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Max's election maps and assorted others

France 1956
    • So this is the final legislative election of the Fourth Republic, and the legislature that sat when it all went down in Algiers in May 1958 and de Gaulle executed his coup d'état was called upon to assume the reins of power in a legal and orderly fashion. The narrative really breaks down in light of the RPF having entered the scene with a bang and become the largest party in 1951, then collapsed in 1956, only for de Gaulle to come back and seize power in 1958. If these two elections had come in the opposite order, it would've made so much more sense.

    Note also the breakdown of the apparentement system with the Third Force no longer being a thing - nearly all of the successful apparentements in this election were centre-right, with only two (Ariège and Corsica) being centre-left. Also, Algeria took the logical next step from blatantly rigging its elections and just didn't hold any at all.

    France 1956
    val-fr-1956.png

    The only Fourth Republic election left now, between @Nanwe and myself, is July 1946. I don't think I'm going to do that one straight away though, because I have a half-finished 1958 map lying around that I now have the data needed to finish. Suffice it to say the contrast with this one is stark.
     
    • France 1839
    • France 1839
    val-fr-1839.png

    A look into the political geography of the July Monarchy, with affiliations largely taken from this map (large file). Bear in mind that each of these constituencies only had about 150-200 actual voters in any given election, on average (they varied hugely in size, being mostly based on the arrondissements). Another massive caveat is that the map only shows government vs. opposition, and while I can guess that the west and the area around Toulouse were largely legitimist rather than liberal, I haven't looked into the precise nature of the split. I think a seat chart would be unhelpful for that same reason.
     
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    • France 1958 (PCF)
    • Time for the first instalment in what will probably be a series, because there's no way I'm just going to let a massive 1958 spreadsheet sit idle after only being used for one map.

    With some 19% of the vote, the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) was technically the largest designation in the first round of the 1958 elections. However, this is an unhelpful metric since the PCF was also the only party that stood candidates in every metropolitan seat - the Gaullists came close, but were still technically divided into the UNR (the main, right-wing organisation led by Debré, Pompidou and the gang) and the CRR (a supposedly left-wing, trade-union-based organisation that basically served as de Gaulle's "Democrats for Nixon" equivalent).

    In either case, their first-round voteshare wouldn't help them much, because in spite of Hungary 1956, they continued to follow the Soviet line. The result was that no other party would touch them with a barge pole, and in the second round they made almost no gains and won only ten seats - making them too small for group status in the new Assembly. It seemed a change was needed, and at the 1959 party congress the delegates voted for a new popular front with the SFIO and other left-of-centre parties against what they called "state monopoly capitalism". They ended up making moderate gains in 1962, but the SFIO were running past them, and the PCF would play second fiddle in every left-wing government under the Fifth Republic.

    val-fr-1958-pcf.png

    As we can see, the PCF essentially had three strongholds (or four, depending on how you slice it). Firstly, a belt stretching from Paris to the Belgian border, taking in the working-class banlieues of the Parisian region, the regional towns of Picardy and Champagne, and the mining basin in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Briey-Longwy forms sort of an eastern outlier of this, being another region dominated by mining and heavy industry, while the dockers and shipbuilders of Le Havre anchor (pun intended) its western end. Second and third were the north slopes of the Central Massif and the Mediterranean coast, both of which have left-wing traditions going back at least to the Revolution. The fourth, smaller, stronghold, was formed by central Brittany.
     
    • Montreal 1994
    • I've been unable to find data for the 1998 municipal election in Montreal, the last pre-merger one, but that's not a huge deal seeing as how it was very boring and basically just a rehash of the 1994 one, so here's that one.

    val-ca-montreal-1994.png

    The thirty-year reign of Mayor Jean Drapeau and his personalist, federalist, vaguely right-of-centre, extremely corrupt Parti civique was ended in 1986, when he was defeated in an open race by Jean Doré of the Rassemblement des citoyens de Montréal (RCM), an alliance of social-democratic associations, student action groups, community activists, anglophone minority rights activists and trade unions. The RCM simultaneously captured the vast majority of the city council, which it would continue to hold for eight years as the city continued to struggle with population loss and a sky-high municipal debt left behind from Drapeau's lavish spending habits and love of megaprojects (having brought both the World's Fair and the Olympics to the city along with the construction of the Métro). Doré found himself unable to do much about either problem.

