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Max's election maps and assorted others

One thing I hadn't realised till I read about Punch's campaigns was that pubs, on the other hand, were always open on Sundays. Punch's argument was that, as Sunday was for many working people their only day off, excessive Sabbatarianism was being used as an excuse to keep the working classes down - because they could get drunk but they couldn't go to the museum or the theatre to get more educated etc.

Of course, they were talking mostly about moralising establishment hypocrites in Parliament here, not the ordinary Methodists who would usually be pro-temperance as well so certainly wouldn't be happy the pubs were open.
 
One thing I hadn't realised till I read about Punch's campaigns was that pubs, on the other hand, were always open on Sundays. Punch's argument was that, as Sunday was for many working people their only day off, excessive Sabbatarianism was being used as an excuse to keep the working classes down - because they could get drunk but they couldn't go to the museum or the theatre to get more educated etc.

Of course, they were talking mostly about moralising establishment hypocrites in Parliament here, not the ordinary Methodists who would usually be pro-temperance as well so certainly wouldn't be happy the pubs were open.

Only reason I really made Sønderheim into an excessive prohibitionist was because he's meant to be a thematic Scandinavian parallel to Britain's Gladstone and Canada's Laurier, and the former was very much in favour of moderation in drinking. So I basically just took Gladstone's moralizing tendencies and turned them up to eleven.

In fairness, Gladstone was on the topic of alcohol fairly moderate. He drank himself, having a sherry and beaten egg when he delivered the budget in the House of Commons, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell recounts a time in his youth when Gladstone had him over for dinner and they had port wine. What Gladstone did think was that there was a problem with widespread drunkenness among working class people in Britain, and he much admired the nudging policies prevalent in Scandinavia at the time, speaking fondly (for instance) of a Swedish law which mandated that public houses having to offer food if they wanted to have permission to offer alcohol.

So, well, it was purely by accident that it turned out that there was a massive pro-temperance movement among the very people that Sønderheim is taken from in OTL.

But it is interesting how much thought and interest was spent on the problem of working class drinking in Victorian times. I think it was you @Thande who linked to this story written in the 1860s, where a person is sent one hundred years into the future, and he meets some bloke who proudly says that the working class no longer drinks, because they have all en masse decided that alcohol was their great stumbling block that prevented them from a good life, and now they want education and culture instead.
 
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norge-kommunereform.png

So Norway is having local elections this September, but with a twist. The Høyre-FrP government in power since 2013 has made "readjustment" (omstilling) its main priority, ostensibly seeking to make the public sector more capable of withstanding the economic hit it's going to take over the coming decades as oil extraction is wound down (and in practice, using this as a fig leaf to push through austerity and neoliberal structural reform in a time of economic expansion). One of the signature measures being municipal reform, which they decided to implement more gradually than Sweden or Denmark and allowing municipalities to have their say in which way the mergers go. This was... optimistic. Starting out with high-flying goals of going down to about a hundred councils and abolishing the counties altogether, stiff local opposition has forced them to back down again and again. By 2015, not one merger had taken place, and four had taken place in time to hold half-term elections in 2017 (three of them in Vestfold, a traditional Høyre stronghold).

Well, by 2019 the pace has picked up, and the 422 municipalities that existed in 2015 are being brought down to 356. It continues to mainly be right-wing councils that are getting with the programme, and the mergers have disproportionately taken hold along the coast and in the regions surrounding Oslo. However, the merger of the counties into larger regions has gone ahead without (much of) a hitch, and the 18 county councils elected in 2015 will be brought down to 10:
- Viken, consisting of Østfold, Akershus and Buskerud plus Svelvik in Vestfold (to be merged into Drammen), Jevnaker and Lunner in Oppland. Capital in Oslo (county municipality) and Moss (governor).
- Innlandet, consisting of Oppland (minus Jevnaker and Lunner) and Hedmark. Capital in Lillehammer (AFAICT).
- Vestfold og Telemark, consisting of (drumrolls please) Vestfold and Telemark, minus Svelvik. Capital in Skien (county municipality) and Tønsberg (governor).
- Agder, consisting of Vest-Agder and Aust-Agder. The governorship of the two counties has been a shared office since 2016. Capital in Kristiansand.
- Rogaland (unchanged). Capital in Stavanger.
- Vestlandet, consisting of Hordaland and Sogn og Fjordane, minus Hornindal (to be merged into Volda). Capital in Bergen.
- Møre og Romsdal, minus Halsa (to be merged with Hemne) and plus Hornindal. Capital in Molde.
- Trøndelag, which actually already exists as Nord-Trøndelag and Sør-Trøndelag merged in 2018. Capital in Trondheim.
- Nordland, minus Tjeldsund (set to merge with Skånland). Capital in Bodø.
- Troms og Finnmark, consisting of (again, fairly obvious) Troms and Finnmark, plus Tjeldsund. Capital in Tromsø.
Oslo retains its status as a county and municipality, with its single council exercising both levels of authority.

