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Makemakean Does Various Graphical Things!

Abandoned concept for Decisive Greenness:

b3d4uVd.gif
 
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It looked so good in my head, but when I was done with it, I sort of felt, nah, it actually looks fairly shitty, and uses far too much space to convey too simple a message. It might have worked as a brief segment in a video, but not as an illustration to a text.

Alex Richards said:
My EYES!
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Dom said:
Perhaps some spoiler tags with an epilepsy warning there, Makemakemax?
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...it was of course only much later that I realized that, yeah, maybe there's also something inadvisable about making a joke about that episode of Pokémon that was banned in Japan because kids were taken to hospitals due to epilepsy by literally reproducing that very effect?

Still fairly happy with the likeness of Ozawa Ichiro:

Ichiro+Ozawa+Reappointed+Democratic+Party+1AckbDqZDINl.jpg
 
You spend the entire evening trying to work out this idea for a political cartoon, and you think it's good, and you try to draw it, but then you find yourself sitting there, going, "Kind of looks like those racist Japanese stereotypes from Tintin and the Blue Lotus, though, doesn't it?"

No, I think it'll probably be for the better if I simply stick to maps and statistics for this project.
 
It's been a while since I uploaded something, so here is an (almost finished) election map from the Swedish Strangerverse, the federal election of the Nordic Empire in 1867 (the first such federal election to be held).

I have since decided that some changes will be necessary, but the basic outline of where the different parliamentary grouping draw their strengths should remain pretty much the same.
Scandinavia_map_Final_Election_1867png.png
 
Redolegna said:
In line with the delightful story you gave us about that most quixotic of marquis, I'd be very glad to read about a snapshot of either the 1885 or 1891 splits.
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The Reform Unionists and the Radical Liberals?

Yes, I'm afraid I must disappoint you in saying that those splits are kind of disappointing in my conception of them. While in the latter half of the 19th century, the parties have moved into more organized structures than just ad hoc membership and them essentially being lose coalitions of independents--by the time of the birth of the Nordic Empire, we start to see things like official party conventions, machines in the cities and parts of the rural areas--the candidates and MPs themselves still have large roles, so both the Reform Unionists and Radical Liberals start off as factions within the Unionists and Liberals respectively, and so it is a very gradual process by which they become independent parties, not really some group walking out and declaring they are now officially forming a new party. The reason why it took so long for them to merge was because though they in a sense had a lot in common, where they differ were at first seen as being very important issues (free trade vs. protectionism mainly, but also other things), and there was a problem of internal party cultures.

Radical Liberals:
Mainly from the more urban Liberals, and then usually focused in the South (Copenhagen, Malmö, and Gothenburg). Think David Lloyd George and his merry men.

Reform Unionists:
Technocratic reformers, also mostly urban people, trying to do away with the spoils system that Gustav III and Émile De Geer inadvertently had created when they reformed civil administration into a more manageable form in the late 18th century. Also trying to fix the bizarre byzantine political systems (which often were run by corrupt machines) in places like Stockholm and Gothenburg. Think Theodore Roosevelt and his merry men.

But, you know, it takes some time for these radicals in both parties to come to a fair understanding on issues. Is free trade something that the capitalists have introduced so that they can buy cheaper goods from abroad while Nordic workingmen suffer from not being able to sell their produce, or are the tariffs something the capitalists have introduced just so that they can sell their inferior products at ridiculously high prices and thus get rich while the working class have to foot the bill? And so forth and so on... As the issues that once separated them wanes in importance, they start moving closer to each other, eventually forming the Radical Party with its first party congress in 1900.

I am trying to figure out what my next vignette can be about, but no sudden inspiration has struck me yet, I fear.
 
Makemakean said:
Mainly from the more urban Liberals, and then usually focused in the South (Copenhagen, Malmö, and Gothenburg).
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I'd be remiss not to point out that there's a fourth major city in the south in any TL where Sweden doesn't bury the hatchet for 200 years - although a) it probably still isn't as big as the ones you listed, and b) it's going to be a massively Unionist city until at least the point where we get universal suffrage.
 
Ares96 said:
I'd be remiss not to point out that there's a fourth major city in the south in any TL where Sweden doesn't bury the hatchet for 200 years - although a) it probably still isn't as big as the ones you listed, and b) it's going to be a massively Unionist city until at least the point where we get universal suffrage.
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It is very true that as the premier naval base in the Nordic Empire, it remains a massive Unionist stronghold. It is also interestingly prior to the introduction of income tax during Asbjørn Abraham Sønderheim one of the cities with the highest levels of suffrage after Björnstjerna gave the vote to all officers and people who had spent a certain time in the military (something that OTL Björnstjerna actually wanted to do, and that was actually a surprisingly popular opinion even in very conservative circles in the 1830s-50s). Still, of course, that only really enfranchises some 40-50% of men and less than 5% of women.
 
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OTL Björnstjerna's book on Representation Reform from 1835 is very interesting. From my understanding of the man, I think it would fair to say that by the standards of the time, he was pretty much a moderate conservative (though naturally, by the standards of our day and age, he would be outrageously reactionary). By the 1830s in Sweden, there was pretty much a massive consensus in Sweden that the Riksdag of the Four Estates was irreparably broken and it definitely needed to be replaced by something. Very few were actually arguing the case of "It's not broken, so let's not fix it!". The problem however was that there was really no consensus of what should replace it, and the reason why it still took some time before it was changed (and when that happened, it was because Louis De Geer basically bulldozed everyone over and imposed his vision which was basically a hybrid of the American Congress and the British Parliament on the whole political establishment), was because people would often feel that any given proposed change would just make the system even worse.

But I digress. Because everyone agreed that some reform was necessary, it was reasonably popular among men of learning and men of letters and men who generally liked having their opinions be read to publish their own model constitutions for how Sweden should be governed, accompanied by essays outlining their arguments for why each paragraph in their model constitutions were justified. Here you can find everything from the radical liberal Anders Lindeberg's model constitution where he called for that women be given the right to vote, to the very conservative Von Hartmansdorff who spends much of his work arguing about the evils of democracy in general. Björnstjerna's model is somewhere inbetween these works.

Björnstjerna felt that the constituencies were hopelessly unreasonably shaped and formed, with widely differing number of voters. Björnstjerna did certainly not believe in the principle of one man, one vote. Indeed, he argues quite strenuously that such a system is unreasonable. Sweden at the time gave the cities far more electoral influence than the countryside (rather the inverse of the problem in the UK at the period, interestingly), and though Björnstjerna felt that this was a bit of a problem and that the cities representation needed to be somewhat diluted, he still generally agreed on that cities should have more representation than the countryside, because the cities were the ones driving the Swedish economy, and so it was only reasonably that they should have a greater piece of the cake. Same thing with the countryside, where he felt that constituencies with important industries, where people tended to pay more in tax, etc. should have a greater say. His problem with the then current situation was that it was very arbitrary and did not follow any proper logic.

Taking all these factors that Björnstjerna considered important into account, he goes into length in his book in various mathematical calculations trying to figure out what the reasonable constituencies in Sweden ought to be, in the process making use of quite some statistics (factors such as how many blast furnaces and brandywine distilleries an area possesses are considered relevant in his book). Though his final analysis is of course a political system I would not wish upon any nation, I cannot help but admire and be fascinated by his work, as he attempts to unravel the mathematics of political legitimacy.
 
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