal in particular, a sign of the popular groundswell backing Jyoti Basu's state government and its land-reform agenda. The JP(S), meanwhile, achieved great strength in the countryside around Delhi, as well as parts of eastern UP and Bihar, but failed to really break through anywhere else. The opposition to Indira was much more fractured than Congress had been in the previous term, and for all intents and purposes, she now had the run of the country once again.



EDIT: Oh, and the bulk of Assam didn't vote in this election or the next one, due to a massive nativist campaign organised by the All Assam Students Union to prevent the granting of civil rights (including the right to vote) to Bangladeshi refugees living in the state, to the point where adherents attacked polling booths to disrupt any election where Bengalis might be on the electoral rolls. The situation wasn't resolved until 1985, when the central government essentially caved to the nativist movement's demands, and tensions between native Assamese and Bengali migrants continue to simmer to this day.

 

[Ares96]

Moving aside slightly now, because 1984 doesn't have a PDF available on the Wayback Machine (at least not as easily-found as the 1977 and 1980 ones). So let's instead take a look at one of the neighbouring countries, and I should note that this map is done to the same scale as the Indian state elections, so could easily be integrated if, for some reason, that should be useful.

So Nepal is a country whose general vibe I would summarise as "75% India, 25% Tibet". There are several Sino-Tibetan cultures in the mountainous parts of the country, and it's home to the Gautama Buddha's birthplace in Lumbini, but the majority of its 30 million people follow Hinduism and speak Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language related to (and sharing a lot of Sanskrit-derived vocabulary with), but not mutually intelligible with, Hindi. In fact, Nepal is the most Hindu country in the world by percentage, and until the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, Hinduism was the state religion.

The whole "abolition of the monarchy" thing is key to Nepal's recent history, because whereas India was under direct British rule and moved to rid itself of its feudal rulers soon after independence, Nepal was a more independent protectorate and never really had to fight for independence - the British simply left, keeping only a few diplomats and the army recruiters in Gorkha country, and India took over a lot of their role as the hegemonic regional power. The Nepalese monarchy was allied with India for the most part, and while its absolute rule was ended by the 1950s, a confrontation between the royal court and the left-leaning Nepali Congress government led to a coup in 1960, whereupon King Mahendra decided liberal democracy was all wrong for Nepal and should be replaced by a more "homegrown" system of nonpartisan, indirectly elected local assemblies of elders (panchayats) that sent delegates to a national legislature (the Rastriya Panchayat). This lasted, with some modifications, until 1990, when a mass movement (the Jana Andolan, or People's Uprising) forced Mahendra's son Birendra to abolish the Panchayat system and reintroduce partisan elections.

The Communist Party of Nepal, which had been a leading force behind the uprising along with the Congress, split in half over whether to participate in the new constitutional monarchy - the moderate faction, the CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist), participated in elections and became one of the three major parties alongside Congress and the right-wing monarchist Rastriya Prajatantra Party, while the radical Maoists led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (better known by his nom de guerre Prachanda, meaning "fierce" in Nepali) continued to oppose the government and eventually began an armed insurgency. The resulting civil war lasted a decade, from 1996 to 2006, and ended with something of a victory for the insurgents - on the one hand, their armed units were demobilised and their parallel institutions (local courts and governing committees) set up during the civil war were disbanded, but on the other hand, the monarchy (which had become thoroughly discredited between suspending democratic government once again and that time in 2001 when Crown Prince Gyanendra shot up the palace and killed the bulk of the royal family, including both King Birendra and himself - I am not making this up, look it up if you don't believe me) was abolished, and elections were held to a constituent assembly that would work out a form of government for the new Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.

That was the idea, anyway. In the event, the situation in the country was so chaotic that it took until April 2008 before constituent assembly elections could be held, and then the assembly lasted its entire four-year term without managing to draft a constitution. Another assembly elected in 2013 (after yet another one-year delay) was a bit more successful, and at long last, the new Constitution of Nepal was passed and came into effect in September 2015. Alongside abolishing the monarchy, secularising the state, providing ironclad guarantees of civil rights and freedoms and establishing special commissions to safeguard the rights of women, Dalits and ethnic minorities, the Constitution also declares Nepal to be a federal state, with more power than ever being delegated from Kathmandu to the country's regions. The previously existing 75 districts and 14 development zones were grouped into seven new provinces, each of which was given an elected assembly with some devolved powers and a responsible provincial cabinet. The provinces were initially given numbers rather than names (insert Prisoner reference here), with the idea being that the provincial assemblies would choose whatever names they deemed appropriate, but it took until March 2023 before the second elected assembly of Province No. 1 could agree to rename it to Koshi Province, removing the last numerical designation from the map.

The democratic revolution also meant some changes to the lower level of government. The Kingdom of Nepal had had 58 municipalities, all in urban areas, and much less powerful village development committees (VDCs) covering the country's rural areas, but this imbalance was done away with by the new constitution, and today most of Nepal's surface (excepting a few uninhabited nature reserves, depicted in grey on the map) is covered by some form of municipal body.
- The six largest cities in Nepal - Kathmandu, Pokhara, Bharatpur, Lalitpur, Birgunj and Biratnagar - all have at least half a million inhabitants, and are each governed by a metropolitan municipality (mahanagarpalika). This is the most prestigious type of municipal body, and these cities are depicted in red on the map.
- Another eleven cities between 250,000 and 500,000 inhabitants are designated sub-metropolitan municipalities (upamahanagarpalika), which have almost but not all the powers of the previous category. These are marked in pale red on the map.
- A total of 276 smaller urban areas, including all pre-existing municipalities, are designated urban municipalities (nagarpalika), a category that covers most of the lowlands and valleys of Nepal and governs the bulk of its population. These are marked in beige on the map.
- Finally, the VDCs that weren't given municipal status or grouped into a body with it were grouped into rural municipalities (gaunpalika), of which there are 460 (or possibly 481, sources conflict and I haven't bothered to count them on my own map). These cover most of Nepal's surface area, but tend to have low populations - the biggest ones have around fifty thousand inhabitants, while the smallest have around a thousand (and one only 538 people). Unlike the VDCs that preceded them, rural municipalities have most of the same powers as their urban counterparts, but in many cases are kept from implementing them by underdevelopment. To account for this, a large number of local government powers are exercised concurrently with provincial or federal governments, allowing underdeveloped rural areas to seek assistance from more well-equipped levels of government.

Each municipality has an executive (called a Mayor in urban municipalities and a Chairperson in rural ones) elected by FPTP, alongside a deputy elected by the same method and an elected chairperson in each ward - in rural areas, each former VDC is guaranteed at least one ward to represent it, and bigger ones are split as necessary. The wards also elect members to the municipal assembly, which is made up of four representatives per ward, two of whom must be women, in addition to the ward chairs. Finally, the assembly elects women and Dalit representatives to the executive, the latter of whom also get to speak and vote in the assembly itself - effectively a kind of alderman role, which ensures that these communities are represented in local government even if no candidates from them win election.