Suffice it to say that some of these mergers - on both levels - make more sense than others.
 
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SBF 2019
Civil society elections!

sbf-2019.png

This is the vote distribution at the AGM of the Southern Motorsport Association, one of twelve districts of the Swedish Motorsport Association (Svenska Bilsportförbundet, abbreviated SBF or Svensk Bilsport - not to be confused with Bilsport magazine, of course). Every affiliated club gets one base vote and one additional vote for every 100 members.

...no, I don't know why I felt the need to do this either.
 
Civil society elections!

View attachment 9021

This is the vote distribution at the AGM of the Southern Motorsport Association, one of twelve districts of the Swedish Motorsport Association (Svenska Bilsportförbundet, abbreviated SBF or Svensk Bilsport - not to be confused with Bilsport magazine, of course). Every affiliated club gets one base vote and one additional vote for every 100 members.

...no, I don't know why I felt the need to do this either.

Are there separate parties for these too?
 
Are there separate parties for these too?
Not that I know of. In most sports clubs and so on, especially in small towns, the board would be more or less the same people who run the local Social Democratic party branch, but for obvious demographic reasons I think this is less true for automotive clubs.
 
Not that I know of. In most sports clubs and so on, especially in small towns, the board would be more or less the same people who run the local Social Democratic party branch, but for obvious demographic reasons I think this is less true for automotive clubs.

I was kind of hoping for a unanimous victory for the Motoring Enthusiasts Party.

Private elections are always interesting. My boss got his ballot for the Seattle Tennis Club board election recently, and it included an apology that there were more candidates than seats this year - apparently they usually discourage contested elections to reduce strife in the club. Big lol.
 
Private elections are always interesting. My boss got his ballot for the Seattle Tennis Club board election recently, and it included an apology that there were more candidates than seats this year - apparently they usually discourage contested elections to reduce strife in the club. Big lol.
How very Swedish of them. I expect the SBK will confirm the nominating committee's choices and divide the rest of the day between arguing over spending motions and trading old stories over coffee and biscuits, if they're anything like normal.
 
Estonia 2019
@Ares96 I think the constituency of Tartu city's shape is wrong, it reflects the old municipal boundaries prior to the reform of 2017.

You can find the seat distribution here: https://rk2019.valimised.ee/en/election-result/acquired-mandates.html Although it'll take some work to place them in the correct place.
Managed it. Also corrected the county boundaries where those changed as a result of the reform - I tracked Pärnu and Rapla on the old map, but not the rest of them.

Estonia 2019
val-ee-2019.png
 
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When Germany overthrew its monarchs in 1918, republics, free-states and people's states were proclaimed in the various former kingdoms, duchies and principalities, each one with slightly different titles and forms of government and wildly different sizes, from the 38 million souls inhabiting the Free State of Prussia to the 50,000 or so each in the Free States of Waldeck and Schaumburg-Lippe. With the monarchs gone, the reason for these disparities was no longer there, and many felt the territory of the Reich should be reorganised to better cope with the new republican reality.

One man who thought so was Hugo Preuß, the left-liberal politician who was tasked by the National Assembly with drafting the new republican constitution. The original draft submitted by Preuß suggested reorganising the states into fourteen new units, pictured below.

