• Hi Guest!

    The costs of running this forum are covered by Sea Lion Press. If you'd like to help support the company and the forum, visit patreon.com/sealionpress

Max's election maps and assorted others

Denmark 1924
The years following the end of the First World War were not an easy time for Europe, as the major powers reeled from the devastation of war and the new states of Central and Eastern Europe struggled to establish themselves and find a place in the global political and economic order. For a country like Denmark, firmly established as a state and as a nation with its own identity and largely untouched by the war itself, the political side of the post-war crisis was hardly felt - the Folketing elected in September 1920 yielded a relatively stable government and lasted three and a half years - but the economic side reared its head before too long. Denmark's biggest source of economic activity was selling surplus agricultural products to Germany and the UK, and with Germany in an economic tailspin, the Danish economy soon felt the effects. In 1922, Landmandsbanken, the biggest bank in Denmark and an institution that specialised in providing loans to farmers, declared bankruptcy, after which it was revealed that it had been systematically padding its books for years. The Rigsdag was forced to step in and provide a reconstruction plan, and (this is how you can tell it was a hundred years ago) several of the bank's executives were tried and jailed for fraud. Emil Glückstadt, the managing director, was found guilty and sentenced to prison time, but died before the sentence could be carried out.

The Landmandsbanken case marked the beginning of two unstable years for the Neergaard ministry, which only held minorities in either house of the Rigsdag and relied on support from the Conservatives to pass its programme. This turned out to be a big issue in light of the crisis, since the two parties' main ideological disagreement was trade policy. Venstre, being a right-liberal farmers' party, continued to believe in free trade and free markets, while the Conservatives believed tariffs were more necessary than ever to protect the Danish economy from predatory foreign actors. On top of which the krone was suffering heavy inflation (not as heavy as that of the German mark, but still), which would need government action to get back in check. Eventually, after many government crises, Neergaard was able to get his revaluation plan through the Folketing in early 1924, and went to the country immediately thereafter in the hopes of being able to present a strong record in government.

This met with mixed success, to say the least. The country was still in a deep recession, and most voters did not see Venstre as a party that had fought their corner especially hard over the previous four years. On top of this, it was pretty widely recognised that a new Venstre ministry would have to depend on Conservative votes, and that that would mean continued confusion over trade and economic policy. The Conservatives themselves underscored this point by attacking the government for not taking strong enough action to protect Danish businesses, while the opposition happily seized on the disunity to underline their calls for a strong and resolute government that would make all Danes better off. The Social Democrats proposed a plan to fight inflation and the rising deficit by instituting wealth and luxury taxes, which caused some rumblings among their opponents, but overall the party did not seem as radical as it had in the past, and more and more voters saw them as the less bad option.

When the country went to the polls, this was clearly and dramatically reflected. For the first time ever, the Social Democrats received not only the largest voteshare but the largest delegation in the Folketing, taking seven seats from Venstre and giving the lower house a slight left-wing majority for the first time since 1918. Nor would they return to passively supporting a Radical ministry - Zahle was never going to come back within eyesight of the King, and the Social Democrats held a clearly dominant position in a way they hadn't the previous time, so they were able to insist upon their own ministry led by party leader Thorvald Stauning, who had chaired the Copenhagen City Council during the Easter Crisis and was relatively respected by the King despite his working-class origins (he'd originally worked as a cigar sorter before becoming a trade union organiser and then entering party politics). Stauning's ministry made history on its first day by including Nina Bang, the first woman to serve in a parliamentary government anywhere in the world (the first overall being Alexandra Kollontai), as education minister. Of course, the parliamentary situation was essentially the same as before the election, only in reverse, and so it remained to be seen how much of its economic programme the new ministry would be able to get past the Radicals.

Oh, and in September, the Landsting held its first regular election since the 1920 dissolutions. Half of the constituency seats were renewed, but the members elected by the outgoing Landsting in 1920 all remained in place. It didn't yield too many surprises, with slight gains for the Social Democrats but a continued strong right-wing majority.

val-dk-1924.png
 
Nina Bang, the first woman to serve in a parliamentary government anywhere in the world (the first overall being Alexandra Kollontai), as education minister.
Does Countess Markievicz not count because the First Dail didn't have the uncontested consent of its claimed territory, then? Although neither did the Bolsheviks, come to think of it. Or perhaps you're counting the Republic as non-parliamentary because the Dail hardly ever actually met?
 
