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Max's election maps and assorted others

Indonesia 1955
The 1955 DPR (People's Representative Council) election was the only proper legislative election held during Sukarno's twenty years as President, and had been preceded by five years of back-and-forth wrangling between the different factions that made up the appointed Provisional DPR. The Provisional Constitution of 1950 envisioned a parliamentary system with a legislature elected by the people in free, secret and direct elections, tempered by the presidential power to dissolve the DPR and call early elections if the machinery of government failed. Every cabinet since then had been formally committed to holding these free elections, but bickering over the details as well as the general instability of the Indonesian government meant it took until spring 1953 for the Provisional DPR to pass an electoral law. This was a relatively progressive document giving the vote to all Indonesians aged 18 or higher and establishing a proportional electoral system with one representative in the DPR for every 150,000 inhabitants in a province. There was some concern that pure representation by population would give Java too much power vis-a-vis the rest of the country, but this was nonetheless the law that was adopted, and preparations were carried out slowly and methodically over 1954 before finally holding the vote on 29 September 1955.

The hope was that an elected DPR would have a mandate to produce a stable, effective democratic government, but this would not come to pass. In large part, this was because of the incredible social divisions within the country, which was after all based on the borders of the Dutch East Indies (though still without West Papua) and included wildly different nationalities and religious groups. President Sukarno had formulated an official state ideology called the Pancasila (from the Sanskrit for "five principles") based on patriotism, altruistic internationalism, consensus-based democracy, social welfare and monotheism (comparisons with the Six Arrows of Kemalism are both apt and welcome), which he hoped would be able to serve as a unifying force to bring all these disparate people together. The party founded by Sukarno, the Indonesian National Party (Partai Nasional Indonesia, PNI), was naturally the most pro-Pancasila organisation, but most non-Islamic parties signed up to it to some degree. The PNI also combined it with something they called "Marhaenism", after a Sundanese peasant named Marhaen whom Sukarno had met in the 1930s, who had a small plot of land that fed his family but still suffered from economic exploitation and scarcity of modern farming tools. Sukarno formed Marhaenism as an ideology that would free the "Marhaens" of Indonesia to live dignified lives, mixing elements of Marxism, economic nationalism and anti-imperialism.

The other most powerful force in Indonesian politics was political Islam, whose principal organisation was a political coalition dubbed the Assembly of Indonesian Muslim Associations (Majelis Syuro Muslimin Indonesia, Masyumi), originally set up during the war as an Islamic support organisation for the Japanese occupation, but who carried on into the post-war era to bring Islamic principles into the political life of independent Indonesia. The Masyumi were the biggest party in the Provisional DPR, and they had ruled in a grand coalition with the PNI until 1953, at which point a PNI-led coalition took over. The electoral campaign would be dominated by mutual sniping between the two, with the Masyumi accusing the PNI of opposing Islamic principles and the PNI accusing the Masyumi of wanting to establish a sharia-based state.

But of course, there was a third bloc - the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, PKI). The Communists weren't really a thing outside of Java, but in Java they mounted a spirited campaign aimed less at securing voters for the election and more at securing sympathisers for the inevitable class struggle they foresaw after the election. The campaign had been carried out since 1949, and was proving successful beyond their wildest dreams, with the party reaching a million members shortly after the election. In the late 50s, the PKI would become the world's third-largest communist party, with only those of the Soviet Union and China boasting higher memberships. They were aided in their growth by their support for Sukarno's domestic policy, which they saw as a vastly preferable alternative to either foreign capitalist domination or the Masyumi's Islamist vision.

And then there were the Christians. Though Java, Sumatra and most of Borneo were solidly Muslim, missionaries during the Dutch period had been successful in evangelising the native populations on a lot of the smaller islands, particularly so in the east. Being the products of Dutch influence, these Christians were quite sharply divided between Protestants and Catholics, who had separate identities, social structures and political parties - the boringly-named Christian Party of Indonesia (Partai Kristen Indonesia, Parkindo) for the Protestants and the even more boringly-named Catholic Party (Partai Katolik) for the Catholics.

Beside these four blocs, three more parties represented in the Provisional DPR merit mention - the Indonesian Socialist Party (Partai Sosialis Indonesia, PSI), the Unity Party of Greater Indonesia (Partai Parsatuan Indonesia Raya, PIR), and the Common People's Conference (Musyawarah Rakyat Banyak, Murba). The PSI was a fairly generic social-democratic party which had been one of the big players in the independence struggle, but whose leadership now seemed stuck between the PKI and PNI with little room to stake out their own ideological path. The PIR was a right-wing splinter from the PNI that supported the Pancasila and the independence struggle but rejected Sukarno's more radical ideas. The Murba, finally, was one of those syncretic former resistants' parties, sort of a mix of the Italian Action Party and the Iranian Tudeh Party - their ideology mixed fierce nationalism with socialist economics, and they and the PKI continued to view one another as a mortal rival even as the PKI came to greatly outnumber the Murba.