 

[Ares96]

Here's a map whose methodology I will freely admit is pretty questionable, but which I needed to make to settle a question arising from something completely different. In 1991, the first free Nepalese election after the end of the Panchayat system, the western hill districts of Rukum and Rolpa were won somewhat handily by the Maoist front organisation, the United People's Front of Nepal. I also know these districts would go on to be Maoist strongholds during the civil war. In 1994, however, no UPF candidates stood in either district, even though the party as such went on existing and even had some success in a couple of seats east of Kathmandu (although they didn't win anywhere). The result was that, despite their aforementioned status as Maoist strongholds, the two districts voted largely for the Congress and RPP, and the UML candidates got very low voteshares compared to their national average. So the question I had was: did the Maoist organisations in Rukum and Rolpa call for a mass boycott of the 1994 election?

Unfortunately, the constituency-level dataset I have for 1994 isn't very complete: it only shows the votes cast for each candidate, containing no totals, invalid votes or turnout information. So I worked with what I did have, which was electorate and turnout figures for the 1999 election. This is what makes the map questionable: Nepal is, of course, a developing country that's very much in the midst of the demographic transition, and over the 1990s its population grew by about 23%. So I think it's fair to say that 1999's electorate figures won't be accurate for five years earlier, and to an extent this map may just be showing which areas grew more in that five-year period. I suspect Kathmandu and other urbanising regions will be undercounted for that reason, and I have a suspicion the very high "turnout" in the northwestern mountain districts might be due to the same thing. However, Rukum and Rolpa do show lower turnout than their surroundings, though not really dramatically so - Rolpa in particular was on the low side, with a "turnout" of 39%, compared to 43% in Rukum and around 50% in surrounding districts. So turnout was low, yes, but it's unclear whether it was low enough to indicate a boycott campaign.

 

[Ares96]

I suppose I'd better start posting the actual election maps too. First off, I should note that I don't have constituency boundaries for anything prior to 2008, so these maps kind of have to be a bit more abstract than you're used to. Hopefully someday I'll be able to track down the boundaries, but today is not that day.

So as mentioned in the local government post, Nepal was an absolute monarchy for most of its history, with first the Rana family, the king's hereditary chief advisors, and then the kings themselves holding supreme power over the country's governance. The "democratic revolution" of 1950-51, which overthrew the Ranas, had been spearheaded by the Nepali Congress, a left-wing group inspired by the INC who hoped the Rana regime would give way to, if not a socialist republic, then at least a modern constitutional monarchy. After all, India had just recently become an independent, secular republic, and Nehru's nominally-socialist INC government had been the key foreign backer of the revolution. In the end, however, it turned out the royal house was uninterested in going from being a figurehead for the Ranas to being a figurehead for an elected parliament. Although a second mass protest wave in 1957-58 succeeded in forcing free parliamentary elections in spring 1959, the parliament thus elected and its Congress-dominated government only lasted eighteen months before King Mahendra launched a self-coup, dissolving parliament and throwing most of its leading figures in jail.

To Mahendra's mind, Nepal, which had been isolated from the surrounding world until the overthrow of the Ranas and remained an extremely poor, underdeveloped country, was simply not ready for liberal democracy. Instead, he designed his own system of government which he believed more closely resembled traditional Nepalese systems of governance and would allow the people to be represented in the fashion they best understood and were able to engage with. This was the panchayat system (not to be confused with the panchayati raj system, which is in use in India and refers specifically to local government), and it would be in use in Nepal for the better part of thirty years. A panchayat (meaning "council of five" in Sanskrit) is the traditional name for a village's governing council in the Indian subcontinent, and these village councils would indeed form the centrepiece of Nepalese governance under the panchayat system. The adult inhabitants of a village would meet and elect a nine-member panchayat (confusingly, most institutions called panchayats in the modern day have more than five members), which would then each delegate one member to sit on the local district council (zila panchayat). The district councils would in turn choose delegates to a zonal assembly (anchal sabha), which had very few powers in its own right and functioned mainly as an electoral college choosing representatives to the Rastriya Panchayat, the national parliament, from among the representatives on each district council. The Rastriya Panchayat was composed of 90 district representatives - no district elected more than two members, which meant the densely-populated Terai (plains) districts were greatly underrepresented - as well as 19 sectional and university graduate representatives and 16 royal appointees. And while official sectional organisations, representing women, youth, the elderly, peasants, labourers and ex-servicemen, did have official representation on all levels of government, political parties were banned from operating.

Obviously, a large part of the motivation for this system was to prevent the opposition from organising above the village level and ensure that the king could effectively govern the country as he pleased. Whether it was the only motivation, or if Mahendra was actually sincere about wanting Nepal to develop along its own path into a place where it could one day be "ready" to adopt a more democratic form of government, is a purely academic discussion, because what the panchayat regime was in practice was a thinly-veiled royal dictatorship. While some social progress was made during the years from 1960 to 1990 - malaria was mostly eliminated, a highway was built along the foothills connecting east and west, and land use reforms brought the Green Revolution to Nepal and ensured that more of the Terai than ever before was put under cultivation. But the regime's brief attempts at redistributive land reform in the 60s came to naught, and what little wealth the country had remained in few hands while the vast majority of the people lived in or near poverty. Discontent rose throughout the period, and limited concessions in the early 80s (including the direct election of the Rastriya Panchayat's district representatives, although they were still required to be nonpartisan) did little to ease tensions.

The sequence of events that brought down the panchayat regime began with the August 1988 earthquake, which had its epicentre in the Saptari district of the eastern Terai and hit both Nepalese and Indian communities hard, killing at least 709 people, injuring thousands and damaging buildings as far away as Patna. Rescue and reconstruction efforts were mounted, but not as quickly as the situation warranted, and there were soon rumours that members of the government were embezzling international aid money meant for the earthquake victims. Around the same time, the renegotiation of a trade agreement between Nepal and India turned sour, and when Nepal attempted to turn to China for both arms and essential goods, India responded by allowing the agreement to lapse in March 1989. Since India was (and to an extent still is, though China is working on it) the only viable land-based trading partner Nepal has, this did immediate and severe damage to the Nepalese economy. Particularly so for petroleum products, which Nepal depended almost entirely on India for, and which were now impossible to source. Without viable motorised transport, heating or machinery, and without the ability to export Nepalese goods over the country's only negotiable land border, the economy ground to a halt for months.

As I mentioned, resistance to the panchayat system had been ongoing since 1960, but the fuel crisis of 1989 brought it to the surface. The crisis was so severe, and the opportunity so obvious, that the two leading forces of the democratic opposition - Congress on the one hand, and the communist movement on the other - decided to come together and jointly plan a protest action to force the panchayat regime to its knees. On the 15th of January, 1990, the formation of the United Left Front was announced, bringing together seven of the roughly a dozen or so communist parties in Nepal, and on the 1st of February, the ULF and Congress formed a joint committee to coordinate opposition to the regime. This was the broadest coalition since 1960 - arguably since the original democracy movement in 1950 - and when it went into action on the 18th of February, it brought the country to its knees. Starting with a relatively isolated movement of party activists, protests began to spread after police shot a student during demonstrations in the east of Nepal, and by the end of March, mass protests were engulfing the Kathmandu Valley. Residents of Lalitpur/Patan, a relatively large town just south of Kathmandu, responded to local police violence by establishing a local committee of public safety, closing entrances to the town with roadblocks and placing policemen in detention. Elsewhere in the valley, locals organised blackouts in areas where protests were due to happen, making it much harder both to identify protesters and to employ force against them, and protests got so large and so radical that the opposition committees were losing control.