Does Countess Markievicz not count because the First Dail didn't have the uncontested consent of its claimed territory, then? Although neither did the Bolsheviks, come to think of it. Or perhaps you're counting the Republic as non-parliamentary because the Dail hardly ever actually met?
I don’t know, but my Danish sources are very keen on claiming they were first. Guessing their justification for not counting Markievicz would be that the Republic wasn’t recognised and she resigned when the Treaty came in.
 
Denmark 1926
Although Stauning came to power with high hopes, the fact was he had nowhere near a majority in either chamber of the Rigsdag, and this meant that as the economic troubles that plagued the Neergaard ministry continued, the only available course of action was to seek broad compromise to restore confidence in the economy. In particular, Stauning and his finance minister C. V. Bramsnes were concerned with revaluing the krone, which had sustained heavy inflation since the war, and initially they were successful in this - a broad parliamentary agreement was reached, the krone was revalued, and speculation soared on both Danish goods and the currency itself. However, it turns out sudden deflation is a very, very bad thing for a country as export-dependent as Denmark, and soon unemployment began to rise as businesses found it harder and harder to sell their goods abroad. The Stauning ministry's solution to this was to seek loans abroad and introduce a wealth tax in order to shore up the state's revenue shortfall. However, the Radicals, being largely a party of the educated middle classes, balked at this and voted against the proposals at the last minute, giving Stauning no choice but to go to the King and ask for an early election.

The resulting election campaign was unusually bitter, with the Social Democrats and Radicals (who, remember, had been in a full electoral alliance not ten years before) openly attacking one another and accusing one another of having brought down the "democratic front" - the Radicals believed the Social Democrats were using the crisis as an excuse to opportunistically push their reform agenda, while the Social Democrats believed the Radicals had sold out their alliance and the most progressive government in the country's history to protect their wealthiest supporters. On the opposition side, by contrast, the divisions were less than they had been in 1924. The crisis had convinced some in Venstre that state protections for Danish agriculture were more important than free trade, and that tariffs might not be such a bad idea as a result.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that a new party appeared in response to the agricultural crisis - the wonderfully-named Danmarks Retsforbund, which I'm choosing to render literally as the Justice League of Denmark (even if English-language sources usually call it the Justice Party). This was a single-issue party that campaigned for the introduction of a Georgist economic model, with a single tax on land value to replace all existing taxes, a policy that turned out to be quite popular among smallholders and tenant farmers who believed it would leave them paying a smaller share of overall taxes than the existing model. They'd actually stood for the first time in 1924, but failed to win any seats then - in 1926 they managed to get two of them, both in Jutland.

The election result was almost identical to 1924 in terms of votes - the Radicals lost a bit and the Conservatives gained a bit, but Venstre got exactly 28.27% of the vote in both elections, and the Social Democrats moved only about half a percentage point. However, quirks of the electoral law (specifically the fact that Venstre had never rated levelling seats in any election since that system's introduction, and they gained constituency seats this time) meant that Venstre still got a net gain of two seats, while the Social Democrats lost two (despite gaining a small amount in the popular vote) and the Radicals four. This was enough to tip the balance in the Folketing, and Venstre were able to form another minority government under Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, who'd been minister for agriculture under Neergaard.

val-dk-1926.png
 
Last edited:
Vienna U-Bahn part 1
Okay, I will get back to Denmark at some point, but in the meantime, I've been travelling Europe and I've found a few things that I wanted to map. First off, while I was in Vienna I learned a fair bit about their troubled history, and in particular that of their public transport network. What makes it strange as major cities go is that it hit its peak population over a hundred years ago and still hasn't exceeded that figure - it was the capital of one of the great empires of Europe (albeit one in terminal decline), but the First World War cut it off from its hinterland, cutting its growth short, and the Second World War severely damaged it, causing a drop in population that it's only really started recovering from after the 1990s.

Of course, no one saw this coming before 1914. From about the mid-19th century, when the city's inner walls were torn down and railways began to be built connecting it to all corners of the Habsburg empire, Vienna saw constant explosive growth. From around half a million inhabitants in 1850, by 1900 it had 1.8 million, and it would reach well over two million before the outbreak of war in 1914. This was a pattern shared by many other European cities, and as with all of them, Vienna struggled to accommodate its new arrivals. Until this point, Vienna had been quite geographically compact, made up of the inner city (the area inside the old walls) and a set of eight Vorstädte (inner suburbs) which were in turn surrounded by the Linienwall, an old fortification that had been turned to serving as a toll barrier for people and goods entering the city. The toll was abolished sometime in the mid-19th century, however (I can't figure out exactly when), and some of the land of the Linienwall was used for railway terminals. Finally, in 1890, the decision was taken to tear down what remained of the Linienwall and annex the villages immediately outside it into the city to make way for future construction.

