• 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

Reader mode
NOTE: Once again, lots of conjectural city boundaries on this. I may have been able to trace them properly, but to do so would've taken a lot of time and effort, and I ultimately decided it wouldn't be worth it.

The Kingdom of Bohemia was the industrial heartland of the Empire. With some 6.3 million inhabitants, divided into 63 percent Czechs and 37 percent Germans (including Jews, of which Prague at least had quite a few), it was the second-most populated province of Austria, behind only Galicia, and since Galicia was overwhelmingly poor, rural and underdeveloped, Bohemia was the richest province, which under the 1906 electoral law meant it had the largest number of seats - 130 of them, divided into 75 Czech-majority seats and 55 German-majority seats. Quite helpfully, the Germans lived mainly along the outer edges of Bohemia, with even the towns outside the German-speaking region almost all being majority Czech, and this meant the districts could be quite easily drawn up without having to resort to extreme imbalances like what we saw in modern-day Slovenia. Of course, the towns and countryside were still separated, but the districts did tend to be fairly equal in population, with a few exceptions. Karlsbad, a rich spa town with only some 3,500 voters, got its own seat (district 88), while the Prague suburbs got lumped together in very awkward ways.

reichsrat.png

The party landscape in Bohemia, even among Germans, was quite different from that of "Austria proper". The language issue had flared up seriously in the 1890s after the ministry in Vienna proposed that Czech should be a co-official language within Bohemia, which caused an uproar among the German population because, while the Czechs could mostly speak German, very few German Bohemians knew any Czech, and this meant they would likely get sidelined for civil service jobs if the bilingual policy were implemented. This contributed to a general sense of German identity in Bohemia being under siege, hard as it might be to understand given their economic and political dominance up to that point, and that in turn meant that clerical politics found no real home among German Bohemians. Instead, with the exception of the mining regions of the Ore Mountains along the Saxon border, German Bohemia was dominated electorally by the German nationalist bloc. It was in large part thanks to Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia (which will come later) that the German nationalists were able to establish themselves as the largest bloc in the chamber overall in 1911.

The Czechs, meanwhile, voted largely along class or identity lines. The Czech Clericals (gold-brown), a bloc comprised of the Catholic National-Conservative Party and the Czech Christian Social Party, did not do very well outside a specific region in eastern Bohemia in 1907, and disappeared entirely in 1911, while the Old Czechs (gold), the standard-bearers of Czech nationalism going back to 1848, were only able to win a handful of seats in 1907 and only one in 1911. Instead, three major parties established themselves in 1907. First in votes, though not in seats, were the Social Democrats, who (as mentioned) were somewhat separate from their German-Austrian counterparts - in 1911, all but one Czech deputy would split off altogether and create a new Autonomist Social Democratic Party, which I haven't depicted on the map because TOO MANY COLOURS. Second, and forming the largest group of deputies, was the Czech Agrarian Party, which if you've been following @Nanwe's Czechoslovak map series were the kernel of what would become the RSZML in Czechoslovakia. Of course, the "R" in that abbreviation stands for "Republican", so they couldn't very well call themselves that at this point. Third were the Young Czechs, who split from the Old Czechs in the 1870s to protest them being insufficiently committed to the Czech national cause, and who attracted significant support from the established middle classes in urban parts of Bohemia. They were, however, increasingly being challenged for that role by the Czech People's Socialist Party (orange - again, the direct ancestor organisation of the ČSNS in Czechoslovakia), a new-ish party (founded in 1897) that combined radical but non-Marxist socialism with a Czech nationalism that incorporated elements of the Hussite tradition. In 1911, the ČSNS were nearly able to beat the Young Czechs into third place among the Czech seats.

val-at-1907.png
val-at-1911.png
 
This Sunday, Finland is holding regional elections for the first time ever. Although the Swedish municipal ordinances were copied more-or-less verbatim in Finland in the 1870s, the county-level elected assemblies weren't included in that, and Finland never established any sort of elected bodies between the municipal and national levels. But, thanks to the Centre Party first leading the government and then participating in the current governing coalition, their goal of establishing regional government has been taken up and will now be implemented. The twenty-one regional welfare service areas (hyvinvointialueet/välfärdsområden), as the name indicates, will be charged with health and social care as well as operating fire and rescue services, all of which are currently municipal services. They largely follow the regional boundaries set up in 1997, with the exception of Uusimaa/Nyland, which is divided into four different areas as well as Helsinki, which due to its size is not included in the reform and will continue to provide welfare services through its municipal government. Åland is also excluded from the reform, since welfare services are already a devolved competency of the Åland regional government.