King Birendra, Mahendra's eldest son, attempted to satisfy protesters on the 6th of April, by announcing that Prime Minister Marichman Singh Shrestha, who had been in charge during both the earthquake and the trade crisis, would be removed and replaced with Lokendra Bahadur Chand, who had previously served as Prime Minister between 1983 and 1986. Chand may have been slightly more competent than Shrestha, but he was still a conservative monarchist, and his appointment did exactly nothing to please the crowds. By this point, chants calling for the king's head were a regular occurrence, and even the police were often unwilling to intervene, preferring to simply watch as protesters smashed cars and statues of King Mahendra. Birendra had only two choices by this point: either cave to the opposition's demands entirely or get killed as protesters ransacked the palace. Wisely, he chose the former - on the 8th, Congress and ULF leaders were invited to the palace for negotiation, and came out with an agreement promising to re-legalise political parties and hold free and direct elections to a national legislature. The king tried to retain Chand as Prime Minister in the interim, but this led to another (slightly less intense) wave of protests, and at the end of that, Congress leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai was appointed Prime Minister leading a transitional government.

Although the goals of the Jana Andolan, or People's Movement, as it's become known to history, were now essentially met, there were immediate ruptures within the communist movement over where to go next. A large faction within the ULF wanted to contest the upcoming elections jointly with Congress, reasoning that they'd worked well together during the uprising and would probably continue to do so in an election campaign. However, the Congress leadership were divided on this - Bhattarai was open to the idea, but Girija Prasad Koirala, brother of the late Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala, who'd led Congress during the 1950s and been Nepal's first democratically elected Prime Minister, was staunchly opposed. This was mostly on pragmatic grounds, as he wanted to apply for development aid from the United States, which he had been warned might not be forthcoming if a future Congress government included communists. After a heated internal debate, the Congress national conference in January 1991 rejected the alliance by a narrow margin. The spurned ULF moderates decided instead to found a new unified organisation, which they gave the characteristically straightforward name Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), usually abbreviated simply as UML. While formally led by Sahana Pradhan, the widow of original Communist leader Pushpa Lal Shrestha, in practice the UML was run by its young general secretary, Madan Kumar Bhandari. Bhandari had been a student activist in the 1970s, then got recruited by Shrestha as part of a younger generation of communist leaders - having been born in 1951, he was too young to have participated in the original democracy movement, pointedly unlike both the Congress leadership and most other senior figures within his own party. He is remembered today for developing the concept of "People's Multiparty Democracy", an adaptation of earlier Marxist-Leninist thought to a post-Cold War reality, which called for communists to carry on the class struggle within a liberal democratic framework, contesting free elections against other parties and using the power thus gained to work for the improvement of material conditions.

It goes without saying that this idea was not without controversy among militant communists, many of whom derided it as revisionism or social democracy in a new form. This view was especially pronounced among supporters of the United People's National Movement, which had been formed in 1989 by those communist parties that thought the ULF insufficiently radical. Generally inspired by Maoism, the UPNM rejected cooperation either with Congress or with the monarchy, and called for an immediate constitutional convention to create a Nepalese people's republic. It too faced division after the Jana Andolan, with one of the two main groups, led by Mohan Bikram Singh, continuing to advocate an electoral boycott since the new constitution had been worked out through compromise with the old regime, a regime he regarded as impossible to compromise with. The other group, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (remember that name, he's going to become very important later on) and Baburam Bhattarai (no relation to K.P.), regarded this as a strategic mistake, believing the new government would need to have a genuine communist presence to prevent Bhandari's exceedingly moderate line from completely dominating the left. Along with parts of the left opposition of the ULF, the Dahal-Bhattarai faction of the UPNM would end up forming the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre), which reaffirmed its commitment to underground work in preparation for the people's war they believed inevitable, while also forming a front organisation, the United People's Front of Nepal, which would contest the general election and use it as an opportunity to spread the message of revolution. Bhattarai took up the leading position in the UPFN, while Dahal stayed underground and continued to lead the CPN(UC)'s cadres.

Meanwhile, Congress was also shifting right. Having previously been a relatively radical force in Nepalese politics, advocating for a secular democratic republic and opposing the panchayat regime through all means available, it now suddenly found itself a party of power leading His Majesty's government. While K.P. Bhattarai and others continued to espouse left-wing beliefs, they were quickly becoming outnumbered by what were called panchas - panchayat-era bureaucrats who now entered politics as a way to maintain their power in their local communities. Particularly in the west of Nepal, the pancha faction came to dominate the Congress organisation. The panchas were welcomed by G.P. Koirala, ever the pragmatist, who saw in them only a chance to keep the party's (and by extension, his family's) influence growing, but their role in Congress, and in Nepalese democracy by extension, would have devastating consequences in the years to follow.

For anyone who's concerned that these divisions in the former opposition camp might mean a victory for royalist forces is about to come, don't be. They were at least as chaotic. In a lot of developing countries, right-wingers tend to distrust liberal democracy and prefer to play a supporting role to conservative institutions, and this was to some extent also true in Nepal - if you base your entire worldview on the idea that the king is a rightful absolute ruler and should be vested with complete power over society, then it can seem counterintuitive to stand for election to a parliament intended to check or supplant royal power. However, just as some Maoists chose to participate in elections despite regarding constitutional monarchy as illegitimate, so too some royalists chose to participate in elections despite regarding liberal democracy as illegitimate. Just after the Jana Andolan, a group of leading royal officials formed the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (National Democratic Party), which was intended to represent the forces of tradition, respectability and Hinduism in the political sphere, now that the king wasn't able to use his full powers in their defence anymore. The RPP soon split in half, however, following what seems to be a proud Nepalese tradition, into a more conservative faction led by our old friend Lokendra Bahadur Chand, and a slightly more liberal faction led by Surya Bahadur Thapa, who had been Prime Minister between 1965-69 and then again 1979-83. Thapa seems to have been one of the few panchas who genuinely believed in democratic development, and even spent a while in jail between his two terms as Prime Minister for giving a speech where he demanded democratic reforms.

At long last, after about a year of preparation, constitutional wrangling and recovery from the chaos of the Jana Andolan, Nepal went to the polls on the 12th of May, 1991. The new Parliament was bicameral, with an upper house called the National Assembly (Rastriya Sabha) and a lower house called the House of Representatives (Pratinidhi Sabha). Information on the former is scarce, and I honestly don't even know the basics of how it worked in this period, so this series will focus entirely on the latter for the time being. The Pratinidhi Sabha was made up of 205 members, elected by universal suffrage (18 years old to vote, 25 to stand for election) by plurality in single-member constituencies. Each of Nepal's 75 districts was guaranteed one seat, with the remaining 140 distributed at least somewhat according to population - some changes were made for the election after this, but they weren't huge all things considered. I don't imagine I need to get into the pros and cons of FPTP here, but it was the system used by India as well as most other countries in the region, and this made it the most obvious system for Nepal to adapt. Generally speaking, electorates ranged from about fifty to eighty thousand, with a few much smaller seats in the mountain districts and, I think, some larger ones in Kathmandu in this election.