Both the PSI and the PIR were significant blocs in the Provisional DPR, and both would be utterly mauled in the elections - the PSI only retained any kind of strength in Bali, and the PIR split into two factions which each won only a single seat, thus not even making it into the key of the map. The Murba also underperformed expectations, winning only two seats, and the Masyumi saw their hopes of becoming Indonesia's leading party dashed as the PNI came to exactly equal them in seat share. In large part, this was because of a factor no one had really reckoned with - the growth of the Nahdlatul Ulama, whom we've already discussed above, as a more cohesive Islamic organisation to challenge the Masyumi. The NU did particularly well in east Java, where they became the largest party, and also captured significant support across the rest of Java as well as Borneo.

The PKI, meanwhile, tripled its number of seats compared to the Provisional DPR, although it is worth noting that only four of their 39 seats came from off Java, all of those being Sumatran. Really, the only party to achieve a better result off Java than on it was the Masyumi, which was utterly dominant on Sumatra and generally did well among off-Java Muslims. The PNI did neither significantly better nor worse than expected, and although it became the largest party, the fact that the largest party got 22% of the vote was obviously not great for stability. All told, the new DPR would have 28 parties, 11 of which won at least four seats. If the goal of calling elections had been to secure a more effective parliamentary system, that was not likely to happen.

The Masyumi's Burhanuddin Harahap was able to put together a coalition with the NU, the Christian parties and the PSI - really, just about everyone except the PNI and PKI - which Sukarno assented to, but which fell as early as March 1956. The succeeding cabinets would all be led by the PNI, and the Masyumi and other Islamic groups became ever more disillusioned. In February 1958, a group of dissidents on Sumatra including Harahap went into rebellion, declaring themselves the "Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia". Sukarno's government sent in the army, newly outfitted with Soviet surplus materiel, and drove the rebels into the mountains by summer, though low-intensity fighting would carry on until 1961. By then, Sukarno had dismissed his last cabinet, declared himself Prime Minister as well as President, dissolved the DPR, restored the 1945 constitution (which gave the President significantly more power) and instituted what he called a system of "guided democracy" - essentially enlightened absolutism for the 20th century. Things would not get better from there on out.

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Those are some huge differences in constituency size. Also, so East Kalimantan didn't elect a single MP?
Somehow. They were allotted three seats, but the website doesn’t show any of them actually getting distributed. By contrast, most of the Java seats have actually had more seats distributed than they were entitled to. I don’t know why that is, but the national seat totals added up perfectly with the figures on Wikipedia (which seem well-grounded), so I decided to roll with it.
 
Very impressive work Max. Really shows you how much Java outweighs the rest of Indonesia (though it's only a mere 57% of the population, in contrast to what we were talking about with England in the UK!)
It was higher than that in 1955 - since Suharto, the Indonesian government has had a policy of moving landless people off Java to combat overpopulation and poverty (according to the Indonesian government), and possibly also to break separatist movements by diluting the population of outlying regions with pliant Javanese who are now in the government's debt (according to the separatists). It’s quite similar to the Stuart policy in Ireland in a way, to tie it back to England.
 
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I believe this is all of the North Side done, i.e. everything north and east of the North Branch of the Chicago River. The Northwest Side, i.e. points west of the river and north of roughly Division Street, is a good way toward completion as far as the actual network goes, but will need stops and also a canvas extension to fit in everything west of Cicero.

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I've said it already, but it bears repeating - this image is going to be huge when it's done.
 
Trying a crosspost from the Cartographers' Guild, as I don't think I'll be weighing this forum down with my increasingly gigantic WIP uploads anymore.

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The map is literally getting to the limit of what my computer can handle in terms of size, so we're going to have to see what happens to it moving forward.
 
WIP of a very 2am sort of project: the group divisions in the 12th Chamber of Deputies of the French Third Republic, otherwise known as the Chambre bleu horizon, elected in 1919 under a deeply weird mix of majoritarian SNTV and proportional representation (candidates getting at least half the vote were declared elected, seats remaining were assigned proportionally to the different candidate combinations). French Wikipedia describes this election as "très confus", and that's by the standards of the Third Republic. The one thing everyone agrees on is that this chamber was the most right-wing in the Third Republic's history, sweeping out the old republican left and radical republicans in favour of a new breed of post-Dreyfus Affair republican right, many of whom had served in the war (hence bleu horizon, which was the name of the colour of the WWI-era French Army uniform). Most of these were connected to the Bloc national, a sort of broad coalition of lists organised at department level which was supported by Prime Minister Clemenceau, at the height of his popularity in 1919. The lists had different names in each department and were generally quite byzantine, and the BN delegates elected ended up joining different groups in the Assembly, which makes it quite a headache to figure out who was and wasn't elected under its banner. In a lot of ways, this election was very much the spiritual cousin of the British general election held a few months prior.

val-fr-1919.png

Note that the party divisions are only valid for the coloured departments, I haven't gotten around to the rest yet.
 
