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Nanwe's Maps and Graphics Thread

Absolute madness.

So I take it the CC dominance was broken in this election then?

Yeah. For the first time since 1983, they (or their preceding parties) are not in the regional government. Nor leading it for the first time since 1993. They don't preside over any island cabildo for the first time ever, and more importantly, they lost control of the Tenerife Cabildo, which they had controlled since 1987.
 
I had completely forgotten how fucked up the Curbelo affair was even for Spanish standards.

And of course, despite everything that happened he’s basically the de facto President of the archipelago as ASG holds the balance of power in the regional parliament.

Yeah, our politicians may be corrupt, but at least they are discreet. The whole incident just screams petty tyrant, a perfect cacique sense of entitlement.

Unfortunately. He'd have had way less influence as just another PSOE regional MP, I wonder if other well-entrenched island leaders will get similar ideas, or if the brutal party discipline would prevent such discordant thoughts.
 
Nanwe, did you manage to finish your FPTP Spain map?

No, never. Too complicated, frankly. Realised there are many areas of Spain that very alien to me so it's hard to push through and the paucity of precinct maps. I suppose I could give a try again now that we have so many data scientists who publish detailed precinct maps of the elections at El Pais and El Diario.
 
No, never. Too complicated, frankly. Realised there are many areas of Spain that very alien to me so it's hard to push through and the paucity of precinct maps. I suppose I could give a try again now that we have so many data scientists who publish detailed precinct maps of the elections at El Pais and El Diario.
It was interesting to see but I can understand that - doing a somewhat similar project at the moment, I've nearly finished the groundwork but I suspect I wouldn't have started if I'd known how complicated it would be!
 
I don't have much to contribute other than your dedication to mapping seemingly every election is genuinely uplifting. Thanks for all the maps!

Thanks! But I hardly map every election, lately mostly Spanish ones that seem interesting. Or Belgian ones because I'm living there. If anything the team at AJR are the real everything mappers.
 
Taken from data obtained from the French Foreign Affairs' Digital Archives, the data from the 1921 Lebanese census.

The data below doesn't include people that the census identified as non-tax-paying emigrants nor as foreigners, it's only a census of residents and tax-paying emigrants (who one would assume would vote and return to the country). However, already back then there were fears that the French census-takers had played with the census by including said tax-paying emigrants (as they were overwhelmingly Maronite) and may have deliberately undercounted non-Maronite Christians.

Similar issues were raised with the 1932 census, although that one was - unfortunately for me - carried out by Lebanese authorities.

The majority of 'Others' were likely minority Christians (Syriac, Chaldean and Armenian Catholics and Orthodox) as well as Beirut's significant Jewish community although many Armenians were yet to be made citizens - hence a large jump that can't be explained by demographic growth alone in the 1932 census.

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-24 a las 10.17.29.png

As you know, Lebanon has not held a census since 1932 for fears of destabilising the country whose entire political system is based off a rectified version of the 1932 census' religious composition. So the closest thing is religious self-identification in the voter rolls. And this is some of the latest data in that regard, for comparison.

Beirut's Jewish community, which numbered about 5,000 in 1948 and around 9,000-10,000 by 1969 largely emigrated as a result of the Lebanese Civil War.

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-24 a las 10.25.25.png
 
I've spent over a week digging information in French and English to make this, so I thought I'd share it. Welcome to the world of alt-demography:

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-28 a las 10.33.36.png
The Levantine Union is part of Leinad and @Turquoise Blue 's Hail Britannia world and it consists of OTL Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and the Sinai. The way Leinad conceptualised was a sort of larger, Middle Eastern Switzerland or just a hella messier Lebanon, so demographic data was key.

Obviously, both Palestine and Lebanon are some of the areas that over the course of the last 70 years have seen the largest, more arbitrary demographic shifts as a result of armed conflict, so I couldn't just replicate OTL numbers for Israel whereas Lebanon is literally the worst place on Earth for demographic data. On purpose too.

The method for obtaining the 1954 data was two-fold:

  • For Mandatory Palestine, in 1946, the UN carried out an estimate of inhabitants in every locality of the Mandate and classified them as Muslim, Jewish, Christian or 'Other' (mostly Druzes in the north, a few Samaritans in some places and Hindu or Sikh Indian soldiers in and around Jerusalem).
    • Thanks to the 1974 CECRID report on Israeli demographics, I got my hands on the Jewish, Israeli Muslim Arab and Christian Arab crude birth rates and the crude deaths and hence their natural growth rate. Which I applied to the various groups at the sub-district level.
      • Why I chose to use Israeli Muslim Arab and Christian Arab natural growth rates instead of potential Palestinian territories' ones is due to (a) data availability and (b) staying in refugee camps retards demographic transition. My idea was to try and model what said demographic evolution would be under circumstances of "prosperity" - or at least not being uprooted from everything you've ever known.
    • On top of that, I brought in the data regarding Aliyah Bet and 1950s Jewish refugees. Unfortunately, there is little information I could find as to where they were located, so I tried to follow the date of the 1961 Israeli census as to where most Jewish people lived to just, arbitrarily place them there.