The results were predictable in that Congress won - the combination of having led a revolution against a deeply unpopular regime and also having access to the rural patronage networks that had supported that regime is both hard to obtain and hard to beat - but the details were more surprising. Far from the landslide victory predicted, or the one that they likely would've obtained had the united Congress-ULF front come to pass, they won 110 seats, an overall majority of 15. While they did very well in the western and central regions of the country, in the east, which had formerly been thought of as the main Congress stronghold, the UML completely crushed them. So too in the Kathmandu Valley. The most surprising result of the night came in Kathmandu-1, the seat covering the centre of the capital, where K.P. Bhattarai stood as the Congress candidate and Madan Bhandari for the UML. To almost everyone's surprise, the much younger and less well-known Bhandari won by a small margin, knocking out the Congress leader and making him ineligible to serve in government according to the constitution he himself had just written. The RPP, meanwhile, was hamstrung by its division into two factions, and ended up winning only four seats in spite of their around 12% of the popular vote combined. Their MPs were outnumbered both by the Maoist UPFN and by the Nepal Sadbhavana Party, a regional party in the Terai that championed the rights of the local Madhesi ethnic groups.

With Congress in the majority but missing K.P. Bhattarai from its party bench, there was only one obvious candidate for the premiership: Girija Prasad Koirala. Following in the footsteps of both of his elder brothers, Koirala formed his government on the 26th, becoming the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Nepal in over thirty years. He would persist in office through the entire parliament, neither resigning, losing his coalition, getting removed by his party or getting overthrown in a coup d'état - a feat no Nepalese government since has managed. Is that to say he was a successful Prime Minister? Well, not quite...

 

[Ares96]

The opening of the first democratically-elected Nepalese parliament in thirty years was met with high hopes. For the downtrodden people of Nepal, particularly women, Dalits and ethnic minorities, the new Congress government was expected to deliver real material change. And to some small extent, it did - a number of new schools and universities were opened under the Koirala ministry, with particular focus placed on training physicians and engineers to help develop rural Nepal and improve public health. Many of these were run on concession by private actors, as part of a liberalisation programme agreed by Koirala and the IMF in order to secure favourable terms for development aid. These same goals (as ever, it's unclear how much of it was due to IMF demands and how much was Koirala's own intent - this was the man who singlehandedly drove a wedge between Congress and the UML after the Jana Andolan, after all) also scuppered any hope of land reform or Indian-style reservation policies for the lower castes. As a matter of fact, Dalit representation declined in the 1991 election compared to the last parliament elected under the panchayat system, nor did other sectors get friendlier to the lower castes than they had been previously.

That wasn't all, though. In 1992, the first post-panchayat local elections were held, and this reignited the conflict between panchas and communists that had been especially heated in western Nepal following the Jana Andolan. Congress won a majority of votes and seats nationwide, but not only did the UML make gains, a new front was formed by the Maoist UPFN and the syncretic-Jucheist Nepal Workers Peasants Party (I'm not making this up, look them up - as if being supporters of Juche wasn't enough, their party logo used to have a swastika in it) as well as a number of smaller parties, and this won power in several rural areas. Most notably, Rolpa district in west-central Nepal got an outright majority for the Maoists, and while the district councils had very limited power in practice, this still caused much stirring both in Kathmandu and in the region's pancha-dominated local sections of Congress. With the active support of Home Minister Khum Bahadur Khalka, as well as his loyalist Armed Police Force (APF), a campaign of violent retribution against communist activists and anyone suspected of being a communist activist (in other words, random peasants) wracked west-central Nepal over the following years, setting the stage for the Maoist insurgency that would begin in earnest in 1996.

On the 16th of May, 1993, a car went off the road into the Narayani River in Chitwan district, a short distance west of Kathmandu, killing two of its three occupants. Nepal's roads being what they are, this sort of thing was far from unheard of, but this case was unusual because of who the casualties were. One of them was Madan Kumar Bhandari, general secretary of the CPN(UML) and leading figure of the moderate Nepalese left, and the other was Jibaraj Ashrit, Bhandari's right-hand man and head of the UML's organisation department. The deaths were ruled an accident by an official inquest, but many in the UML and the broader left continue to believe it was murder - their suspicions are corroborated by the fact that the driver, the sole survivor of the incident, was himself murdered years later. The inquest verdict caused mass protests in Kathmandu, resulting in 26 deaths when protesters and police came to blows, and soon the demand of the protesters went from a new inquest to the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Koirala.

It was in fact Bhandari's death that would undo Koirala's government, but not in quite that immediate a fashion. Bhandari had, of course, been an MP, and his death meant that a by-election was called for his seat in central Kathmandu in February 1994. To supporters of K.P. Bhattarai, Koirala's old rival for the Congress leadership, this was an obvious chance to get their leader back into power, but Koirala himself was more lukewarm on this. It's again a bit unclear whether he actively did anything to hinder Bhattarai's campaign, but either way, the UML once again won the seat, this time with Bhandari's widow, Bidhya Devi Bhandari, as their candidate. Bhattarai's supporters were incensed, and when Koirala called a vote of confidence in his government in July, 36 Congress MPs voted with the opposition. Koirala duly resigned and asked the King to dissolve the lower house, and elections were scheduled for November.

The campaign, to put it mildly, did not go well for Congress. Not only were they accused of murdering, threatening and sabotaging their opponents, they'd gotten very little done in government, and Nepal's economy continued to be sluggish. The UML, meanwhile, were able to capitalise on this discontent and called for all the broken promises of Congress rule to be fulfilled - land reform, electrification, access to clean water and a television in every village, plus an end to corruption and political violence. Even without Bhandari, their campaign was very well-coordinated and effective. Really, though, this was an anti-incumbent wave rather than a pro-UML one, as evidenced by the fact that the RPP, now reunited, also made strides. The previous three and a half years hadn't made liberal democracy look great, and while the RPP stopped short of calling for a return to royal autocracy, their message of tradition and order had a lot of appeal.

When the people had voted, the result was clear, except insofar as it wasn't very clear at all. Congress had lost about five percentage points in the popular vote, going from 39% in 1991 to 34% in 1994, and while this was still a narrow plurality, the UML narrowly edged them out to become the largest party in the new parliament. The RPP went from four to twenty seats, while the bloc of independents grew from three to seven. Finally, the Maoist bloc was completely wiped out, and the reason for this is simple - well, as simple as it gets when you're talking about Nepalese communists. The CPN (Unity Centre), the major Maoist underground party, had a split earlier in 1994 over the ongoing political violence, with the majority faction arguing it was time for people's war, while the minority believed they should continue to contest elections and operate as a normal political party. Both factions tried to register candidates under the United People's Front label, but a court decision awarded the designation to the moderate faction, which led the hardliners to boycott the election altogether. As a result, while a group called the UPFN stood for election in 1994, it achieved no success and was mainly focused in the valleys surrounding Kathmandu. The old UPFN strongholds in Rukum and Rolpa districts, meanwhile, had very low turnout and saw Congress and RPP candidates elected with only the most token of UML opposition.