This presented a problem, however. The new Vororte (outer suburbs) were too far from the city centre to make walking to and from work feasible for its residents, and the city's network of horse trams was already under heavy strain. A new solution was needed, and ideally one that could simultaneously solve another problem Vienna had in common with most other European capitals: its rail network was split between several terminus stations, none of which had track connections to one another. The Austrian government, and the military in particular, wanted rail connections built through the city so that people and goods could more easily be shipped from one end of the empire to another. Already in 1882, an answer to both these problems had been found by Berlin, which built an elevated railway called the Stadtbahn across the city from west to east. Vienna's city fathers found this a good example, and in 1892 the city council approved the construction of a Stadtbahn for Vienna. After a series of technical and financial challenges during construction, the grand opening was finally held in 1898, and the initial network was completed in 1901.

wien-stadtbahn.png

The reason I'm not translating the word Stadtbahn, btw, is that it's genuinely hard to describe what exactly the Wiener Stadtbahn was when it opened. It's been called one of Europe's first metros, but as mentioned, one of the reasons it was built was to connect the railway termini, and so its lines were connected to mainline railways and used by goods, post and troop trains on a regular basis. In addition, even the local trains that served the Stadtbahn itself were steam-powered, and many of them crossed onto the mainline rail network to take in additional suburban stations. The only such lines that were considered part of the Stadtbahn proper were that between Hauptzollamt and Praterstern, which connected the network to the Nordbahnhof, and the segment of the Westbahn between Penzing and Hütteldorf, which connected the Stadtbahn's Vorortelinie, the westernmost and most technically demanding line of the network, with the rest of the network in the southwest.

There was also the issue that the Stadtbahn was, well, just not very useful for the local population. Trains were slow, infrequent, unreliable and - as a result of using steam power while running partly underground, especially in the inner city - unpleasant to use. On top of which, the originally-planned network had been pared down significantly, with segments and stations of limited strategic importance removed, but many of those segments were ones that would have been vitally important for passenger service. Local wits dubbed it the Um-die-Stadt-Bahn ("around-the-city railway"), and the population largely shunned it. Instead, the electric tramway opened at about the same time became the backbone of the city's public transport system, and would remain so for the next several decades. But as with the horse trams before them, the electric trams were unfit to handle the passenger volumes of a city the size of Vienna, and so it wasn't long after the opening of the Stadtbahn before yet more plans began to be drawn up.

In 1911, the city council again decided to approve the construction of a new rail network, this time a separated underground system inspired by the Paris Metro. This was intended to have three lines, at least to begin with: the first would cross the inner city in a north-south direction, then turning west to serve Mariahilf, the Westbahnhof and the Schmelz, a former military exercise ground now slated for construction, before terminating at Ottakring on the Vorortelinie. The second line would add an east-west crossing, then split in two to follow both Alser Straße and Währinger Straße to their respective Stadtbahn stations, and in the latter case on to Gersthof in the northwest. The third line, finally, would follow the Ring around the west side of the inner city (complementing the Stadtbahn in the east) and then head south to serve Wieden and Favoriten. All three lines were planned with future extensions in mind.

Construction on the first line of the Elektrische Schnellbahn, as it was dubbed, was slated to begin in autumn of 1914.

wien-ubahn-1914.png

We know what happened next, of course. The empire that lent its glory and power to Vienna collapsed into a heap of military failure and ethnic conflict. The Habsburgs were expelled from the country without ceremony or pardon, and it was all the new Austrian state could do to save itself from bankruptcy, let alone fund large infrastructure projects. Even the Stadtbahn had been closed down in 1918 owing to chronic coal shortages. One of the few institutions that retained any agency whatsoever in this new environment was the city of Vienna, run since 1919 by the Social Democratic Workers' Party, which set about doing what it could to improve the transport situation. In 1923, seizing on a plan proposed multiple times before the war, the city council voted to buy the bulk of the Stadtbahn (the segments coloured darker on the maps) and electrify it, reserving it for local traffic. The Wiener Elektrische Stadtbahn (WESt) was opened on 3 June 1925, and while it was still not as useful as some would've liked, it now ran three times as frequently as it had before the war and both trains and stations were free from coal smoke. The WESt remained in service under that name until 1989, and most of its length and all of its stations are today integrated into the U-Bahn. Line U6, which follows the old WESt alignment along the Gürtel, still uses overhead power wires and tram-like rolling stock just as it did before the conversion.
 
