• 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

And here's the one you've all been waiting for: the language statistics for Hungary. Note in particular a) the weird amount of random German enclaves (including many of the lighter green shades in the middle of the country), and relatedly, b) the insane patchwork quilt that was the Banat, a couple of whose districts had no language spoken by above 30% of the population.

osterreich-sprachen-1910.png
 
Philippines 1969
Okay, I've been going through what exists on Wikipedia of older Filipino elections, and here's one of the few ones I've been able to find something resembling full results for. No majority shades yet, I'm sorry to say.

In 1969, President Ferdinand Marcos, still ruling as a democratically-elected leader, won re-election to a second term. This has since been banned constitutionally. Marcos asked for a strong mandate to fight Communism, and it's hard to argue he didn't receive one. Not only did he win over 60% of the votes for President, his Nationalist Party secured a crushing majority in both houses of Congress. The opposition Liberals, themselves a splinter from the Nationalists, were reduced to 18 seats in the House and six senators, which deprived them of nearly all their legislative power.

Of course, Marcos didn't get such a sweeping win just by asking for it. He was the incumbent President, and as such, used all the powers of his office to make sure the people chose correctly. Some 50 million US dollars were spent on infrastructure just during the election campaign, causing such a shock to the state budget that the Philippines had to apply for IMF debt restructuring the following year. On top of this, Marcos sent soldiers, Constabulary officers and mercenaries into the countryside to assist his campaign and threaten, harass and, in more than a few cases, actually beat up opposition leaders, voters and COMELEC officials.

Whatever the effects of Marcos' untoward campaign tactics on the country's economic and political life, they did hand him the victory he wanted. Not satisfied with another four years in office, he immediately set about calling a constitutional convention to update the colonial-era 1935 Constitution, which was still in effect at this point. This served two purposes: firstly, by reforming the structure of the Filipino government to remove the overtly American elements, Marcos would be able to shore up support among Filipino nationalists and evade accusations of being a US puppet. Secondly, of course, the 1935 Constitution had that pesky two-term limit, and writing an entirely new constitution would probably look better than simply amending the existing one to get rid of term limits.

This almost backfired - the Convention was elected in December 1970, met in 1971, and quickly got taken over by opposition politicians who called for a grandfather clause to ban previous officeholders, or their relatives (a provision chiefly aimed at Imelda Marcos, the President's highly politically active, and extremely corrupt, wife), from standing for election under the new constitution. This caused Marcos to lose faith in it, and after a series of bombings in Manila through 1972 were attributed to Communist guerrillas (with very scant evidence - indeed, there's been persistent rumours that the bombings were in fact false-flag operations by the Philippine Constabulary), Marcos used them as an excuse to dissolve both the Convention and Congress, declaring martial law and ruling as an outright dictator for the next decade.

val-ph-1969.png

(I apologise pre-emptively for any errors with the Tagalog on the map - it's not a language I speak at all, and most of it was either machine translated or copy-pasted from Wikipedia)
 
Here's that municipal map with the rest of Schleswig added.

dk-stor-kommuner.png

The careful observer will note I've not added the thick county lines in Schleswig, and that's because I'm still a bit unsure about the division there. Same goes for the municipalities, which are mostly based on present-day boundaries - Schleswig-Holstein has never had a comprehensive municipal reform, which has the unfortunate drawback that they don't keep very good track of historical boundaries. That, and the Wikipedia maps of it are just very bad compared to a lot of other German states.
 
Denmark 1920 (April)
And to return to normality for a while...

I've been watching Matador again, and with that in mind I've decided to take another look at Danish interwar politics. I've already done the 1918 election, so I'm going to be continuing from there.

The Zahle ministry, having been comfortably re-elected in 1918, looked on the end of the First World War with confidence. Now, they hoped, the privations and compromises of wartime governance would end, and the left would be able to see their reform ambitions through. Events would overtake them before they got the chance, although they were able to get yet another new electoral law passed (more on which later).

