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Max's election maps and assorted others

Växjö 1863-1940 (wards)
So I've now been able to trace the boundaries of the city back to the municipal reform in 1863, which created two municipalities to cover what had formerly been the Växjö cathedral parish: the City of Växjö (Växjö stad), which covered the city itself and its land possessions within the parish, and the Växjö Rural Municipality (Växjö landskommun), which covered the rest of the parish, including the lands of the episcopal see as well as the seven villages of Kronoberg, Araby, Hov, Östregård, Hollstorp, Skir and Telestad.

vxo-1863.png

As you can tell, this created some slightly odd borders, as the city owned significant tracts of land along the highways west and north of it, enough in fact to split the rural municipality in half. Borders were complicated even further when the Royal Kronoberg Regiment (I 11) established a cantonment in the western rural part of the city in 1919, which detached a large area from the city council's ownership and moved it into state control. This didn't formally change the municipal boundaries, but it did have a significant effect on the history of Växjö as a city.

Despite being a cathedral city and the only city for dozens of miles in any direction, Växjö in the 19th century was a profoundly sleepy place, with only a couple of thousand inhabitants. The only things it had to recommend it were its grammar school and its role as a county town, and teachers and bureaucrats came to dominate local government in the early years. As urbanisation began to take hold all around the country, and as the cantonment was established, it began to slowly grow, and before too long it was spilling over into the rural municipality. East of the city centre, the city's jurisdiction ended immediately behind the cathedral, but a large suburb began to grow up in Östregård in the first years of the 20th century. In order to implement a city plan and various public safety laws, which normally weren't possible to apply in rural municipalities, Östregård decided in 1919 to form a municipalsamhälle, a small ad-hoc council set up specifically to administer those laws. The borders of this council were set up to hug the edges of the settlement, leaving the episcopal estate as a near-exclave of the rural municipality in what was fast becoming the middle of the city. Remnants of this can still be seen today, as the bishop's pastures remain largely undeveloped. There's some allotments, and the northern half of it would be taken over by the new grammar school built in the 1950s, but there are in fact still significant areas of pasture in the middle of Växjö.

vxo-1919.png

Until this point, elections in Växjö had been simple affairs. The voters, of whom there were only a few hundred at most, gathered in the city hall and elected their representatives. But in 1919, the Edén coalition government brought in universal suffrage in local elections, which (along with the aforementioned growth) meant that the body of voters ballooned to several thousand. To better serve these new voters, it was decided to split the city into two electoral wards, of which the southern one would still hold polls at the town hall, while the northern one would vote in the IOGT chapter hall. The split line was simple and understandable, following the high street through the city centre and then the highway west.

vxo-valdistrikt-1923.png

The growth continued, and in 1937 the time came to add a third ward, this time in the west of the city. Somewhere in between here, the city also switched from bloc vote to proportional representation, and aligned its election days with those for the county council, for which Växjö made up a constituency by itself as the only city in Kronoberg County. Despite universal suffrage, it remained a Conservative bastion for most of this period, and only as part of their nationwide landslide in 1938 did the Social Democrats manage to break through.

vxo-valdistrikt-1937.png

The Social Democrats, led by the energetic young councillor and former grammar school teacher Georg Lücklig, immediately decided to set about merging the two municipalities, in large part to secure the votes in Östregård, which was by now a heavily lower-middle-class suburb. Aided by the generally favourable attitude of Stockholm to urban boundary reform, they were able to get an order in council confirming this as early as autumn 1939, and on New Year's Day 1940, Växjö Rural Municipality and Östregård council both ceased to exist. As a result, Växjö again saw a big population increase, putting it over the 10,000 mark for the first time ever and requiring it to elect its council in two different constituencies rather than by citywide vote. To implement this, the city's wards were again redrawn, creating a north and a south constituency with equal populations (electing twenty councillors each) and a west and an east ward within each constituency. This was the division that would exist until 1949, when population growth again forced a rewarding, and the constituencies would exist until it was made possible to voluntarily abolish them in the early 60s, at which point Växjö immediately did so.

vxo-valdistrikt-1940.png
 
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Växjö 1942-1962
And here's all the elections going back to the amalgamation of 1940.