I assume you're aware of this, but in case you aren't, the Assemblée nationale's database of former deputies is very good and the Third Republic deputies all (?) have a copy of their biography from the dictionary of French parliamentarians 1889-1940. The biography often includes details on their elections, and the political labels at the time of their elections. I used it a lot when I did my map of the 1936 elections a few years ago.

 
I assume you're aware of this, but in case you aren't, the Assemblée nationale's database of former deputies is very good and the Third Republic deputies all (?) have a copy of their biography from the dictionary of French parliamentarians 1889-1940. The biography often includes details on their elections, and the political labels at the time of their elections. I used it a lot when I did my map of the 1936 elections a few years ago.
Indeed, that's where I'm drawing them from.

Where can I find that map, out of curiosity? I've been working on the same election in the past, I've got both the constituencies and the candidate results, but it's slow going because of how the result books made under the Third Republic don't show party affiliations.
 
France 1965 (P)
This overlaps quite a bit with another Election Twitter user's recent work, but I'm going to do it anyway. In 1965, France held its first direct presidential election in a hundred and twenty years. Charles de Gaulle, who had been elected by a whopping landslide in the college of grands-électeurs in 1958 and gone on to win two legislative elections by a convincing margin, expected to cruise to re-election in the first round, and so did most of his opponents. Pierre Mendès France, the de facto leader of the French left at this point, refused to legitimise the system of direct elections by participating in one, and Gaston Defferre was unable to secure the support of his party leadership. In the end, the task of opposing de Gaulle fell to Mendès France's interior minister, the centre-left independent François Mitterrand. Though a relatively obscure name going into the election, Mitterrand turned out to be a masterful campaigner, and was able to run de Gaulle down sufficiently to ensure a runoff would be held - de Gaulle received some 45% of the vote in the first round, with 32% going to Mitterrand, 15% to MRP leader Jean Lecanuet, 5% to the protest candidacy of OAS lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and 3% to scattered independents.

Although de Gaulle had been complacent enough to end up in a runoff, his campaign was still able to marshal enough support to win easily, with the margin of victory staying more or less the same across the country between the two rounds. Still, the mere fact that the man who was the Fifth Republic couldn't get 50% of the electorate behind him indicated that maybe, just maybe, things were starting to change. The 1965 election marks the turning point from early de Gaulle to late de Gaulle, and the beginning of the regeneration of the French left that would culminate in May 1968 (not that Mitterrand or the established left-wing parties had anything to do with that, of course).

val-fr-p-1965.png
 
I know some of the reasons why, but I really like how you can spot the langue d'oc areas along the southern border and coast. It's more stark than I associate it being in more modern elections (mostly because Provence minus Marseille remembered it's supposed to be stubbornly conservative).

It's also interesting how neatly the 2nd round performance for Mitterand in the south lines up with Marine Le Pen's performance in 2017.
 
This overlaps quite a bit with another Election Twitter user's recent work, but I'm going to do it anyway. In 1965, France held its first direct presidential election in a hundred and twenty years. Charles de Gaulle, who had been elected by a whopping landslide in the college of grands-électeurs in 1958 and gone on to win two legislative elections by a convincing margin, expected to cruise to re-election in the first round, and so did most of his opponents. Pierre Mendès France, the de facto leader of the French left at this point, refused to legitimise the system of direct elections by participating in one, and Gaston Defferre was unable to secure the support of his party leadership. In the end, the task of opposing de Gaulle fell to Mendès France's interior minister, the centre-left independent François Mitterrand. Though a relatively obscure name going into the election, Mitterrand turned out to be a masterful campaigner, and was able to run de Gaulle down sufficiently to ensure a runoff would be held - de Gaulle received some 45% of the vote in the first round, with 32% going to Mitterrand, 15% to MRP leader Jean Lecanuet, 5% to the protest candidacy of OAS lawyer Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour, and 3% to scattered independents.

Although de Gaulle had been complacent enough to end up in a runoff, his campaign was still able to marshal enough support to win easily, with the margin of victory staying more or less the same across the country between the two rounds. Still, the mere fact that the man who was the Fifth Republic couldn't get 50% of the electorate behind him indicated that maybe, just maybe, things were starting to change. The 1965 election marks the turning point from early de Gaulle to late de Gaulle, and the beginning of the regeneration of the French left that would culminate in May 1968 (not that Mitterrand or the established left-wing parties had anything to do with that, of course).

View attachment 30296

It's astonishing how clear the C-shape of left-wing support in the south is. I suppose it speaks to France's unique history that the heavily industrialised areas of Nord and Pas-de-Calais still voted to the right of, say, very rural areas in southern France.
 
It's astonishing how clear the C-shape of left-wing support in the south is. I suppose it speaks to France's unique history that the heavily industrialised areas of Nord and Pas-de-Calais still voted to the right of, say, very rural areas in southern France.
It also speaks to how weird Gaullism was as a political movement, and how urban and working-class its support base was compared to both the old French right and the right in other European countries.
 
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