deutschland-preuss.png

- The Free City of Berlin (Freie Stadt Berlin), covering Berlin in its 1920 (Greater Berlin Act) boundaries. Capital: Berlin (obviously)
- The Free State of Brandenburg (Freistaat Brandenburg), covering the Prussian provinces of Mark Brandenburg and Pomerania, the Landkreise Jerichow-II, Gardelegen, Osterburg, Salzwedel and Stendal from the Province of Saxony as well as the states of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Capital: also Berlin
- The Free State of Prussia (Freistaat Preußen), reduced to the parts of the provinces of East and West Prussia still in German hands - this gave it a big exclave in the west, but the peace settlement wasn't finished when the proposal was made, and it's not unlikely that Preuß imagined the Polish Corridor would either stay German or return to Germany. Capital: Königsberg
- The Free State of Silesia (Freistaat Schlesien), covering the Prussian province of Silesia (excluding the Landkreis Hoyerswerda) plus contiguous parts of the Province of Posen and the Ämter of Löbau and Zittau from Saxony. Capital: Breslau
- The Free State of Lower Saxony (Freistaat Niedersachsen), covering the Prussian provinces of Hannover and Schleswig-Holstein plus the states of Oldenburg, Braunschweig and Schaumburg-Lippe as well as northern exclaves of Waldeck and the Province of Hesse-Nassau. Capital: Hannover
- The Hanseatic Cities (Hansestädte) of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck would be merged into a single state, exchanging their various exclaves for suburban regions around Hamburg in a similar way to what eventually happened with the Greater Hamburg Act (or at least that's how it looks on my source map). Capital: Hamburg (I think)
- The Free State of Upper Saxony (Freistaat Obersachsen), covering Saxony minus Löbau and Zittau, the Province of Saxony minus its northern and western regions, the Landkreis Hoyerswerda and the Free State of Anhalt. Capital: Leipzig
- The Free State of Thuringia (Freistaat Thüringen), covering the various Thuringian states plus the Regierungsbezirk of Erfurt from the Province of Saxony and the Landkreis Schmalkalden from the Province of Hesse-Nassau. Capital: Weimar
- The Free State of Hesse (Freistaat Hessen), covering the Province of Hesse-Nassau apart from its various exclaves, the provinces of Starkenburg and Oberhessen from the People's State of Hesse, and the Landkreis Wetzlar from the Rhineland. Capital: Frankfurt
- The Free State of Westphalia (Freistaat Westfalen), covering the Province of Westphalia plus the Free State of Schaumburg-Lippe. Capital: Münster
- The Free State of the Rhineland (Freistaat Rheinland), covering the Province of the Rhineland minus its Wetzlar exclave as well as the Birkendorf exclave of Oldenburg, the left-bank parts of Hesse and the Palatinate from Bavaria. Capital: Köln
- The Free State of Baden (Freistaat Baden), covering the Republic of Baden (unclear whether the style would've actually changed - I'd hope not). Capital: Karlsruhe
- The Free State of Württemberg (Freistaat Württemberg), covering the People's State of Württemberg (again, unclear style) plus the Hohenzollern territory from Prussia. Capital: Stuttgart
- The Free State of Bavaria (Freistaat Bayern), covering Bavaria apart from the Palatinate and including some Thuringian exclaves. Capital: Munich

The internal divisions are based on those of the German Empire (except in Thuringia), and would probably not have looked like this. Mecklenburg's insane feudal mess would be particularly unlikely to survive reorganisation. The Regierungsbezirke are mostly guesswork on my part.

Now, as it turned out, the state governments were mostly quite happy to rule the areas they ruled, and opposed Preuß' reorganisation proposal almost unanimously. In the face of this resistance, Preuß backed down, and the Weimar Constitution that was eventually passed by the Assembly left the boundaries as they were and required three-fifths of voters and majorities of the electorate in referendum to change them. The only changes that were made were the unification of the Thuringian states (except Coburg, which joined Bavaria) in 1920 and the annexation of Waldeck into Prussia in 1929.

The Weimar Constitution had, I think it's fair to say, a lot of issues. But this is one of the less talked-about ones, and one has to wonder what would've happened if Preuß had gotten his ideas through. The Free State of Prussia was usually stronger for the Weimar Coalition than the nation as a whole, and its government (led by Otto Braun of the SPD) frequently clashed with Hindenburg's right-wing national government. It was eventually suspended entirely (using another questionable clause of the Weimar Constitution) after the Preußenschlag of 1930, paving the road to the emergency governments of the early 30s and eventually the Nazi takeover. If Prussia had been broken up into parts, no individual state would've gotten near its strength, and perhaps that would've speeded along the demise of Weimar democracy, or perhaps the more functional units envisioned by Preuß would've made the country slightly more governable.
 
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