The elections having returned a hung parliament, King Birendra asked both Congress and UML to investigate forming a government, and when Congress failed to negotiate a coalition with the RPP, the UML were asked to form a government under Man Mohan Adhikari, a 74-year-old veteran of the Biratnagar jute mill strike and the 1950-51 democracy movement. The government was comprised entirely of UML members, but the RPP and NSP agreed to give passive support to it. Nepal had its first-ever communist government, and one of the first freely elected ones anywhere in the world, and it had been achieved with the support of Hindu royalists. Could it last?

 

[Ares96]

Alright, it's high time I actually posted some of this stuff, so forgive the brief break from Nepal.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, a few months ago, myself, @Nanwe and @Uhura's Mazda embarked on a project to map pre-1994 South African elections. While we found a good amount of information, especially constituency-level results, things went rather worse on the map front, and that means I wasn't able to get very much of use out of my part of the project.

However, something that already existed before our project started was a map of the 1989 election result, and we were able to determine that every election after 1981 used those same boundaries. So without further ado, here they are.

In 1978, the National Party celebrated thirty continuous years of majority government. In that time, they'd instituted what we know as apartheid (largely formalising and tightening existing racial laws that went back to the founding of South Africa), stripped black South Africans of citizenship and founded new "homelands" intended to become independent states, banned multiple violent and non-violent resistance movements and repeatedly put down uprisings by the black majority and their supporters, broken away from the Commonwealth and declared a republic, taken a staunch anti-communist position during the Cold War, fought several border conflicts against liberation movements in the now-former Portuguese colonies, and of course, resisted the introduction of television until 1976 for fear that it would indoctrinate white youth against the apartheid system. For most of this time, the white minority had enjoyed unbroken economic growth and prosperity, and this helped prevent widespread resistance to the racist social order among the population that was able to vote, but between an economic downturn and hardening international opposition, it was becoming more and more clear by the late 1970s that the South African system such as it existed was unsustainable.

In spite of this, the National Party as such was looking safer in power than it ever had been. There was a simple reason for this - the parliamentary opposition was in complete shambles. The United Party, which had been the main opposition to the Nationals for most of their time in power, had never been able to formulate a coherent alternative to apartheid. Some within the party wanted to dismantle the system and create a non-racial democracy in South Africa, but the old guard of Anglo-South African power brokers retained an essential belief in white minority rule and simply regarded the Nationals as too uncouth and anti-British. This division was first seen in 1959, when younger, liberal elements within the UP broke off to form the Progressive Party, the first avowedly anti-apartheid party to enter the South African Parliament since the institution of apartheid, but their influence was limited by the fact that, until 1974, they only ever won a single seat. In 1972, however, another upset occurred when Harry Schwarz, an anti-apartheid liberal whose views largely aligned with those of the Progressives, won the local UP leadership in Transvaal Province, and two years later Schwarz made headlines by signing an agreement, the Mahlabatini Declaration, alongside KwaZulu chief minister Mangosuthu Buthelezi, in which the two set out a blueprint for what a multiracial South African democracy could look like. In 1975, after holding his own seat of Yeoville and seeing the Progressives break out to win six seats, Schwarz left the UP altogether and formed the Reform Party, which soon merged with the Progressives to form the Progressive Federal Party. In 1977, the PFP overtook the UP to become South Africa's official opposition.

However, the old guard of the UP were less than eager to join this initiative. Instead, they sought to overcome the party's other big limiting factor - its limited appeal outside the circle of English-speaking urban voters - by seeking an alliance with moderate Afrikaner politicians. The Nationals had suffered a three-way split in the early 70s, with first a hardline faction under former communications minister Albert Hertzog (the man who had kept South Africa television-free through the 60s) leaving to form the Herstigte Nasionale Party (the "Reconstituted National Party" - universally known even in English as the HRP or as the Herstigtes), and then a moderate faction under former interior minister Theo Gerdener forming the Democratic Party (not to be confused with the later party of the same name). The UP old guard immediately saw a kindred spirit in Gerdener and moved to ally with the DP, which eventually led to the formation of the New Republic Party out of the DP and the rump UP in 1977. The NRP went into the 1977 general election with high hopes of becoming a strong opposition force against the Nationals, but as mentioned before, they weren't even able to overtake the PFP. In fact, the NRP would never really gain a foothold outside of Natal and the eastern Cape, which not coincidentally were and are also the only rural parts of South Africa where most white people speak English.

The only real result of this, as mentioned, was to strengthen the Nationals, who won their best-ever result in 1977 with 65% of the vote in contested seats and 134 out of 165 seats in the House of Assembly. One might think this would give a strong hand to the relatively hardline National Party leadership of John Vorster, but soon after the election a scandal broke where Vorster and information minister Connie Mulder were found to have run a slush fund that moved tax money into various business ventures, most notably attempts to purchase newspapers in South Africa and the US and turn them into mouthpieces for the Nationals. "Muldergate", as it became known (one of the first scandals outside the US to receive a -gate moniker), led to the resignations of both Vorster and Mulder, and the coming to power of Pieter Willem Botha, the man who would lead South Africa for the next decade and see the apartheid regime through some of its worst crises.

Botha was as much of a committed white supremacist as his predecessors, but unlike most of them, he recognised that some changes would need to be made to keep the system from breaking down. He'd served as defence minister through Vorster's entire time in government, dealing both with the collapse of Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique and the slow losing struggle for white minority rule in Rhodesia, and the latter in particular had brought him some lessons about how not to do things. For all his implacable opposition to majority rule, Botha had become convinced that the white population alone was too small to support a democratic order, and would be doomed if the other races banded together in opposition to apartheid. Instead, he thought, South Africa should fully embrace the concept of "separate development" - a description of the philosophy behind apartheid that went back as far as the 50s - and allow both the Coloured and Indian populations to participate in the democratic system, albeit using only their own political parties (South African law forbade political parties from having members in more than one racial group, a rule designed to prevent multiracial opposition parties from operating) and still firmly in a subordinate role to the white majority.

To achieve these goals, Botha would need to rewrite the South African constitution, and the first step in that process would be to seek a new parliamentary mandate. The House of Assembly elected in 1977 would expire in November 1982, but was dissolved a year and a half before that in order to coincide with the first tranche of constitutional reforms, including the abolition of the Senate (long a completely powerless body) and the institution of a President's Council, a fully-appointed body with representation for all racial groups except the black majority. Botha hoped that a snap election would give him the mandate to rewrite the constitution fully, and this was the message he took to the voters on 29 April 1981.

