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Max's election maps and assorted others

India 1936 (constituencies)
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... INDIA!

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And of course, the Sikh seats in Punjab and NWFP:

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Assam also had a "Backward" electorate (what modern India calls Scheduled Tribes) whose constituencies covered most of the areas excluded from the general and Muslim rolls, and there were seats for Europeans, Anglo-Indians and/or Indian Christians in most provinces. But as the latter tended to cover the entire province, I haven't bothered to map them. If I ever get full results, I might throw them on as insets.

I should probably put this up somewhere with a proper writeup, but at the moment, I just want to sit down. (Well, I've been sitting down this whole time, but...)
 
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Malmö 1966
Something slightly more modest this time, namely another instalment of Annals from Swedish Electoral Cartography.

The 1966 local elections were, perhaps, the most significant ones in the history of the country. The general elections of 1964 had seen the standard of non-socialist cooperation raised for the first time, as Bertil Rubin founded Medborgerlig Samling (which, yes, the microparty that @Makemakean keeps going on about is almost certainly named for) as a platform for joint lists, secured the support of Sydsvenskan and a few other Malmö-based groups, and only succeeded in creating a fourth right-wing list in the Malmö-Lund-Helsingborg-Landskrona constituency that won three seats.

The time was clearly not ripe for a general alliance, but soon enough, the Liberals and Centre began talking, and announced that for the 1966 local elections they would be supporting the creation of joint lists wherever their local parties could agree on such, under the name Mittensamverkan ("Centre Cooperation" or something like that - note the distinction between mitten meaning centrism in general and center as in the Centre Party here). The Conservatives were invited to participate in some cases, in others not, and this resulted in something of a mess - we can comfortably piece together the partisan composition of councils elected in 1966 because the SCB added a section tracking that, but there's no good way to calculate voteshares.

The 1966 local elections were the first time SR trialled its new approach to journalism. Previously, political interviews had been treated as an opportunity for politicians to speak freely about their policies, and interviewers were generally convivial and forgiving toward their subjects. No more. This time, interviews of party leaders were conducted by the "three Os", Åke Ortmark, Lars Orup and Gustaf Olivecrona, who spared no punches, withheld no embarrassing questions and pressed the leaders for answers. This caught most of the political scene off guard, but none quite as much as Prime Minister Erlander, who was coming up on his twenty-year mark as head of government. Where he had been friendly, masterly and agreeable for as much as he was seen on TV at all, Erlander found himself stumbling at the questions asked of him. Particularly so regarding the housing question, which was getting worse and worse in the major cities especially. His inability to provide a clear solution hurt the Social Democrats, and nowhere more than in the major cities - they lost control of Stockholm, Gothenburg, Uppsala, Jönköping, and a number of other cities.

In total, the Social Democratic net losses amounted to 3,056. But this is a misleading figure by itself - the country was, of course, midway through a local government reform at the time - the block municipalities were created in 1964, and encouraged to merge at their own pace. A few had done so by these elections, in others the process had yet to start, and others still were partway through the mergers, creating a patchwork map.

Malmö fell into the latter category, and technically still does so today. It had been placed in a large block covering the municipalities of Oxie, Bunkeflo, Svedala, Bara, Burlöv and parts of Staffanstorp. By 1966, Oxie had finalised merger negotiations and been placed into the first (northern and eastern) constituency for Malmö City Council. Bunkeflo merged in 1970, and from there on negotiations stalled. The other three municipalities were uninterested in joining, and Bara and Svedala would eventually merge (not without resistance on the former's part) while Burlöv remains intact, the second-smallest municipality in Sweden by land area.

So it was a changing city that went to vote in 1966, and in more ways than one. The harbour shoreline was further out than it had ever been, but not as far as today. The housing estates that dominate the east and south of the city (and from one of which I'm currently writing this) were partway built, and the shift in voting habits partway finished with it. The Social Democrats had ruled the city since 1918, the first election held under universal suffrage, and the cracks were beginning to show even as the shipyards and factories showed record profits and the only underperforming business seemed to be the unemployment offices.

Malmö was where MBS had been born, and its local Conservative party had been cheering it on, in sharp contrast to their more hardline brothers in Stockholm and elsewhere. They got along swimmingly with the Liberals - if anything, it was Liberal reticence that prevented MBS from properly being implemented in 1964 - and Malmö, as with the other Scanian cities, saw the creation of a broad right-wing unity list called Samling i Malmö ("Malmö Coalition" or something). Well, in Malmö it wasn't quite a perfect union, because there was also a Liberal-Centre unity list under the Mittensamverkan name. Just to make things perfectly confusing. The SCB file notes that both members elected off this list were Centre Party members, which makes them the first such ever elected in Malmö.

It gets harder to divide the SiM seats, but I've made a completely arbitrary division that's probably no wronger than any other guess - I'll see if I can shake down a membership list sometime.

