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Thule Air Base as it was then known, since renamed to Pituffik Space Base.
It's actually now got it's own polling station.
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Max's election maps and assorted others
- Thread starter Ares96
- Start date
Thule Air Base as it was then known, since renamed to Pituffik Space Base.
It's actually now got it's own polling station.
There’s two unincorporated territories in Greenland today - Thule/Pituffik Base and the Northeast. The latter was part of the county division in use at the time, so while I don’t know if the constituencies included it (it probably wouldn’t have made a difference), I decided to follow the precedent of the map on Wikipedia.
Finland 2025 (R)
Here's the first of what should be a few maps of the Finnish elections held yesterday. The regional elections, the first to be held alongside municipal elections (and there seems to have been a bit of confusion about the idea of voting for two different levels of government at once, Finland not having quite the same political traditions as Sweden), saw a pretty good showing for the Social Democrats (and to a lesser extent the other left-of-centre parties), a surprisingly solid result for the Centre Party, and an absolute drubbing for the True Finns, who won zero municipalities and lost about a third of their seats. Turnout was 51%, so it's unclear how relevant this is for the next general election, but it looks as though most of the trends of 2023 have been interrupted at the very least.
Helsinki 2025
The municipal elections saw a general shift to the left, but I don't think this was quite as pronounced anywhere else as it was in Helsinki. The Coalition very narrowly held on to their spot as the largest party, but the SDP equalled them with twenty-one seats - a gain of eight compared to 2021. The Left also made substantial gains, solidifying their position in the old working-class suburbs northeast of the city centre in particular, while the Greens pretty much held their good result from 2021.
So who lost, then? Well, the Coalition did lose a bit, but the major loser was the True Finns, who lost more than half their support to end up with just four seats on the council. Movement Now were also nearly wiped out, following the general trend in these elections - I think this is a combination of Hjallis' wet fart of a presidential run last year and a leftward move among young people in the big cities, who used to be one of his big support bases. The Swedish People's Party also lost one of its five seats, continuing their slow decline as the Swedish-speaking proportion of Helsinki's population continues to decrease.
Compare with 2021 here
So who lost, then? Well, the Coalition did lose a bit, but the major loser was the True Finns, who lost more than half their support to end up with just four seats on the council. Movement Now were also nearly wiped out, following the general trend in these elections - I think this is a combination of Hjallis' wet fart of a presidential run last year and a leftward move among young people in the big cities, who used to be one of his big support bases. The Swedish People's Party also lost one of its five seats, continuing their slow decline as the Swedish-speaking proportion of Helsinki's population continues to decrease.
Compare with 2021 here
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Finland 2025 (K)
Trying a slight change to the colour scheme, since there were quite a few municipalities in otherwise Centre-dominated territory that were won by independent groups, and those sets of shades were basically impossible to tell apart. I think orange for the SFP works pretty well in a vacuum, but of course I will have to determine how it mixes with using the yellow shades for the Finns. Then again, I think the latter is generally represented in light blue in Finnish media, so perhaps I'll end up changing their colour too.
Finland 1907-2023 (table)
Made a table of election results to the Finnish Parliament for sv.wikipedia. I imagine I'll end up splitting this into sections if I ever put it into the actual article, so I decided to preserve the version from my sandbox here for your general enjoyment.
Helsinki 1933/1936
This may well be the first part in a series. You see, the other day, I finally came across a website that has a full digitised series of the City of Helsinki's annual statistical reports. I found one of them on a shelf in the basement of the Lund University Faculty of Law library when I was working on my bachelor's dissertation, and ever since then I've wanted to find more of them - this saves me the trip, although I should probably go over there one of these days.
Now, Helsinki is a bit of a weird place as capitals go. Whereas Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo are all medieval cities with murky origins and around a thousand years of recorded history, we know for a fact that Helsinki was founded on the 12th of June, 1550, in order to prevent the farmers of Nyland from sailing across the bay to Reval to sell their produce, as had been their custom up until that point. Gustav Vasa had high hopes for the new city, but that was stopped by his death in 1560 and the Swedish conquest of Estonia the following year, which meant that the merchants of Reval now paid taxes to the Swedish crown, rendering the mercantilist goals behind Helsinki moot. It would stay a complete backwater for quite some time, and although the construction of Sveaborg starting in 1748 brought some life to the city, it was still far from the most important place east of the water. When Russia took over in 1809, it had around 4,000 inhabitants, less than half of the population of Åbo, which had been the capital of Finland for as long as "Finland" had been a concept.
It was likely the military presence combined with the city's location near the narrowest point of the Gulf of Finland that made Alexander I choose it as the new capital in 1812. In any case, he wanted to make sure the capital was not Åbo, which he saw as too close to Sweden both geographically and culturally, with its Swedish-speaking aristocracy and lingering Swedish institutions like the cathedral and university. Helsinki, on the other hand, had burned down during the Finnish War, which gave the Tsar and his administrators a free hand to design the ideal capital for the new country. Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, a former Gustavian courtier who had narrowly avoided execution for treason in 1794, was appointed to plan the new city, and Ehrenström hired the German architect Carl Ludwig Engel, who happened to be passing through on his way home from Saint Petersburg, to design its principal buildings. The two men designed a model neoclassical city, and Ehrenström's wide straight boulevards and Engel's monumental colonnades still define Helsinki to this day.