Not everyone was impressed, however. For the first time since 1948, right-wing opposition to the Nationals began to emerge in force, initially concentrated around the HNP. Conservative Afrikaners in rural areas, especially in the Transvaal, looked at developments in Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia (now Rhodesia Zimbabwe, soon just Zimbabwe) and saw their entire world crumbling before them. South Africa was simply not in the position it had been a decade earlier, nor was the idea of white minority rule in Africa, and Botha's proposed reforms looked a lot like surrendering to this new reality where they would've preferred to fight for the old ideals. This tendency would only grow through the 80s, but in 1981 it wasn't enough to win the HNP a single seat. They did garner over 12% of the popular vote though, which technically made them South Africa's third-largest party, but of course the NRP were much more geographically concentrated and were able to hold eight of their ten seats as a result.

The PFP, meanwhile, continued to make gains, going from 17 to 26 seats and cementing their position as the main opposition. Once again, the primary opposition to the Nationals was found on the left, and this encouraged Botha to proceed with his reforms despite the conservative backlash. The constitutional revision would be carried out fully by 1984, including a constitutional referendum and a partial election to two new chambers of parliament representing Coloured and Indian voters, but far from cementing white supremacy, it would split the National Party in half and pave the way for the end of apartheid altogether.

 

[Ares96]

The other day, I had an idea I like to call "what if reichswahlgesetz 1920 still on tv today". It's pretty straightforward: calculating what post-war German elections would look like if they'd never bothered replacing the Weimar-era electoral system. This is pretty easy to do, because it was such a mathematically simple system that even I can make a spreadsheet that calculates seat distribution when vote numbers are put in. And I already have spreadsheets of most of the post-war elections, so it's a quick affair.

I've calculated 1949, but not mapped it yet - the constituencies only slightly reworked to fit the new state borders (broadly speaking, each state makes up a WKV - NRW gets split into Nordrhein and Westfalen, while Hamburg is merged with S-H and Bremen with Niedersachsen, and the three states that would make up BaWü form a single one together) and, for this election only, to avoid splitting OTL constituencies. 1949 having only one ballot makes things a bit wonky for that election, partly because I don't have results below OTL constituency level, and partly because there were a lot of cross-party agreements and, at least in some states, a lot of independent candidates. Being unable to effectively separate these, I've counted them as a single bloc, but it's worth noting that under these rules, you can just take their seats out of the equation and the rest would look the same. No individual independent reached 60,000 votes, but the "German unity" (anti-SSW) candidate in Flensburg came damned close, and a couple of the ones in Württemberg-Baden crossed 30,000 as well. It's not impossible that you could've gotten a handful of seats for candidates who IOTL stood as independents, had they been forced to pool their votes by a different electoral system.

Anyway, the thing you've been waiting for, the actual result.

SPD 116 (-15)
CDU 100 (-15)
FDP 47 (-5)
CSU 23 (-1)
KPD 23 (+8)
BP 16 (-1)
DP 16 (-1)
Z 12 (+2)
WAV 11 (-1)
DKP/DRP 7 (+2)
RSF 4 (+4)
SSW 1 (+-0)
Independents 19 (+16)

Total seat count is 395, or 376 without the independents. Compared to the 402 seats on offer in the OTL election, it's a pretty close match, but I can't imagine the Bundestag would grow by a hundred members to match its OTL size in 1953.

The EVB and RWVP still failed to win a seat, not having attained 30,000 votes even on a federal level. The only "large" party to clearly benefit from this system is the KPD, which can actually use all those votes in states where they didn't hit OTL's 5% state-by-state threshold. Beyond them, the Centre and DKP/DRP both gained, and most interestingly (pinging @Uhura's Mazda) the RSF, the political wing of the Freiwirtschaft movement, manages to win two constituency seats (one in Westfalen-Süd and one in Düsseldorf-Ost, so both of the Ruhrpott constituencies), which means it qualifies for another two seats for its national list and ends up with a surprisingly strong bloc of four seats in the Bundestag.

EDIT: And the map:

 

[Ares96]

Here's 1953, which was the first election held after a big electoral reform that basically established the modern German electoral system - this is where the nationwide 5% threshold was first implemented, and where constituency and party-list votes were first cast separately. As such, it presents none of the hurdles of 1949 in recalculating the results, and I can show pretty much exactly what it would look like on the exact boundaries (adjusted only to avoid crossing state lines gratuitously) used during the Weimar era.

Nationwide results (comparisons are with OTL 1953, not with the 1949 Weimar calculations):
CDU 167 (-24)
SPD 132 (-19)
FDP 44 (-3)
CSU 40 (-12)
BHE 27 (+-0)
DP 15 (+-0)
KPD 10 (+10)
BP 8 (+8)
DRP 5 (+5)
Z 4 (+1)
GVP 2 (+2)
Total 454 (-33)

A lot of parties that missed the 5% threshold get representation here, as one would expect. The DP and Centre were given free run in a couple of constituencies each IOTL to bring them into the Bundestag (and make their continued existence entirely dependent on staying in the CDU's good graces, a fact Adenauer was not shy about exploiting), but even then there were only seven parties (counting the CSU) in the OTL Bundestag, whereas here we end up with eleven parties winning representation. The KPD sticks around, which has interesting implications given they were banned during this parliamentary term IOTL - although I can see it still happening even if they do have seats, since it's not like they and the SPD had anything close to a majority put together. We also get the Bayernpartei (which has its own Implications), the DRP (unfortunately), and most interestingly, the Gesamtdeutsche Volkspartei, a splinter off the CDU who rejected Adenauer's Atlanticist foreign policy and called for a united, disarmed Germany, win two seats, one in Düsseldorf-Ost (like the RSF before them, I guess Düsseldorf, Essen and/or Wuppertal just have enough strange centrist cranks) and one for their national list.

 

[Ares96]

IOTL, 1957 is the election that really established West Germany's two-and-a-half-party system. The only minor party to remain in the Bundestag were the DP, and as mentioned before, that was solely because of the seat-lending agreement they had with the CDU. By this point, the DP was basically just another faction within Adenauer's "Union" government, and by the next election most of their leadership had joined the CDU proper. The BHE, having no such agreement in place, narrowly missed the threshold with about 4.6% of the vote, but here they obviously do make it in with a pretty healthy delegation.

Nationwide results (as before, comparison with OTL and not the previous election):
CDU 187 (-28)
SPD 154 (-15)
CSU 50 (-5)
FDP 36 (-5)
GB/BHE 22 (+22)
DP 16 (-1)
FU 4 (+4)
"Others" 4 (+4)
Total 473 (-14)

The "others" listed show a bit of an issue with this election, which is that the spreadsheet lumps all parties not previously represented together. The largest party in that category by far was the DRP, and I'm reasonably sure it would've been them winning both of the constituency seats they win here, and they did get enough votes nationwide for four seats, so I'm comfortable labelling the "others" elected as DRP members on the map. It does potentially mean they ride the coattails of the other minor parties, many of which were not far-right nutters, but since this bloc as a whole would've been entitled to five nationwide levelling seats if it weren't for the national list threshold (basically, a party's national list could never be awarded more seats than that party had won in constituencies - the closest thing the Weimar electoral system had to a threshold), I think we can assume those three "lost" seats represent the other minor parties.