Vienna U-Bahn part 2
The interwar period was... certainly a fun time to be Viennese. When we left off, the Social Democrats had taken power and used their mandate to raise taxes on various luxury goods, which were then in turn used to fund social projects, the most prominent of which was their mass social housing programme. These projects were opposed by the national government, but Vienna was now a state in its own right, and the new constitution left precious little space for the national government to interfere in state affairs. That changed in 1933, when the entire presidium of the National Council resigned at once and Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß used this as an excuse to declare the parliament "self-abolished", dissolve it and rule by decree. Over the next year or so, he would consolidate his rule into a proper dictatorship, merging the parties that supported his government into a new movement called the "Patriotic Front", which was consciously modelled on the Italian Fascist Party and similar movements across Europe. After a brief uprising of leftist paramilitaries in February 1934, the power of the Social Democrats over Vienna was broken, Mayor Karl Seitz removed from office and a new administration loyal to Dollfuß installed.

Part of the new "Austrofascist" regime's efforts to consolidate its power was a mass purge of the tramway staff, who were among the most solid supporters of "Red Vienna" and thus regarded as a potential focus of resistance to the new order. Weirdly enough, this meant that, when the Austrofascist regime fell and the Nazis took over in 1938, part of their effort to consolidate their power was to rehire all those socialist tram workers - sometimes the false and slanderous line that the Nazis were socialists accidentally gets corroborated by real-life historical events. This was probably not entirely politically motivated, however - that was part of it, but also the Nazis were very big on urban expansion - generally and for Vienna specifically. Very shortly after annexing Austria, they promulgated a series of laws that expanded the municipality of Vienna enormously, bringing it to nearly five times its earlier surface area and adding some 200,000 people to its population. They planned to expand the actual city to match, and that included improving its urban transport system. Which, in turn, meant that the old plans for an underground railway were dusted off and updated.

The plan eventually presented by Siemens in spring 1939 was fairly similar to the pre-war plan - the three lines had essentially the same layout in the inner city, although their alignments were straightened out considerably to allow higher speeds. In the suburbs, however, the network was a lot bigger. The Nazis were generally not too set on realism or achievability, and this was no exception - the 1939 U-Bahn plan included lines to suburbs that are either currently set to receive U-Bahn service sometime around the early 2030s (Hernals) or that have never been included in current extension plans at all (Gersthof, Lainz and Mauer). The first line scheduled to be built was the one between Mauer and Engerthstraße, which is thus labelled Line 1 on here (just like its 1914 equivalent). As with the previous time, their timing was absolutely impeccable - construction was set to start in August 1939.

wien-ubahn-1939.png

Oh, and unlike the 1914 map I had, this one didn't have stations on it, so most of them are conjectural. Take it all with a grain of salt.
 
Reichstagswahl 1920
With thanks to @Makemakean and apologies to @Erinthecute, here's the first of what will hopefully be a few more maps of Weimar-era elections. Thankfully, because I've already posted some simpler ones to the DA, that means I can just copy-paste the writeups from those ones for a little while, so here goes.

One of the first things the National Assembly did after convening in Weimar in February 1919 was set up a temporary republican government with itself as the legislative branch and a Reichspräsident (president) heading the executive. The Weimar Coalition parties, who held a solid majority in the Assembly, nominated Friedrich Ebert (SPD), the incumbent chancellor and President of the Council of People's Deputies. The only candidate against him was Count von Posadowsky-Wehner (DNVP), Interior Minister around the turn of the century, against whom Ebert won a crushing 73-12 majority of the Assembly delegates. Taking office on the 11th, Ebert appointed a cabinet two days later, made up of the Weimar Coalition parties and headed by Philipp Scheidemann (SPD). To liaise with the republican state governments being formed around Germany, a Staatenausschuss (states' committee) was also created, and this came to include representatives from all the German states as well as the fledgling Republic of German-Austria, where opinion favoured a union with Germany now that the Habsburgs weren't a factor anymore.