There was no off-cycle election held for the unified council, so the 36 councillors representing the original city carried on until the scheduled local elections in 1942 (I dare say Sweden is probably one of few countries in Europe to hold elections in 1942...). As with the 1940 general elections, these saw a mass surge of voters coming out in support of Per Albin Hansson and his wartime leadership, and in Växjö this came to benefit the governing Social Democrats under Georg Lücklig, who won an overall majority of seats - albeit reduced from 1938. The Conservatives did about as well as could be expected under the circumstances, and the amalgamation also had the slightly less expected effect of making Växjö one of very few city municipalities in the country where the Agrarians won representation.

val-1942-vxo.png

Four years later, the Red Army had stormed across Europe and destroyed the fascist menace, and many in the western European labour movements took this as a sign that maybe Communism was the future after all. In Sweden this tendency was tempered a bit by general Russophobia as well as the phenomenally strong position of the Social Democrats in the movement, but there was still a surge in Communist support and a concurrent drop for the Social Democrats all across the country in the 1946 local elections. The Conservatives were losing ground too, tainted by their association with the pro-German strands of the right before and during the war. Instead, the Liberals began a surge that would last about a decade. Both of these factors were on display in Växjö, as the two big parties each lost several seats and the Communists and Liberals gained ground to compensate. The result was a 20-20 deadlock on the council - the right were able to get their man into the council chairmanship, but Lücklig stayed on as head of the all-powerful Finance Committee.

val-1946-vxo.png

1950 saw the Communist wave recede decisively as the Cold War began to set in. The Social Democrats regained all four of the seats they'd lost to the Communists in 1946, but the council remained deadlocked and no change in leadership occurred. The Liberals, for their part, continued to win seats off the Conservatives and knocked the Agrarians off the council altogether.

val-1950-vxo.png

1954 was reported in the local newspapers as another deadlock election, but in fact, the final count revealed that a seat in the southern constituency initially assigned to the Communists was in fact won by the Conservatives, who were thus able to secure 21 seats taken alongside the Liberals (who were now almost as big as them). The two right-wing parties struck a deal whereby the Conservatives kept the council chairmanship while the Liberal MP Erik Strandh took over the Finance Committee.

val-1954-vxo.png

The right won another victory in 1958, with the now-renamed Centre Party returning to the council and the Conservatives regaining some ground from the Liberals. Strandh retired from politics after being defeated in the 1958 snap general election, and was replaced by a fellow Liberal of whom I know nothing whatsoever. A year into the term of this council, Carl Petri retired as council chairman, and was replaced by none other than Georg Lücklig in an upset result, perhaps a sign of things to come.

val-1958-vxo.png

1962 saw a significant change in the electoral map, as the constituencies were becoming unbalanced. Rather than redraw them, the council decided to reapportion them so that 25 councillors were elected in the north and 15 in the south. This had the unexpected result of seeing a Communist elected to the council once again, even as the Social Democrats regained their majority and were able to elect their man to head the Finance Committee. The Liberals, meanwhile, continued to take a drubbing, and the Agrarians began to make inroads beyond the tiny rural population that remained in the city.

val-1962-vxo.png
 
Great work Max. I have plans to do something similar with Doncaster at some point as I've tracked down some of the earlier boundaries and results.
Meanwhile I’m thinking of trying to track down similar information for the nearby cities now. I have a feeling that Jönköping in particular might be very interesting, and of course I haven’t done Karlskrona.
 
Great work Max. I have plans to do something similar with Doncaster at some point as I've tracked down some of the earlier boundaries and results.

Can probably help with boundaries, but results is likely to be the libraries up your end.
 
A new project, inspired by some more old map finds at the archive - in this case, simply the old general economic maps from the early 1950s.

This is an attempt to trace the boundaries of the villages (byar) and basic cadastral units (trakter) that existed at the level below the parishes almost everywhere in the country (except those very old agricultural areas that were sufficiently rich that each village actually had its own church). Because of the extreme scale required, I'm going to limit myself to Kronoberg County for the time being.

The maps I’m working from were drawn around 1950, as mentioned, but the idea is for the map to represent a sort of generic primal state, kind of like those maps of "pre-contact" Native American civilisations that include the Susquehannocks and yet have the Cheyenne in Colorado. As such, the boundaries in Växjö parish are those that existed prior to the 1940 merger, at which point all but a couple of the villages were subsumed into Växjö proper and the properties changed designation to match.

trakter-kronoberg.png
 
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The maps were drawn around 1950, as mentioned, but the idea is for the map to represent a sort of generic primal state, kind of like those maps of "pre-contact" Native American civilisations that include the Susquehannocks and yet have the Cheyenne in Colorado. As such, the boundaries in Växjö parish are those that existed prior to the 1940 merger, at which point all but a couple of the villages were subsumed into Växjö proper and the properties changed designation to match.