  • Lebanon now, it's a monstrosity. As you can see above, there is regionalised data from the 1921 census, but even going into the Lebanese Official Gazzette, I could only find the summary of the 1932 census. As such, I got my hands on some external estimates from 1943 and 1946 that went to the governorate level and worked from there. Thanks to the work from El-Badry, de Vaumas and especially of David Yaukey, I got a hold of TFRs by (roughly) religious group. I calculated the CBR from there and then used a common CDR for all groups which I arbitrarily increased for rural populations, since it was surprisingly low overall for the region, even though El-Badry shows how Lebanon had the best health care in the MENA region at the time.
    • The main thing to keep in mind here are fertility differentials across sects: Christians can be divided between Maronites, Other Catholics (Armenian and Greek Catholics mostly) and then Orthodox (Greek Orthodox and Armenian Gregorians mostly). Christians, with the exception of the very wealthy and very urban Greek Orthodox community, had similar sky-high TFRs to Muslims in the rural areas. But in the cities, typically, TFRs were half the Muslims' and even more than that for Greek Orthodox. Maronites and Greek Catholics were far more rural than urban, whereas all other groups were eminently urban or at least town-dwelling. The Druze behaved demographically similarly to Christians, although since they were so overwhelmingly rural it didn't matter much.
    • Interestingly, although Sunni TFRs were lower than Shia, there was no difference between urban and rural Muslims, and indeed, according to Yawkley not even by income or education level, i.e. a working-class urban Maronite had fewer children than a upper class, university-educated urban Sunni*.
    • I couldn't quite determine the share of the urban and rural population by sect so I had to infer from some qualitative data on where and how they lived: Sunnis, Greek Orthodox, Armenians and Jews were mostly urban, other Christians were more mixed with Maronites still being more rural than urban at this point. Shia were overwhelmingly rural as were Druze. So I used some rough numbers and corrected if I thought it was too high.


  • Captura de pantalla 2020-08-28 a las 11.19.14.png
    • Internal and external migration - Lebanon is a well-known country of migration but the 1940-60s represented a low point for external migration thanks to the country's prosperity, with about 3000 people a year emigrating during the 1950s. Although I don't have data for the time - again, there's nobody collecting these numbers - I would assume, as many demographers do, that the pattern of migration was similar to that of the Mandate period, i.e. Maronites and Greek Orthodox and Catholics making up the overwhelming majority of emigrants, moving to South and North America.
      • By the 1960s, Beirut was home to over 100,000 Shia (compared to 11-12,000 in 1945) and its banlieue was home to some other 170,000 Shia who had emigrated. These rural, often illiterate Shia came from the Bekaa and South Lebanon, driven by the tremendous poverty of these regions as well as from political instability caused by the PLO in the region. As such, I tried to model what that internal migration would look like.
So I obtained something like so:

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-28 a las 11.13.14.png

Very interestingly for me, my numbers look eerily similar to the État-Civil's 1953 population estimate (see below). But actually this might not be a good thing, as I'm 50% sure that the État-Civil counted emigrants since it worked off 1932 numbers, so it over-represented Christians. But I suppose that could still make sense politically ITTL so I decided not to touch it.

As these estimates only count citizens, Beirut looks underpopulated, as there would have likely been some 100,000 more people in the city, from Armenians who refused to become citizens under the Mandate to Kurds and Syrian refugees to Westerners living in the city.

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-28 a las 10.52.22.png

* The chances of finding an upper class, university educated, urban Shia in 1954 were extremely low.
 
That's an incredible amount of work there.

Yeah, not gonna lie, but it's been fascinating, it's been something of a puzzle actually, but I've learnt a bunch about demographics and Lebanon along the way. Some of the works out there, like de Vaumas' especially, are extremely insightful in terms of explaining group characteristics if heavy on the Orientalism. Although that's to be expected from 1950s works.

I've also been making a map of a surviving Transcaucasia so maybe this experience can help with projecting some demographics for the region as well. Luckily here, the 1897 Russian census data is pretty damn good.
 
That's an incredible amount of work there.