Other than them, the only minor party that may need explaining is the Federalist Union (makes a great abbreviation). Back in 1949, the Centre and BP delegates had formed a joint faction in the first Bundestag under that name, and after the BP lost representation and the Centre fell out with the CDU, they decided to join forces again for the 1957 election in hopes of crossing the threshold when pooling their votes. They drew from completely different regions, so for all intents and purposes the arrangement wasn't that different from that of the CDU/CSU. The new alliance only got 0.9% of the vote, which obviously got them nowhere IOTL, but their votes were clustered enough in Bavaria that they get four seats here. I can imagine one of the two national list seats would've gone to the Centre.

 

[Ares96]

So the upper house of the old German Imperial legislature had, confusingly to modern eyes, been called the Bundesrat. Like the present-day institution of the same name, it was composed of representatives sent directly by the governments of the various states - at the time, this meant they were technically personal representatives of the state's monarch, but the different states varied in how personal they were and to what extent the monarch had to follow recommendations from the state legislature. Either way, the idea of representing the states at the federal level and giving them a direct stake in legislation was still seen as useful by the founders of the Weimar Republic, and when they drew up a provisional form of government in February 1919, it included a "Committee of States " (Staatenausschuss) intended to continue this principle. The Committee included 56 mandates, compared to 61 in the old Bundesrat, and these were mostly, sort of, assigned proportionally to the states based on population. Obviously, many of the smaller states ended up overrepresented just to get a single vote, and the changing borders of Germany at this time meant things were always going to be a bit dicey. Also because of the aforementioned border flux, the Republic of German Austria's government was given a single representative in the Committee, which was intended to be expanded if and when Austria was included in the permanent constitution. Of course, the Treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye forced Germany and Austria to desist from any attempt at merging, and this ensured Austria would never again get to participate in a democratic all-German institution.



That's not to say there were no quirks in the Reichsrat (as the permanent institution ended up being named) worth mention. From 1921 onwards, the vote count was increased to 66, and Prussia decided its 26 seats would be divided into halves to more adequately represent that state's regional diversity and quasi-federal nature. Half of them would continue to represent the Prussian state government in Berlin, while the other half - conveniently, exactly one each - would be assigned to the provincial authorities, including the city of Berlin's magistrate. This basic structure continued in place, with occasional slight changes in vote weight, until the Reichsrat was dissolved in 1934 as part of the Gleichschaltung process intended to turn Germany into a unitary state under Hitler's totalitarian leadership.




As mentioned, Prussia was itself a semi-federal state within the German federation, and it had its own upper house to represent the provincial authorities and mirror the Reichsrat on the national level. Dubbed the Staatsrat, this was a new creation of the republican government, replacing the House of Lords of the old Prussian Landtag, and it was modelled pretty closely on the Reichsrat. Its 79 votes were distributed between the provinces and Berlin according to population, with every province except Hohenzollern guaranteed at least three votes. Like the rest of the Prussian state government, the Staatsrat was dominated throughout its existence by the Weimar Coalition, and its president for most of that time was the Mayor of Cologne, one Konrad Adenauer. Because of his vehement anti-Prussian sentiment (and in spite of his generally conservative beliefs), Adenauer was a particular focus of hatred for the revolutionary right, and the Staatsrat was quickly prorogued after the Preußenschlag in July 1932. The fact that both Adenauer and Otto Braun were dismissed without successors being named meant that the attempted dissolution of the Landtag in February 1933 could not be approved in the legal fashion, but this hardly fazed the authorities then in place, and the new elections (held under deeply suspect circumstances alongside the Reichstag elections in March 1933) returned an outright majority for the Nazis, who proceeded to abolish the Staatsrat in its current form and turn it into an advisory body consisting of appointed and ex officio members. This, in turn, technically lasted right up to 1945, but like the Prussian government as a whole it was essentially powerless, having been superceded by the Gauleiter system on the one hand and by Hitler's absolute authority in Berlin on the other.

 

[Ares96]

I made this in more or less a blind overnight rush after discovering the data's more readily available than I thought it was, with a list of constituency results having been posted on Russian Wikipedia. No such thing is really available for any of the previous elections, but 1995 and 1999 both seem to have good spreadsheets available through the Wayback Machine, so they should be doable even if they end up taking slightly longer.

The 2003 legislative election was the great realigning election of post-Soviet Russia. The previous situation had seen a relatively stable and powerful presidency, throughout the 1990s held by Boris Yeltsin and then, after Yeltsin's forced retirement following a heart and/or brain scare in 1999, by Vladimir Putin, checked by a chronically unstable State Duma dominated on the one hand by the Communist Party and on the other by a disunited bloc of oligarchs and local independents. This situation had allowed Yeltsin and his liberal allies to push through a series of reforms privatising and deregulating the economy in the early-to-mid-90s, but then faded into complete dysfunction when it came time to figure out how to solve the myriad social problems caused by this sudden economic shock. By the time Yeltsin resigned, he and his government were almost universally despised by the Russian people (some polls put his approval rating as low as 2%).

When Putin took over the reins, he was determined to avoid repeating Yeltsin's mistakes, but more in the sense of safeguarding his own reputation and that of Moscow's political establishment than in the sense of actually addressing Russia's problems on a deeper level. He became convinced that bringing the Duma into line was key to this, and after winning the 2000 presidential election by a healthy margin, set about uniting the different "pro-administration" factions into a unified political force. The core of this new party would be the pre-existing Unity (Единство/Yedinstvo) party, founded in 1999 as basically a previous attempt to do the same thing, bolstered by a merger with the Fatherland-All Russia (Отечество-Вся Россия/Otechestvo-Vsya Rossiya) movement led by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov. They were soon bolstered by a number of smaller factions, most notably the remnants of Our Home - Russia (Наш дом – Россия/Nash dom - Rossiya), the party of Gazprom chairman and former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (one of the quintessential 90s Russian oligarchs - the party was nicknamed "Nash dom - Gazprom" because it was seen as such a naked big-business vehicle), which had fallen on hard times after Chernomyrdin's dismissal as PM left it without direct institutional power. The new party was initially dubbed "Unity and Fatherland", but after its founding congress in 2001, it settled on the somewhat snappier name United Russia (Единая Россия/Yedinaya Rossiya).

United Russia's message was quite simple. Russia had gone through a decade of chaos and instability, with poverty, crime, corruption and border wars. Everyone was sick of change, and now, with Putin at the helm, it was time for the change to stop. There wouldn't be one more heave of neoliberal reforms to finally fix everything and bring Russia into the West, nor would the reforms be reversed and Russia returned to socialism. The current owners of the country would be kept in place, they just wouldn't rotate in power quite as often. The fact that this message resonated - because it clearly did - is... both sad and understandable. As a Windows user, I quite understand the feeling that every new change only makes things worse and that it would be nice if they could just stick with the current version, and that is sort of what Putin and United Russia promised in the 2003 State Duma election.