One of the stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles said that Germany would submit to plebiscites to decide the future status of several of its border regions, and even though Denmark had been neutral throughout the war, one of those border regions was Schleswig, which still had a substantial Danish minority and was the target of substantial Danish revanchism following the 1864 cession. The Allies asked the Danish government for input on the borders of the plebiscite zone, which eventually led to the creation of two zones: Zone I covered three and a half large, rural, mostly Danish-speaking districts, while Zone II covered a strip of land to the south of it alongside the city of Flensburg, which had been one of Denmark's most important port cities before 1864 and formed the target for a lot of the most intense revanchist sentiment. However, while Zone I was expected to vote comfortably for reunification with Denmark, Zone II was almost entirely German-speaking and pro-German. In the original border proposal from the 1890s that the Danish government drew on, it had been intended as the maximum border that could feasibly be assimilated, and the author of that proposal later withdrew his support for annexing it as he became convinced Flensburg was too German to accept Danish rule. Nevertheless, opinion in Denmark demanded its inclusion, and the Allies had no problem with potentially weakening Germany even further, so in it went.

The plebiscites were scheduled for February and March 1920, and followed slightly different rules. Zone I, which voted first, would vote on its future allegiance as a single unit. If half-plus-one of its inhabitants voted to unify with Denmark, the entire zone would be ceded. This was to ensure that the German-speaking populations of the border towns, many of whom had moved there since 1864 (especially so in Sønderborg, which had a German naval base), would be drowned out by the solidly-Danish countryside. For Zone II, however, each town and parish would decide its own allegiance, and the French-led international commission which oversaw the plebiscites would draw a new border based on the local results. In the end, though, only three villages in Zone II voted for Denmark, all of them on the island of Föhr well south of the line, and so the commission's border was essentially identical to the Zone I border.

Zahle and his ministry accepted these results enthusiastically, but almost no one else in Denmark did. Most opposition politicians felt that Denmark had a right to take back Zone II as well, as all of Schleswig had once been Danish soil and, in their minds, remained Denmark's birthright. They had seen Zahle pursue a weak-kneed policy of accommodation towards the people who had stolen Danish lands all through the war, and now it seemed as though they had final proof that the Prime Minister would never be able to guard Denmark's national interest properly. The fact that the zone had voted for Germany by over 80%, they saw as a result of German repression of Danish feeling, and to remedy this they called for a League of Nations mandate to be created, which would eventually be allowed to vote on its future allegiance once a fair vote could be assured. This was not of interest to Zahle, who wanted the question settled as fast as possible so that he could return to domestic reforms - an attitude which only strengthened his opponents' conviction that he was secretly pro-German.

This attitude was shared by King Christian X, who did not, however, support the idea of a League of Nations mandate. He wanted Flensburg and Zone II to be ceded forthwith. After some minimal prodding by business leaders in Copenhagen, he decided to summon Zahle and ask him to dissolve the Folketing. Zahle refused to do this before his new electoral law could pass, knowing full well that the 1918 electoral law benefitted Venstre and would make it harder for him to win re-election. There was now an impasse - Zahle reminded the King that he still had the confidence of the lower house, but also noted that the 1915 constitution technically left the appointment and dismissal of the Prime Minister to royal prerogative. The King decided to take him at his word and immediately dismissed him, declaring that if his Prime Minister would not see to the national interest, he would simply appoint someone who would. His choice was Otto Liebe, a lawyer and businessman who had never previously been involved in party politics, but was known to be a right-wing nationalist by persuasion.

Reactions from the left were immediate and violent. The newspaper Social-Demokraten, owned by the trade unions, ran the headline "The King makes a coup d'état", and the leadership of the unions and the Social Democratic Party drafted an ultimatum that called on the King to restore Zahle to power or else they'd launch a general strike. The next few days saw massive demonstrations in Copenhagen, and although the Folketing were on leave for Holy Week, the Copenhagen City Council (which had a Social Democratic majority) met and drafted a resolution of no confidence in the Liebe ministry. Faced with the threat of an uprising in the capital, the King was left no choice but to call in the leading figures of all four parliamentary parties and hammer out a solution to the crisis. A new election would be held in three weeks' time, as the King had originally wanted, but it would follow the new draft electoral law, and Liebe's ministry would be dismissed immediately, to be replaced by a caretaker government that would sit until the election was decided.