It's hard to predict the results of these elections since turnout will likely be quite low - a poll taken by Yle indicates that only 40% of the electorate is likely to vote, although early voting tallies seem to point to a higher final turnout. Of course, the pandemic also likely means fewer people will want to vote in person.

val-fi-alue-2022.png
 
There was a attempt to implement county assemblies in 1880s (copied from Sweden of course) but that went nowhere. In fact intermittent failed efforts to establish such bodies became a constant feature of Finnish politics.
.
 
Derper said:
There was a attempt to implement county assemblies in 1880s (copied from Sweden of course) but that went nowhere. In fact intermittent failed efforts to establish such bodies became a constant feature of Finnish politics.
.
Click to expand...
Let’s see how far these go - I understand in their current form they can’t even levy their own taxes?
 
Ares96 said:
Let’s see how far these go - I understand in their current form they can’t even levy their own taxes?
Click to expand...
Yeah, for the time being almost all of their funding comes from the state budget. Given that this government seems to be unwilling to give them taxing powers and next government will most likely include NCP which is even more unlikely to do so, I'm kinda sceptical of these welfare zones ever becoming meaningfully autonomous.
 
Ares96 said:
This Sunday, Finland is holding regional elections for the first time ever. Although the Swedish municipal ordinances were copied more-or-less verbatim in Finland in the 1870s, the county-level elected assemblies weren't included in that, and Finland never established any sort of elected bodies between the municipal and national levels. But, thanks to the Centre Party first leading the government and then participating in the current governing coalition, their goal of establishing regional government has been taken up and will now be implemented. The twenty-one regional welfare service areas (hyvinvointialueet/välfärdsområden), as the name indicates, will be charged with health and social care as well as operating fire and rescue services, all of which are currently municipal services. They largely follow the regional boundaries set up in 1997, with the exception of Uusimaa/Nyland, which is divided into four different areas as well as Helsinki, which due to its size is not included in the reform and will continue to provide welfare services through its municipal government. Åland is also excluded from the reform, since welfare services are already a devolved competency of the Åland regional government.

It's hard to predict the results of these elections since turnout will likely be quite low - a poll taken by Yle indicates that only 40% of the electorate is likely to vote, although early voting tallies seem to point to a higher final turnout. Of course, the pandemic also likely means fewer people will want to vote in person.

View attachment 48805
Click to expand...

Are councillors elected in a single at-large constituency or in multiple sub-constituencies?
 
Was Vihr expected to get less votes than Vas? Does it have to do with strength at the national vs local level because of different party structure or there's a loss in votes from Vihr to other parties?
Do these bodies have executives with a formal governing coalition and a clear division between majority and opposition?
 
LMBRD said:
Was Vihr expected to get less votes than Vas? Does it have to do with strength at the national vs local level because of different party structure or there's a loss in votes from Vihr to other parties?
Click to expand...
I don't actually know why the Greens fell back in this election compared with 2021. You're right that they tend to be weaker in local elections, especially in rural areas, so the exclusion of Helsinki from these elections definitely doesn't benefit them, but I also don't think they're the sort of party that suffers in low turnout.
LMBRD said:
Do these bodies have executives with a formal governing coalition and a clear division between majority and opposition?
Click to expand...
If they follow the model of Finnish municipalities, they'll have all-party executive committees that usually govern by consensus. I don't expect there to be clear majority/opposition divides even on an informal level, but I may be wrong.
 
Finland 1994 (ref)
  • Index
    • Here's the Finnish EU membership referendum, held about a month before the Swedish and Norwegian ones in 1994. Finland approved joining by the widest margin of the three, with around 56% voting in favour - despite almost every major party either supporting a Yes vote or staying neutral. The Centre Party officially backed the Yes, though plenty of their members disagreed with this stance and (from the look of the map) most of their voters ended up voting No.

    Åland held a separate referendum a month later to approve the Åland Protocol, a set of special rules that recognised their existing status as an autonomous customs jurisdiction, but this was approved by over 70% of voters, in addition to which Åland election results are notoriously hard to track down in detail, so I didn't bother trying to find those.

    ref-fi-1994.png
     
  • Index
    • Norway 1994 (ref)
  • Index
    • And here's the referendum in Norway that was held about six weeks after the Finnish one. Notably, unlike both the Finnish and Swedish referendums, the Norwegian one returned a narrow majority opposed to joining, and Norway did not in fact go on to join the EU the following year. We can also see how the Yes side was almost entirely concentrated in the Oslo region, although most of the other major cities did return extremely narrow Yes majorities. Rural Norway, however, was overwhelmingly opposed - unlike in Finland, the Norwegian Centre Party had taken a strong No stance from the very beginning, winning second place in the 1993 general election thanks largely to that stance, and they were able to take most of their voters with them.

    ref-no-1994.png
     
  • Index
    • Reader mode
    You must log in or register to reply here.
    Back
    Top