I was doing some more research into Beirut and I came across their confessional division for the Beirut City Council in 1953. Best part? It contains a 1956 table on the city's demographic composition. The authors as cited in the text do admit that city numbers likely undercount the number of Shia living in the city as well as the number of Maronites. The former because being illiterate and living in 'tanaks' (shanty towns) were hard to count by police authorities and the latter because many Maronites lived in Beirut for most of the year but went to the Mount Lebanon villages to spend the 3-4 months of summer to escape the city's heat.

Fairly proud of the end result despite the large errors with the Shia community. I suppose large-scale migration had not yet started by the mid-50s.

Captura de pantalla 2020-08-29 a las 12.48.33.png
 
Latvia held its last general election, for the 13th legislature of the Saeima on October 2018. The 2018 election brought about considerable changes compared to the two previous electoral cycles. The SDP "Harmony" remained the single largest party losing only one seat compared to the 2014 election, as it would be expected from a party with such a fixed electoral base as the Latvian Russian-speaking minority. Harmony topped the polls in Riga, some surrounding cities as well as the more Russian-heavy south-eastern parts of the Latgale constituency.

The radical changes took place on the right-wing of the political spectrum, where the two parties that had dominated the right, the agrarian Union of Greens and Farmers (ZZS) and the liberal-conservative New Unity lost half and more than half of their elected members, respectively.

In their place, three new parties gained representation for the first time, the populist Who Owns the State?, led by Artuss Kaiminš, an MP first elected in 2015 for the Latvian Association of Regions. KPV LV is a neoliberal anti-establishment populist party that seeks to appeal to a young, male constituency. KPV LV swept the rural parts of the country that in previous elections had voter for ZZS. Another new party is the liberal-conservative New Conservative Party (JKP), founded by former National Alliance MP Jānis Bordāns. Lastly, the progressive liberal alliance of the Movement For! and Latvian Development contested the election together as Development/For!, topping the polls in a few affluent suburbs of Riga.

Representation in the Saeima is rounded with the inclusion of the National Alliance, a right-wing populist party first formed as a coalition of the right-wing LNNK and the far-right All for Latvia! in 2011.

Two parties that had been present in the previous legislature lost all their seats by failing to cross the threshold. One was the centrist Latvian Association of Regions, which only gained 4.1% of the national vote share; and the other was the national conservative For Latvia from the Heart, that lost all 7 MPs it had gained in 2014 as its vote share crashed to 0.8%.

Government formation was complicated by the need to bring many parties together in order to prevent Harmony from being a part of the cabinet, a long-standing principle in Latvian politics, where the Russian minority interests' party is locked out of forming part of the national government, unlike say, in neighbouring Estonia. This is caused for instance by the fact that Harmony was an official partner of United Russian from its founding until 2017. Its main predecessor party, the Harmony Centre, had likewise been excluded from participating in national politics, due to, again, its perceived cosiness with Putin and ambivalent position on the Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Likewise, the agrarian ZZS was excluded from cabinet formation discussions, much like in 2011 and 2014 due to the party's perception as the tool of oligarch Aivars Lembergs, who finances the party.

Because of this, government formation took months until Krišjānis Kariņš was nominated on January 2019 to form a government composed of members from Development/For!, National Alliance, New Unity, the New Conservative Party and KPV LV.

The electoral system for the Saeima elections is pretty straightforward. The 100 members of the legislature are elected from 5 multi-member constituencies, roughly corresponding to each of the country's five 'cultural regions'. These constituencies elect anywhere between 12 (Kurzeme) and 35 seats (Riga). Latvian citizens voting from abroad are counted as voting in the Riga constituency. In order for a party to make it into the Saeima, it has to cross the national 5% threshold, otherwise, it is excluded - as it happened to the Latvian Association of Regions, despite topping the polls in two municipalities.

L7WcNJp.png
 
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You weren't kidding about a breakdown in party system!

And yet, 2014 also marked a big contrast with the 2010 and 2011 elections! The Reform Party ran a joint list with Unity in 2014 and they basically lost half the seats they had separately in 2011 (from 42 to 23) LRA and NSL show up for the first time only to disappear by the next electoral cycle...

Latvia seems like a fun country to map, their centre right keeps on dissolving and merging and seeing entryism from different liberal-conservative and conservative-liberal parties that really aren’t that different. Unity is itself a party created out of a coalition of 3 different centre right parties that banded together in 2010. And they themselves can be traced to the early 2000s re-restructuring of the centre right landscape and so on.

It’s not a super stable parliamentary system, in 30 years of democracy they’ve had 16 Prime Ministers.
 
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