The 1920 electoral law was quite interesting, not least because it would last for almost thirty years, and its basic principles remain in use to this very day. Essentially, it was an attempt to merge full nationwide proportionality with local representation, which remains something of a holy grail of electoral mathematics even now - for 1920, it did remarkably well at it, although it wasn't without some oddities around the edges. Basically, it was a more proportional version of the 1918 system. The counties would be assured the same number of seats as they'd had in 1918, on top of which (like in 1918) a number of additional seats were elected to ensure proportionality within each region (landsdel). Again like in 1918, candidates were nominated in single-member constituencies, but unlike in 1918, the results in the single-member constituencies would not govern seat distribution among the parties. Instead, seats were distributed proportionally within each county (or in Copenhagen, within each of the three roughly equal six-seat constituencies) and awarded to the most successful constituency candidates from each party. The voters had the option of voting for any of the candidates within their county, or simply to vote for a party, which would be counted for the candidate in their local constituency. If you're confused by this, you're not alone, but it worked quite well all things considered. The national parties appreciated the high degree of proportionality, while local parties appreciated being able to nominate their own local candidates in a more direct way than a pure list election would allow. As mentioned, there'd be some tweaks around the edges in decades to come, but by and large this is still how the Danish electoral system works today.

val-dk-1920-i.png

The results of the election were a huge disappointment for Zahle and his allies. In spite of the blatantly undemocratic actions of the King in dismissing his ministry, the people seemed to care more about national honour than they did democratic norms - on top of which Zahle's ministry was already hugely unpopular for unrelated reasons mainly to do with the wartime economy. The Business Party (Erhvervspartiet), a protest movement of small business owners in the cities who wanted to ensure a lighter government hand in the economy, won four seats, and Zahle's own Radical Party was almost halved in size compared to 1918. Far from artificially strengthening Venstre, the 1918 electoral system had most likely propped up the Radicals - they'd been in an electoral alliance with the Social Democrats for several elections running, but with the proportional system introduced, the latter no longer saw the need to prop up "bourgeois" candidates, and the result was clear. Zahle held his own seat in Ringsted, a railway town that would most likely have been otherwise inclined towards social democracy, but only a handful of Radical constituency candidates were successful beside him, and the party relied on the additional regional seats to reach any sort of success.

The new Folketing had a clear right-wing majority, and the King called Venstre leader Niels Neergaard to form a new government. For reasons unclear to me, this only lasted a couple of months before new elections were held, and then yet another set of elections followed in September with the Schleswig reunification completed. 1920, for Denmark, was a year of three elections, though none of the others would yield anywhere near as many surprises as the April ones.
 
Denmark 1920 (July)
In the months following the Easter Crisis, the tense mood gave way to an outburst of national pride and elation over the coming reunification. Although Denmark had done very little in the grand scheme of things to achieve it, the fact that the wounds of 1864 were going to be healed made almost everyone in Denmark, from left to right, look confidently on their country's future. The summer of 1920 saw large public celebrations and rallies welcoming what had once been Northern Schleswig back into the Danish fold, and in Christiansborg the politicians were busy drafting the legal formalities necessary to make the reunification a reality.

Unfortunately for them, it soon became clear that the constitutional changes needed to redefine Denmark's national territory would need to be passed by two consecutive parliaments, and in order to ensure that it could be done as speedily as possible, Neergaard and his ministry decided to call yet another snap election for 6 July. The campaign for this was quiet - not as quiet as the 1915 campaign, in which the parties had stood down for one another in almost every constituency, but then again, there'd been a war on in 1915. Still, no one felt any particular need to fight hard. After all, everyone was in broad agreement on the constitutional revisions (the Social Democrats wanted additional changes made, up to and including the abolition of the monarchy, but didn't push especially hard for this), and no one was under any illusions that the basic political landscape had changed in the two months since the last election. So the result was essentially a consolidation of the April election, which was obviously a disappointment for the left as it showed April hadn't been a fluke. Venstre were able to make modest gains, taking one seat off the Radicals and two off the Conservatives, while the Social Democrats stayed exactly put. The Easter Crisis divisions were, if anything, slightly reinforced, as the Social Democrats consolidated their lead in Copenhagen while most of the countryside got deeper blue.