With the business of creating a national authority over with, the Assembly turned to its two most important tasks: making peace with the Allies and drawing up a constitution for Germany. The former proved both extremely easy and extremely difficult, as the peace negotiations started in January included only the five principal Allied powers, who came to an agreement among themselves and then presented Germany with finalised terms to either sign or face a resumption of war. The terms were harsh: Germany would abandon its wartime gains in the East (most of which had already slipped away), give up an additional ten percent of its territory and seven million citizens, desist from any attempt to unite with Austria, surrender all its colonies to the disposal of the League of Nations, reduce its army to 100,000 personnel and its navy to a fraction of its former size, pay a staggeringly enormous indemnity, and accept sole responsibility for causing the war. To ensure compliance, the Allies reserved the right to occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years, and German troops would not be allowed west of a line running 50km east of the Rhine.

The terms caused an uproar in Germany from the moment it became public. The territorial losses, while painful, had been expected, and stung less than the indemnity, the war guilt clause and the fact that Germany itself hadn't been party to the negotiations. The Foreign Minister tried to call for a peace based on the Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted during the armistice, but none of the Allies were interested in negotiating. Philipp Scheidemann resigned as Minister-President rather than having to endorse the treaty. Ebert was as opposed to it as Scheidemann, but as ever, took a more cautious line. He sent a note to Paul von Hindenburg, who was still in overall command of the Army, asking if the Army could possibly hold its own if the war were restarted. When Hindenburg said no, Ebert decided he had no choice but to push for ratification. The Assembly approved the treaty by a two-thirds majority, and it was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on the 28th of June, the fifth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. The war was over.

The Assembly was nearly done with its new constitution at this point. Rather than a pure presidential system like the American one or a pure parliamentary republic like the French one, the delegates opted to draw up a system that would mix elements of both. The result was something oddly similar to the Kaiserreich that came before it. The President (Reichspräsident), elected to a seven-year-term by popular vote, would appoint and dismiss the cabinet. The Chancellor (Reichskanzler) would preside over the cabinet, but had less authority over the individual ministers than was the case under the Empire. The cabinet would stand and fall as a unit, but it became common for ministers to serve in their positions over multiple cabinets.

The legislature would consist of the Reichsrat, appointed by the states and the provinces of Prussia and serving only an advisory function, and the much more powerful Reichstag. The Reichstag would be elected from largely the same constituencies as the National Assembly, but instead of apportioning seats directly to the constituencies, the "Weimar Constitution" established a system where a constituency list would get one seat for every 60,000 votes. Surpluses of more than 30,000 votes at the constituency level would be moved up to something called a Wahlkreisverband, a union of two or three constituencies (typically), where the same calculation would be made, then surpluses of more than 30,000 from that level would be moved to national level and the process repeated. The upshot was that the Reichstag was elected in a highly proportional way, but an extremely opaque one that also caused the number of members elected to fluctuate with turnout. In the eight elections held under the Weimar Constitution, the Reichstag would have anywhere between 463 and 608 members.

Contrary to the wishes of some Assembly delegates, the Weimar Constitution maintained the principle of federalism. The state governments that had formed would be recognised and given powers under the Constitution, and the boundaries, based on lines of princely ownership that no longer held significance, were largely maintained. In addition, Prussia functioned as a federation within the federation, with its provinces given broad powers of their own and the Prussian state legislature operating as a miniature of the national one with a Staatsrat appointed by the provinces.

The most ominous part of the Weimar Constitution, though, was Article 48, which dealt with emergency powers. It provided for the suspension of state governments that failed to exercise their obligations to the nation, and gave the President authority to suspend civil rights and govern by decree if "public security and order" (die öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung) were threatened. This would become the instrument for both Hindenburg's suspension of parliamentarism in 1930 and, of course, the establishment of Hitler's dictatorship in 1933.

For now though, the organs of state were in the hands of sober, responsible social democrats, committed republicans, who would only use their powers in good faith to defend the republic, never to subvert it. Well, except for that whole bit where they'd already conspired with the armed forces to suppress left-wing dissent and strike down their own people. Not everyone in the SPD was happy with this, and over the course of 1919 and early 1920 a large number of members and supporters moved over to the more left-leaning Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD).

It wasn't just the left that grew restive. On the 13th of March, 1920, Berlin was the scene of a military coup, as a reactionary Freikorps brigade tried to overthrow the republic by force. The coup had been masterminded by General Walther von Lüttwitz, commander of the Army units in and around the capital, and civil servant Wolfgang Kapp - as a result, it is known to history either as the Kapp Putsch or the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch. The government had to flee to Dresden to avoid detention by the coupmakers, but the victory of German nationalism and tradition over the weak socialist traitors was not to be, as the army and civil service failed to defect and the coup was crushed in a hundred hours.