    In 1994, the citizens decided to toss the RCM out and instead elected Pierre Bourque, the manager of the Montreal Botanic Gardens and organiser of the 1980 Floralies Internationales (because of course Drapeau made sure to bring those to Montreal as well). Bourque was also responsible for the construction of the Montreal Biodome, still an icon of the city, out of the former Olympic velodrome. This had brought him into the public spotlight, and in 1994 he formed a political party which he called Vision Montréal. Bourque's plan combined fiscal responsibility with environmental initiatives, and he's credited with a number of urban renewal projects as well as the stabilisation of the city budget during his first term in office.

    Bourque's second term would be more controversial. He believed the root of Montreal's economic problems lay in the municipal boundaries, which kept the city mostly working-class while the more affluent West Island communities governed themselves. This, in Bourque's view, meant that their residents used Montreal's services while not paying tax to the city, and the PQ government of Lucien Bouchard broadly agreed with this view. Bouchard planned a series of municipal amalgamations, similar to those undertaken in Ontario a few years earlier, and Bourque became an enthusiastic participant in this project, calling for the entire Island of Montreal to merge into a single city. Despite some hand-wringing by the West Island towns, who feared their anglophone residents would be poorly taken care of in a majority-francophone city, the merger went ahead on New Year's Day 2002.

    Ironically, the merger would prove Bourque's undoing. His two primary opposing groups - the RCM and the West Island anglophones - united into a loose coalition christened the Montreal Island Citizens' Union (MICU, soon shortened to Union Montréal), and nominated businessman Gérald Tremblay for mayor. Tremblay turfed out Bourque as unceremoniously as Bourque had Doré, and Montreal would go on to have absolutely no more troubles ever.
     
    • Saskatchewan 1944
    • Here's some Canada again - thanks to an excellent site find, I'm going to be able to do a lot of older elections if and when I want to.

    This is the groundbreaking Saskatchewan election of 1944, possibly the most exciting thing ever to happen in Saskatchewan, wherein the Liberal government in power for the preceding ten years (and with one interruption, since the province's creation in 1905) was decisively turfed out by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a slightly awkwardly-named socialist grouping led by firebrand Baptist preacher and social reformer Tommy Douglas. The CCF won all but five seats in the province, backed by disenchantment with the lack of recovery from the Dust Bowl years. This was the first socialist government ever elected in North America, and Douglas went on to be the longest-serving Premier in Saskatchewan's history, sitting until 1961 when he went off to be leader of this new thing the kids were calling the "New Democratic Party", in which post he'd become known as the Father of Medicare and voted the greatest Canadian ever in a CBC poll. But that's all another story.

    val-ca-sk-1944.png
     
    • Ireland 1798 (constituencies)
    • And here's a quickie I have an odd feeling of having done before.

    val-ie-1797.png

    The Irish House of Commons, modelled on its English/British counterpart, was quite impressively undemocratic:
    - Like the English House of Commons, all forty-shilling freeholders in each county has the franchise, which was actually a fairly substantial number for its time (230,000 out of five million Irishmen could vote). But, of course, this only went to electing 64 out of 300 members.
    - With the exception of the two seats reserved for Trinity College graduates (yes, graduates only, not like those freethinkers in Oxford and Cambridge), the remaining seats were given over to the boroughs, of which there were a large number. As in England, these were sometimes large towns, but just as often random villages or deserted Norman camps with a handful of voters in them. What made Ireland somewhat different was that the vast majority of borough seats were corporation boroughs, meaning their member was nominated by the town corporation. Which meant that in the pocket boroughs, the landlord could just freely appoint a member without needing to bother going through the motions of an election.
    - And of course, only Anglicans could vote or serve as members. That meant not only were Catholics excluded, but Ulster's many Presbyterians too.