*Pfft* Amateur.

No but seriously, fun to see a Swedish equivalent to my big parish project.

Speaking of which...
 
Gårdsby parish was dominated by the eponymous landed estate, on whose grounds the parish church was built. In time, it would come to be dominated by the village of Sandsbro, located in the southwest corner of the parish along the spit between Helgasjön and Toftasjön, which grew into a satellite town for Växjö in the 1980s. But that's far away as of whenever the hell this is, and the municipality was thoroughly rural and conservative throughout its existence. (To be fair, it's not as though Sandsbro votes left-wing even today...)

trakter-kronoberg.png
 
Ares, what kind of population are you dealing with when discussing these parishes? Something on the order of a few hundred to a couple thousand people, or is it even smaller than that? (I'm guessing solely based on the Wikipedia-listed population for modern Växjö, so apologies if I'm way off!)
 
Ares, what kind of population are you dealing with when discussing these parishes? Something on the order of a few hundred to a couple thousand people, or is it even smaller than that? (I'm guessing solely based on the Wikipedia-listed population for modern Växjö, so apologies if I'm way off!)
If we look at 1938 year-end population figures (the last ones to count Växjö city and parish separately), Växjö had 9,954 inhabitants within its boundaries, while the rural municipality had 5,220 (of which 2,048 lived in Östregård), and Gårdsby had 1,242. I'd say around a thousand people is probably a good average, with quite a lot of variance in either direction - the smallest parishes only had a couple of hundred people in them, while ones with industrial towns in them could easily get up to three or four thousand.

Of course, the villages have even more variance below that - the smallest ones you can see on the map above are literally just one or two farms.
 
Los Angeles 1909, 1911 (wards)
I've been playing a fair amount of LA Noire lately, which got me back into their insane local history, and after some googling I found a very good newspaper archive (https://cdnc.ucr.edu/) which included old election precinct maps and results. So with that in hand, I've now drawn up a couple of maps for some of the most dramatic mayoral elections in the city's history, which will hopefully themselves be mapped soon.

1909 (not showing the harbour area, because I can't get the borders down there quite right and also it would make the map too big):

la-valdistrikt-1909.png

1911, after annexing Hollywood and redrawing and renumbering all the precincts:

la-valdistrikt-1911.png

Oh, and the threadmark title "wards" is purely for internal consistency - like a lot of other cities in the American West, LA abolished its council wards a few years before this as an anti-corruption measure, instead requiring all council candidates to campaign across the entire city and thereby theoretically making vote-buying harder.
 
I can really see what you mean about the harbor making the map too big. I haven't looked too much, but where did Alexander's "Good Government" label come from? Los Angeles elections have long since been non-partisan (though that doesn't stop common knowledge stuff).
 
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I can really see what you mean about the harbor making the map too big. I haven't looked too much, but where did Alexander's "Good Government" label come from? Los Angeles elections have long since been non-partisan (though that doesn't stop common knowledge stuff).
I don’t actually know, but the Los Angeles Herald, from which I’m getting basically all the data for this, refers to Alexander and the slate of candidates supporting him as “Good Government” candidates - presumably because of their opposition to the Republican political machine that had run the city for the preceding few decades. It does bear mention that the Herald was very much a pro-Alexander paper, and so it’s quite possible that they’d try to obfuscate his party affiliation to get Republican voters to turn out for him.
 
I can really see what you mean about the harbor making the map too big. I haven't looked too much, but where did Alexander's "Good Government" label come from? Los Angeles elections have long since been non-partisan (though that doesn't stop common knowledge stuff).
Usually in that era a "Good Government " man is so,eone supported by that part of the business elite opposed to the dominant party machine (in this case, the Republican machine)
 
Oh, and the threadmark title "wards" is purely for internal consistency - like a lot of other cities in the American West, LA abolished its council wards a few years before this as an anti-corruption measure, instead requiring all council candidates to campaign across the entire city and thereby theoretically making vote-buying harder.
I am struck again by how it feels like America invented all the parts of proportional representation separately (the formula used for House apportionment, the idea of at-large elections for arguments like these ones, etc.) but never put them together.

I can really see what you mean about the harbor making the map too big.
Los Angeles, twinned with Bristol.
 
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