The response from the left was a general strike in support of the republic, which turned into an armed uprising when communists in the Ruhr region decided they'd rather use the opportunity to launch the true workers' democracy they'd been deprived of by the treacherous SPD the year before. The result was about the same as it had been the year before: the uprising was brutally crushed, with around a thousand militants killed in the fighting or through summary executions, and the government's dependency on the Freikorps to keep order was deepened right after the Freikorps had shown their true colours. Times were not great for the Weimar Coalition, though at least the immediate crises were all over.

The first national elections under the Weimar Constitution took place on the 6th of June, 1920, thirteen weeks after the Kapp Putsch and nine weeks after the end of the Ruhr uprising. Turnout was just about 80% in spite of everything - lower than in 1919, but not by much. The result was a massacre for the Weimar Coalition. The Centre, supported by its devout Catholic rural electorate, maintained most of its votes, but both the SPD and DDP were cut in half. The USPD won eighteen percent, making it the second-largest party, and the DVP and DNVP, both anti-republican at this time, made corresponding strides.

The Weimar Coalition parties had gone from a three-quarters majority in the National Assembly to just over forty percent in the first Reichstag. They would never regain their majority at any point in the republic's history.

EDIT: The borders in Saxony have been updated (still guesswork in places though, all I had was the towns above 2.000 people in each constituency) and a few details shifted around to make the key line up with the maps still to come.

val-de-1920-ny.png
 
Last edited:
With thanks to @Makemakean and apologies to @Erinthecute, here's the first of what will hopefully be a few more maps of Weimar-era elections. Thankfully, because I've already posted some simpler ones to the DA, that means I can just copy-paste the writeups from those ones for a little while, so here goes.
Don't apologise for anything! I'm excited for this.
 
I do have one question, though, you do have some yellow up in Oldenburg, and some yellow down by Karlsruhe and Basel, yet in the relative majority legend, those are not indicated. What's up with that?
 
I do have one question, though, you do have some yellow up in Oldenburg, and some yellow down by Karlsruhe and Basel, yet in the relative majority legend, those are not indicated. What's up with that?
Oh dear, that is an oversight. That’s the DDP, of course, and I can’t believe I left them off the key and yet remembered to add the Polenpartei.
 
Must admit that it is first when looking at this map that I learned that apparently the USPD and the KPD actually coexisted for a period of time. I always just assumed that the KPD first emerged on the scene after the USPD had dissolved, but apparently, they existed all the way up until 1931, and the KPD was founded as early as December 1918, which baffled me, since I had always assumed that they had been founded by people who left the SPD out of anger that the SPD did not join Lenin's Third International.

On the topic of these parties in the early Weimar era Germany, I actually just found out the other year that Albert Einstein had, to some limited extent, been a founding member of the DDP, though from what I can tell, he never appeared to have been an active member of the party, which made me raise an eyebrow, since I had always assumed that he had been pretty much consistently a socialist. The only reason I found out about this was because I went down a weird rabbit hole about dialectical materialism and some really strange conspiracy theories about "bourgeois physics" that I would like to spare you people from.

Emmy Noether of course was a very firm and active supporter of the USPD in those days, and while I do not know if she ever actually joined the KPD, I do know that both her and her brother ended up becoming great admirers of Joseph Stalin, so much so that her brother emigrated to the Soviet Union, only to discover that that place wasn't precisely the promised land for the Jews. He was arrested during the Great Purge and after four years in a labour camp was executed in 1941.

Max Planck was of course a member of the DVP, and throughout his life espoused very conservative views, though interestingly, he never became an antisemite or a supporter of the Nazis. He was in fact so much of a conservative that he blamed the rise of Nazism on democracy itself, and felt that all of Germany's problems could be traced back to them abandoning good old Bismarckian principles.
 
South Australia 1956
Heave away, haul away...

South Australia is the least populous mainland state of Australia, with some 1.8 million inhabitants as of 2021. Much like neighbouring Western Australia, a lot of that is concentrated in the state capital, Adelaide, which is home to just over three-quarters of the state's population, or 1.4 million people. Adelaide is one of the oldest cities in Australia, and having been incorporated in 1840, the Corporation of the City of Adelaide is its very oldest local government body, predating Sydney by two years. Typically for Australia, the boundaries of the city proper are the same now as they were then, which means that technically speaking, only about 25,000 people live in Adelaide itself with the remainder in suburban municipalities. Adelaide's city centre is laid out in a grid with wide streets and large green squares, likely inspired by cities like Philadelphia and Savannah, and surrounded by a ring of parks that form a physical barrier between it and the suburbs, which is likely part of why the city proper has never expanded. The city is a few miles inland, and the creatively-named harbour suburb of Port Adelaide and the corridor connecting it to the city was and is one of the most heavily industrialised urban areas in Australia, being home to the main Holden factory until 2017, as well as industries ranging from the ASC shipyard to Coopers brewery to a significant chunk of News Corp (which was founded there).