It was effective enough, and the local strongman network that ran much of provincial Russia was united enough, to deliver United Russia a popular voteshare of 38%, the highest of any party since the fall of the Soviet Union, and 223 seats - three off from an overall majority. For all intents and purposes, however, United Russia did win a workable majority in the new Duma, because a large portion of the independent bloc - larger than any actual party except UR itself - was elected with UR's de facto endorsement and didn't meaningfully oppose their programme in government. The same was true of the People's Party, which had been founded by a group of independents in the previous Duma as a pro-Putin faction outside of United Russia and won 17 seats in 2003, only a handful of which were opposed by UR candidates. Several popular and/or pliable Communist deputies were given a similar treatment, as were the two remaining representatives of the theoretically left-wing Agrarian Party of Altai governor Mikhail Lapshin. The two right-wing blocs in the new Duma - the Liberal Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the National-Patriotic Movement "Rodina" - were both also close to the government to various degrees, and the latter in particular faced accusations of having been set up by the Kremlin to prevent nationalist voters from going to more radical or anti-government parties.

In short, the 2003 election left precious few real opposition forces in place. There was Yabloko, a centre-left liberal party that had enjoyed some success during the Yeltsin years, but which was now reduced to just four deputies, not enough to form an official group in the Duma. In theory, there was the Union of Rightist Forces, a coalition of neoliberal true believers left over from Yeltsin's early governments, but all three of their elected deputies left for United Russia soon after the new Duma met. The Communists and LDPR, two of the biggest factions in the new Duma, were somewhat in question, but all the other factions were pro-administration or tightly controlled opposition. And this has been the state of the Duma in every subsequent election - only a few of the names have changed.

 

[Ares96]

Ideally, I would like to map every post-Soviet Russian election going back to 1990, but it's quite hard to find information on that one for what should be obvious reasons. 1993, too, is frustrating, because the Internet was still quite new when it happened, and so the results presentation made available at the time was quite lacklustre by any sort of modern standards. I will have some work ahead of me to get constituency results for that one, but what I do have are subject-level results for both it and the attendant constitutional referendum.

You can't really make sense of this election cycle without understanding the events of "Black October" 1993. President Boris Yeltsin had spent the previous months locked in conflict with the Congress of People's Deputies (as the legislature was then called), which had been elected back in 1990, when the Soviet Union still existed and seemed like it was going to keep existing. When the USSR collapsed and Yeltsin announced his economic reforms, the country was initially supportive, but then a very bad economic crisis hit, and resistance started to entrench itself first in the bureaucracy and then in the legislature itself. After a series of disputes over appointments and proposed constitutional revisions, Yeltsin signed a decree in late September 1993 that declared the Congress (as well as the Supreme Soviet, which still existed as a standing committee of the Congress) dissolved. According to the 1978 Russian Constitution, which was still in effect despite the USSR's dissolution, this was beyond the President's authority (though it would be allowed under Yeltsin's draft constitution), and the Congress responded by impeaching Yeltsin for abuse of power. Neither side was willing to back down, and so for ten days, both Yeltsin and the Congress remained in their positions of power, neither recognising the other's legitimacy and both trying to influence the people of Moscow to make a decisive show of support for their side.

What resolved the impasse, as in so many such cases throughout history, was the presidential monopoly on the use of force. On the 4th of October, called to action by Yeltsin, the Army rolled tanks into the streets of the capital, marshalled outside the White House (the meeting place of the Congress of People's Deputies, in which its members had barricaded themselves following the impeachment vote), and opened fire. Official estimates place the death toll from both the shelling of the White House and the attendant protests at 147, with another several hundred wounded. It was, for all intents and purposes, a self-coup by Yeltsin, carried out unconstitutionally to support an unconstitutional decision, but none of that mattered in the end. A poll taken shortly after the events showed that 70% of the Russian people backed Yeltsin's actions, and while this would change dramatically later on, he was safe in office for the time being and the Congress would not be able to reconvene. Just over a week after the shelling of the White House, Yeltsin signed a decree calling for new parliamentary elections and a referendum on the draft constitution, both of which would be held on the 12th of December.

This was a daring calculus. On the one hand, even Boris Yeltsin recognised that ruling by decree for an extended period of time would not be acceptable, and electing a new legislature alongside the constitutional referendum rather than later on showed willingness to abide by democratic norms. On the other hand, it all hinged on the referendum passing - if it didn't, the new legislature would presumably continue to operate under the 1978 constitution, and that risked recreating the situation preceding the self-coup. Getting the broader powers provided by the draft constitution was a higher priority for Yeltsin than electing a supportive legislature, and so his administration focused its efforts on campaigning for a "Yes" vote in the referendum.

The rules for the referendum required a simple majority of votes cast, as well as a minimum 50% turnout. Both of these requirements were met according to the official tally - the result reported was 58.4% approval on 54.4% turnout. However, in a pattern that would repeat itself more than once in post-Soviet Russia, ballots and related paper trails were very quickly destroyed after the official tally was published. A group of observers from opposition parties later claimed that ballots had been stuffed and that turnout had in fact only been around 46%, but their findings were immediately rejected by the government and by most foreign observers, including John McCain, who led the US observer delegation and praised Yeltsin's commitment to the democratic process.

Whatever the truth of the rumours, even if we take the official results at face value, even they showed only 31% of the total Russian electorate voting in favour of the draft constitution. It was far from the mass show of approval Yeltsin might have wanted, and he would continue to face an uphill battle convincing the Russian people to support his policies. Even more alarmingly, the regional governments of Tatarstan and Chechnya, both autonomous republics within the Russian Federation, resisted holding the referendum on their territories. The Tatarstan government was satisfied to call for a boycott while allowing the referendum itself to be carried out, but the Chechen government of Dzhokhar Dudayev, which had already declared itself an independent state back in 1991, would not allow the Russian election authorities into their territory at all.

 

[Ares96]

I found out someone on French Wikipedia has done incredible work cataloguing old election results, so here's the 1968 election.

The Gaullist bloc had lost its majority in the 1967 legislative elections, so there was already a degree of instability in the government even before May 1968 happened. As the protests and strikes began to die down, de Gaulle and Pompidou decided the time was right to call on the silent majority to rally to the defence of the Republic, and immediately declared the National Assembly dissolved pending elections in late June. The result was devastating to anyone who had hoped 1968 would herald a new beginning for France - the left was routed on a level not seen since the previous "crisis election" in 1958, and unlike then, the Gaullist movement was now organised enough to reap the benefits all on its own. The Union for the Defence of the Republic, a bloc of Gaullists and independents formed specifically to contest the elections, won an outright majority in the Assembly, and nearly a majority of the popular vote as well.

Along with their abysmal performance in the following year's presidential elections (which no one knew about at this point), this election marked an existential crisis for the French centre-left, which had barely managed to keep its leaders from electoral defeat. At a series of congresses held in various Parisian suburbs between 1969 and 1971, the SFIO and FGDS (the organisational and electoral arms, respectively, of the centre-left) transformed into the new Socialist Party, which soon managed to unite everyone in the old centre-left bloc, except a few Radicals who nonetheless continued their electoral alliance with them. It's not easy to tell based on this election result, but the left would soon be back in business.