Also accompanying the elections, unlike in April, was the complete renewal of the Landsting, the upper house of Parliament. Until 1918, this had been a highly conservative body made up of members elected indirectly by property-holding men under a weighted franchise - not unlike the First Chamber in Sweden, except that instead of being elected by local councils, the Landsting was elected through a system of electors chosen in each Folketing constituency (each nomination district, under the new system). The constitutional revisions after the First World War did a lot to democratise the Landsting, which became elected by universal suffrage, although the indirect election system remained. The twelve old constituencies were also merged into seven, and the seats previously appointed by the King were now subject to election by the party rooms in the outgoing Landsting.

val-dk-1920-ii.png
 
Love the principle of 'this must be approved by two consecutive Parliaments, so we'll just pass it, immediately dissolve Parliament and have a new election at once.'
Add in “stitch up all of the constituency elections by not standing candidates against any incumbent member” and you’ve got the 1915 elections.
 
shore up support among Filipino nationalists
That and I think he was counting on said nationalists endorsing a sort of corporatist, authoritarian Standestaat type thing (though not entirely - Marcos didn't trust the Church) like eventually happened after Martial Law denuded the opposition influence on constitutional reform. There was an is a certain intellectual tendency that believes that the Philippines is not at least for now suited for democracy, because Filipino society is parentalist in orientation.

Interestingly enough, the first few elections after Martial Law (that is, referenda on the Marcos Constitution) were interesting in that they were I think one of the only modern Filipino elections without secret ballot - you gathered with your neighbors at the local barangay hall and declared your approval or disapproval (and the police, of course, knew where you lived.)
 
(I apologise pre-emptively for any errors with the Tagalog on the map - it's not a language I speak at all, and most of it was either machine translated or copy-pasted from Wikipedia)
I would use Tagapagsalita for Speaker, though Ispiker also works if less formal. I will note that government during this era mostly operated predominantly in English anyway, as did most of the press so most people would have just used Speaker even if it was linguistically incorrect.
 
I would use Tagapagsalita for Speaker, though Ispiker also works if less formal. I will note that government during this era mostly operated predominantly in English anyway, as did most of the press so most people would have just used Speaker even if it was linguistically incorrect.
Ispiker is the word they used on Wikipedia, although I did notice the Tagalog Wikipedia's political sections, er, seem to need some work.
 
Denmark 1920 (September)
With the fresh elections necessary to amend the constitution having been successfully completed, the constitution was duly amended to incorporate what had once been Northern Schleswig, now formally rechristened Southern Jutland (Sønderjylland). The four German districts that had made up the territory were converted into Danish counties, and some of the local municipalities were merged to make them more uniform in size with those to their north, and additional changes followed over the next few years to bring local law fully in line with Danish law. Unlike in, say, Alsace-Moselle - or indeed the pre-1864 situation - no trace of the former border would be left in Denmark's body politic.

Of course, now that Southern Jutland was once again part of Denmark, and legally indistinct from any other part of Denmark at that, it followed that they ought to be allowed to elect members to the Rigsdag. They could possibly have done this through by-elections, but well, there seem to have been fewer things Danes loved more than a good snap election, so they simply decided to hold the third general election of the year. Once again, the entire Folketing and Landsting would be up for election, and Southern Jutland would make up one seven-seat constituency for the Folketing (breaking with the system of one constituency per county, which was probably for the best in this case) and form part of the Landsting's fifth constituency, which had three seats added to it along with one new seat for the outgoing parliament to co-opt.

The election campaign was not that much more spirited than the July one - you have to assume the parties were getting a bit worn out by this point - but the result did yield slightly more changes than that one had. Venstre stayed put at 51 seats even though the chamber had grown. Every other party made gains except for the Business Party, which lost one of its four seats, but the big winners were the Social Democrats, who gained six of the nine new seats, largely off the back of a good performance in the Islands. Southern Jutland voted somewhat similarly to its northern neighbours, although Venstre were less dominant here than they were in the rest of Jutland, and the Conservatives had a bit more of a rural presence. This distinction is partially still visible today - both the Progress Party and the Danish People's Party have counted Southern Jutland as one of their main strongholds. There was also a small but significant vote for the new Schleswig Party (Schleswigsche Partei/Slesvigsk Parti), which was set up to represent the German-speaking minority and had no detailed programme aside from preserving their minority rights.

While the new Folketing was slightly more left-wing, it was not enough to unseat the Neergaard ministry, which carried on and would last almost the entire four years. The election mania that swept Denmark all through 1920 was over, but that wasn't to say the next four years would be smooth sailing.

val-dk-1920-iii.png
 
Back
Top