    The result was a thoroughly corrupt, incompetent assembly of three hundred Anglo-Irishmen, mostly from the lower rural gentry and the urban upper crust, who were basically as totally unrepresentative of the Irish people as the House of Lords were, and only a fraction of whom had any sort of electorate to keep them under scrutiny. Not a brilliant way to set up a legislature, you might think, and you'd be right.

    The Irish Parliament had been subordinated to the English Parliament for most of its existence, but in 1782, a loose alliance of MPs led by Henry Grattan (dubbed the Patriot Party) were able to secure full home rule for the island. This led to a brief flourishing of reform, notably giving Catholics the franchise (but not the right to stand for election) in 1792, but they were soon overtaken by events. The United Irishmen, starting as a movement of dissident republican Presbyterians in Ulster, soon spread throughout the island and rose in rebellion in 1798. The resulting civil war was short but bloody, and it became clear that something had to be done. William Pitt the Younger, Britain's energetic young Prime Minister, promised a sweeping reform package that would bring Ireland into a united polity with Great Britain, lift the restrictions on Catholics in public life, and crack down on public corruption.

    Pitt's way to get the Act of Union past the Irish House of Commons was neither very original nor very cunning - he offered £15,000 to all owners of pocket boroughs to compel their pocket members to vote for the bill. It did work, though, and Ireland ceased to exist as an independent country on New Year's Day 1801. The rest of Pitt's reform package stalled, however - most due to lukewarm interest, but Catholic emancipation because the King viewed it as a betrayal of his Coronation vow to defend the Church of England - and in the end, union brought none of the expected benefits for Ireland. Grattan and the Patriots bitterly resented the move, and the cause of Repeal and Home Rule would dominate Irish politics for the next century.
     
    • Quebec 1956/1960
    • Alex Richards said:
    Canada has just always been like that hasn't it.
    Click to expand...
    Well this is a series of realigning elections, not anything representative of what Quebec tended to be like. The Liberals had ruled essentially a one-party state since 1897, when the Tories alienated the entire province over the Manitoba Schools Question, and the UN would rule until... well, funny I should say that.

    Quebec 1956 and 1960
    val-ca-qc-1956.png
    val-ca-qc-1960.png
     
    • Quebec 1962/1966/1970
    • Quebec 1962, 1966 and 1970
    val-ca-qc-1962.png
    val-ca-qc-1966.pngval-ca-qc-1970.png

    These were the last elections held with the old provincial ridings, and the 1966 election sort of hints at why - the Liberals carried the popular vote by more than a 6% margin, but still fell behind in seats because so much of their vote was in Montreal. And this was after they'd added ten ridings to suburban Montreal to compensate for the woeful malapportionment there. In 1962, while the average rural riding had (very roughly) fifteen to twenty thousand voters, Jacques-Cartier had around eighty thousand and Laval more than a hundred thousand.

    Rather fewer lessons to be learned from 1970, obviously - everything sort of went crazy. It is worth noting that the PQ were a solid second in the popular vote, but because of the aforementioned malapportionment, both the UN and créditistes (oh hi there @Uhura's Mazda) got more seats.

    It's hard to overstate just how massive the redistribution in 1972 was, so that one may take some time for me to do.
     
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    • Quebec 1981
    • The 1981 election, the only one held under its set of boundaries and the first strictly two-party assembly since 1936 (or 1966 if we don't count one or two independents). Lévesque kept his majority intact despite the crushing referendum defeat, and spent the next four years splitting his party over cooperation with Brian Mulroney's Tories on the federal level.

    val-ca-qc-1981.png

    This is pretty much what Quebec would look like for the next twenty-five years or so, shifting back and forth between PQ and Liberal majorities every two terms. Then the ADQ happened for real in 2007, and things started going awry again.
     
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