The remainder of the state is, as mentioned, fairly sparsely populated, but it's nevertheless unique as it's the only Australian state never to have been a penal colony. Instead, it was founded as a settler colony by high-minded British gentry who wanted to build an ideal society away from the overcrowding and pollution of England (stop me if you've heard this one before - and yes, of course there were already people living there). The need to attract settlers through means other than penal transportation meant the state became quite ethnically diverse from early on, with a particularly large contingent of Germans - this also meant a strong cultural backlash during World War I, when a huge number of towns and streets across the state changed names to avoid association with "enemy cultures". Due to this different settlement pattern, South Australia is also the only Australian state to have something approaching a regional accent, although it's quite faint compared to the differences you get in virtually any other English-speaking country.

So I've completely lost the plot here... ah yes, elections. As mentioned (or at least strongly hinted), South Australia was intended as a sort of yeoman farmer's paradise, and even though it was clear from very early on that Adelaide was going to be dominant in population terms (as early as 1851, the city held a quarter of the colony's inhabitants, and the surrounding County of Adelaide nearly half of them), the fathers of the colony made sure that the rural interest would always be more than adequately represented. Thus, its first constitution (enacted in 1856) called for no more than a third of the representatives in the House of Assembly to be elected from the capital. Even as the province-then-state enacted some very radical reforms, including giving women the vote as early as 1895, this disparity remained in force. In fact, it would be reinforced over time.

As with the country at large, South Australia saw a political realignment during the Great Depression, as the Labor Party (in government in the state as well as federally) was wracked by infighting over how to deal with the crisis while their opponents slowly began to unite against them. This went even further in South Australia than it did nationally, as all non-Labor forces formed a coalition dubbed the "Emergency Committee" and swept the state in the 1931 federal election, winning all seats except intensely working-class Hindmarsh. This success encouraged the two main right-wing parties, the Liberal Federation and the Country Party, to begin negotiating an all-out merger, which was achieved just in time to win a landslide in the 1933 state election. The newly-christened Liberal and Country League would be led by former Liberal leader Richard L. Butler, whose Gawler origins put him right on the border between Adelaide and the country, and the Country Party were able to secure a number of concessions from the party they were effectively joining. Most infamously, this included the re-entrenchment of the 2:1 rule in the new 1934 constitution, which also changed the electoral system from the old multi-member constituencies to single-member preferential voting. Of the 39 constituencies drawn up for the 1938 election, 13 were in Adelaide and 26 were country seats. This ratio was maintained when the seats were redrawn in 1956, even though the census that redistribution was based on showed that some 60% of the state (484,000 out of 797,000) lived in the capital. This created a farcical situation where the seats were drawn somewhat equitably within each division and followed quota pretty well, only the quota was about 23,000 for an Adelaide seat and 6,500 for a country one.

Even though Butler was responsible for implementing it, this system has become known to history as the "Playmander", after his successor, Thomas Playford IV (the numeral distinguishes him from his grandfather, who served as Premier in the 19th century). This is somewhat understandable, since even though it wasn't his creation, Playford was able to use the unequal electoral map to remain in office for a staggering twenty-seven years. He first came to power in 1938, when Butler used the death of a South Australian MP as an excuse to move into federal politics (he would, incidentally, lose the by-election in an upset, a sign of the right's impending troubles at the federal level), and even though he was initially chosen as a compromise candidate, he didn't leave office until 1965. There were basically three reasons for this: firstly, the state enjoyed a long period of explosive economic growth, as Adelaide became home to all those industries mentioned earlier and extractive and defence industries sprung up around the rural parts of the state. Secondly, as is so often the case in small polities, the world of Adelaide politics was quite chummy, and Playford, very much the pragmatic developmentalist type, was often on better terms with the Labor opposition than he was with his own backbenches. (In)famously, Mick O'Halloran, who led the Labor Party for most of the 1950s, dined at Playford's house once a week, and once said Playford did a better job serving Labor's constituents than he himself ever could.