Anyway, Malmö was one of few cities where the Social Democrats pointedly did not lose power in 1966. Perhaps because the city was expanding rapidly, perhaps because the industrial crisis was still ten years away. In any case it hardly mattered, because Malmö, like all municipalities outside Stockholm and possibly Gothenburg, used a Proporz system to divide municipal government posts. I mentioned the local Conservatives and Social Democrats were chummy - well, after a spirited campaign aimed at displacing the Social Democrats that failed, the fifteen Conservatives elected to the council went right back to cooperating with them in governing the city. Majoritarian government, too, would be another ten years in the making, although who knows what might have happened if SiM had won another three seats and gotten to govern the city.

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Gotland 2018
And the first result of last Sunday's elections: Gotland 2018.

The reason for this is, of course, that Gotland doesn't have a county council to count first: or rather, this is the county council. When the order came out to form blocs and merge in 1964, it was decided that there wasn't really any point trying to keep Gotland divided because Visby is in every meaningful sense the central place for the entire island. So the county council and the fourteen old municipalities were subsumed into the Gotland municipality, which changed its name to Region Gotland in 2011. Along with the name change, its powers were expanded to make it fully equivalent to a mainland regional council as well as a local one, which arguably makes it the most powerful local body in the country.

Politically it's divided between Visby, which votes like a major city (in part because a lot of its inhabitants are transplanted Stockholmers), and the countryside, which is an S/C duopoly with the former stronger in the north and the latter in the south. The Centre boost in this election brought them to new highs in Gotland, as the party succeeded in attracting centre-right liberal Visbyites while also shoring up their base in the rural south. This growth regained them their Riksdag seat, which had been held by the Moderates since 2006, and brought them to parity with the Social Democrats on the council.

SD are weaker in Gotland than in other parts, probably because no one in the SD leadership understands the dialect, but FI continue to eke out a place for themselves based on support in Visby. Due to the elimination of the council constituencies, they went up to two seats in this election, while KD reclaimed their place on the council for the first time since 2010.

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Örebro 2018
Örebro 2018. Bear in mind that the outgoing control here is a centrist coalition of S, C and KD - the latter two's voters don't seem to have cared - if anything, KD has gone up, they were in second place in a couple of districts in western Örebro city.

I've got Jönköping nearly done, but I'm waiting on the official decision verifying the results before I put seat distributions in. Suffice it to say it looks quite German.

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Have you considered doing one of those fit-together maps of a wider area like we did with the England-wide map of county councils? I appreciate it may be harder given the population variance in Sweden.
 
Have you considered doing one of those fit-together maps of a wider area like we did with the England-wide map of county councils? I appreciate it may be harder given the population variance in Sweden.
In short, no. I can't do it to scales much smaller than the maps posted above, and if I had to draw all of Sweden, all six thousand-some wards of it, to the scale of, say, the Lund map above, I'm pretty sure I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome. Not to mention that it'd be something like 10000x50000 pixels.
 
In short, no. I can't do it to scales much smaller than the maps posted above, and if I had to draw all of Sweden, all six thousand-some wards of it, to the scale of, say, the Lund map above, I'm pretty sure I'd get carpal tunnel syndrome. Not to mention that it'd be something like 10000x50000 pixels.
Fair enough - I wasn't thinking of the whole of Sweden, but something more like those fit-together maps of a whole English region we used to do, just of a suitably densely-populated subset. But Swedish cities may be farther apart than I'm thinking.
 
Ah Lund, I'm gonna miss it. Truth be told first I did after the final results came out was to check how Delphi and Sparta voted. I wasn't all that surprised.
 
Jönköping 2018
Jönköping 2018, once more, is a city of the... err, well, the shade I use is grey, but they've never used anything other than dark blue AFAIK, so.

The outgoing mayor, weirdly enough, is of the Centre, which made Jönköping the biggest Centre-led municipality in the country. No idea how it'll end up this time, but the Alliance went up to 39 out of 81, so no change of power is likely.

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Malmö 2018. Not much change here - SD went forward a bit, the Greens lost ground to the Left in Möllevången and surrounds and to the Social Democrats in more established middle-class places, FI fell out and the Centre came back for the first time since 1994. The sum of the above being a slight shift to the Alliance, but that was enough for the red-green bloc to lose its majority. Remains to be seen if the Social Democrats can salvage this situation in spite of their rocky relationship with the Left locally, or if we're going to see a 20-seat Alliance minority coalition.

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Sverige 2018 (K)
Something I amazingly didn't do for 2014: an overview map of the municipal elections, with margins for each council. Bear in mind that while the map looks very red, there were a lot of places where the Social Democrats made it to first place but were still outnumbered by the Alliance combined. I'll probably complement this with a map of controlling coalitions once we know what those are going to be.

Kommunvalen 2018

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