The third factor, then, was the Playmander. But while it did very clearly disadvantage Labor, it wasn't as devastating as one might expect. Rural South Australia had quite a few industrial towns (especially around the Spencer Gulf in the "north" of the state) whose workers were staunch Labor voters, and the LCL were often challenged in the agricultural belt by various independents. The LCL never held more than 23 seats in the lower house all through Playford's tenure, which made him quite vulnerable to backbench revolts, and from 1950 onwards they'd either hold steady or lose seats at every election. Of course, this was not only in spite of Labor frequently winning the two-party-preferred vote (as far as we can tell, anyway), but also just seemed to have nothing to do with the popular vote in general. In 1953, even as Labor won 53% of the 2PP vote, the LCL won 21 seats to their 14 (and four independents), and in 1956, this balance was essentially unchanged (Labor won one seat from an independent, and that was it) even as the LCL went back to a slim 2PP majority. The insidiousness of the Playmander was less in the fact that it delivered artificial LCL majorities (although, as mentioned, it did do that quite frequently), and more in how it did it - by making sure a few thousand rural voters held more influence over election results than the bulk of the state's population, and thus detaching state politics from the concerns of the majority.

Although perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty, there is a factor that makes comparing popular vote totals from one election to another quite hard: unopposed returns. In 1956, a whopping sixteen seats in the lower house were uncontested, and while this was higher than any other election during the Playford era, it wasn't much higher. There were another several seats where only minor parties opposed the incumbent, which brings us to the likely reason why the Labor vote fell between 1953 and 1956: the 1955 party split. This was a lot less dramatic in South Australia than elsewhere, as AFAIK no incumbent politicians joined what was then "Anti-Communist" Labor (later the DLP), but they did stand a few candidates, largely in working-class Adelaide seats, which brought down the Labor vote slightly in those areas. Not that it really mattered, because there were only three seats in the entire state where any redistribution happened. Only one of those - the rural seat of Chaffey - changed hands as a result.

val-au-sa-1956.png
 
Seeing there was some experimentation with both AV and STV in British Columbia and Alberta in the first half of the twentieth century, but in both cases, it ended up being abolished (in both cases by a near absolutely dominant Social Credit Party), I am a bit curious as to why both AV and STV have managed to stick around in Australia for as long as it has even in states where there were actual two party systems. I can to a certain extent understand why both the Liberals and the Nationals were worried about upsetting the other on the federal level, but as to why Labor, despite being against the introduction of AV in 1918, has never seriously tried to get rid off it baffles me.

I suppose there's also a fair question as to why state parties in Australia have a much stronger connection to their federal counterparts than what we see in Canada. While in Canada, the state parties started out as being "the local chapter of the federal party", only to then diverge drastically (you'd almost be surprised to learn that once upon a time the BC Liberals and the Québecois Libéraux were really part of the same party), in Australia it seems to have gone in the opposite direction, with the state parties originally being much more independent of their federal counterparts, only gradually (and in some cases very painfully) becoming more and more centralized.

I suppose that if I were to guess, it has something to do with the Canadian provinces being much more diverse in relation to one another (culturally and economically) than the Australian states are. Thus, if a party focuses on trying to win the vote of farmers or the vote of workers, that's going to cause a problem in the long run in Canada, since the interests of a farmer or worker in Alberta might well differ substantially from those of a farmer or worker in Quebec, in Australia, where the interests of a farmer or a worker in Queensland are virtually the same as those of a farmer or worker in New South Wales, things will be different.
 
(you'd almost be surprised to learn that once upon a time the BC Liberals and the Québecois Libéraux were really part of the same party)
That’s not a great example though, seeing as how both are essentially centre-right parties with no real ideology except graft (and federalism, in the latter case).
 
I was wondering if you'd end up diving into the Playmander! It's not unheard of for the party that wins the 2P vote to lose the election--that particular curse would bite the Liberals in the 2010 and 2014 elections in SA--but it's the structural nature of the imbalance that made the Playmander era so utterly insidious. Great map, and great writeup!

Glad to see someone else appreciating how bonkers SA politics can be. :D
 
Italy 1919 (new)
I've finally gotten around to a project I've had lying around for a very long time - updating the 1919 Italian map to incorporate majority shading calculated from the ISTAT documents uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. I've also shifted the colour scheme around a bit, mainly to make the liberal bloc's map colours more closely match their little mans (and also accurately reflect how chaotic it was). I have the 1913 results available as well (and, I suspect, even older ones), but for obvious reasons, those are going to be harder to do.

dbl672n-2f7bdde6-51b3-4de2-88b7-60059ae0185a.png
 
Back
Top