Ironically, given Alexander's desire to found a city separated from the old Swedish aristocracy, the old Swedish aristocracy soon came to dominate the new city. The decision to move the university after Åbo's great fire in 1827 brought in a large number of Swedish-speaking academics, and that same class continued to dominate the administrative state, so Helsinki remained a Swedish-speaking city for many decades. However, the university did become a hotbed of Finnish nationalism over the course of the 19th century, as academics documented the myths and culture of the Finnish peasantry, standardised and expanded the Finnish language, and made efforts to Finnicise their own personal lives, up to and including changing their names. This "Fennoman" movement was initially supported by the Russian state, who saw it as primarily directed against Sweden, and Alexander II in particular enjoyed very good relations with the Finnish people. But this support was based on a misunderstanding of the Fennoman project - they opposed the dominance of Swedish culture within Finland, but they largely wanted to remain under Swedish law, and certainly they did not want to see Russian law imposed on them. This was completely lost on Alexander's successors, who imposed stricter and stricter limitations on Finnish autonomy, culminating with the assassination of Governor-General Bobrikov by Eugen Schauman in 1904 and the general strike of 1905, parallel with the Russian revolution of the same year, which ended with Finland given wider self-rule and a unicameral parliament elected through universal suffrage - the first territory in Europe to extend this privilege to women as well as men.
Significantly for us, however, this reform did not extend to local government. City councils in Finland continued to be elected under the pre-reform system, which restricted the vote to taxpayers and allowed a single voter to control as many as 25 votes according to the amount of tax paid. (Worth noting that this was still more liberal than the Swedish system, whose upper limit was 40 votes after 1910 and 5% of the total votes before that.) This was a particular issue in Helsinki, because it meant that the Swedish-speaking elite maintained their grip on the city's institutions even after the population had become majority Finnish-speaking. Although the city remained primarily a military and administrative centre, some industry did spring up around the harbour in the late 19th century, helped by the arrival of Finland's first railway in 1862. The railway also brought in a steady stream of people from the interior, most of them working-class and Finnish-speaking, who settled around the industrial harbour northeast of the old city. This created a strict socioeconomic divide, which is still present today albeit in a slightly different form, between the eastern suburbs and the rest of the city.
Finland became independent in 1917 - I won't go into detail about that process, this is long enough already - and after three months as the capital of Red Finland, German troops recaptured the city in April 1918, allowing the White government under Mannerheim to return to power. The Whites did a lot of questionable things, which I also won't go into detail about, but after the German defeat in World War I put paid to their plans to introduce a monarchy, they did create quite a good democratic system (no doubt helped by Mannerheim's lack of desire to run the country in peacetime). One of their reforms was the introduction of universal and equal suffrage in local elections, and this was first implemented in December 1918. The 60 members of the Helsinki City Council, which had previously been elected in fifteen constituencies, would now be elected citywide under proportional representation, with 20 seats up for election each year. This was the system in use until 1925, at which point they moved over to full-council elections once every three years. At the same time, the council was reduced in size to 59, which I assume was to prevent deadlocked votes more than anything else.
The 20s saw some political excitement in Finland, with the right wing squabbling over how exactly the new republic should be governed, the Agrarians steadily peeling off more and more of their rural voters, and the Social Democrats splitting in half over the legacy of the Civil War. The supporters of the Red government had formed the Communist Party of Finland in 1919, and while this was almost immediately banned by the Finnish authorities, a sequence of front lists stood for election in the 20s with varying degrees of success. The final crackdown only came in 1930, spurred on by the quasi-fascist Lapua Movement, whose supporters eventually formed the Patriotic People's Movement (IKL) once they began facing police crackdowns and decided maybe the parliamentary road to power was worth pursuing after all. The IKL never got very far electorally, mostly taking votes from the nationalist end of the National Coalition Party, and they had a particularly hard time in Helsinki given the multicultural nature of the city, and especially of its elite. Instead, the main forces in the capital were, as they always had been, the Social Democratic Party, which now had a solid hold on the working classes once again, and the Swedish People's Party, who remained the main right-wing force in the city with particularly strong support in the southern area. However, even at this time, the SFP were being squeezed as the city kept growing, and more and more Finnish-speakers began to attain wealth and education enough to join its upper crust. These new men and women of Helsinki largely voted for the Coalition, although the Progressives had a strong niche among them and the academic class. There was also a Swedish equivalent to them, the confusingly-named Swedish Left, who had been formed by SFP dissidents who opposed the party's monarchist line, and were basically a joke everywhere outside the capital. In Helsinki, however, they had a solid niche, winning four seats in 1933.
I had already mapped the 1933 election before - it was the subject of the book I found in Lund way back when - and so the above is simply a retread of that map, changed to fit my current style and with some islands recoloured now that I know roughly how the polling areas were drawn. Below, however, is a new map of 1936, the final election held before WWII, which as you can see did not feature a staggering amount of change. The Social Democrats and the Coalition each gained one (1) seat, while the Progressives and the Swedish Left each lost one (1). The map is hardly any more interesting - the SDP made some gains around the western harbour, while the Coalition won a second district in Töölö (the spiritual home of that new Finnish-speaking bourgeoisie, and also the site of the new Parliament House opened in 1930). The SFP held their pole position on the right, but would not keep it for very long after the war. Because Helsinki was about to enter its most intense period of growth ever, and it would emerge nearly unrecognisable.
Now, Helsinki is a bit of a weird place as capitals go. Whereas Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo are all medieval cities with murky origins and around a thousand years of recorded history, we know for a fact that Helsinki was founded on the 12th of June, 1550, in order to prevent the farmers of Nyland from sailing across the bay to Reval to sell their produce, as had been their custom up until that point. Gustav Vasa had high hopes for the new city, but that was stopped by his death in 1560 and the Swedish conquest of Estonia the following year, which meant that the merchants of Reval now paid taxes to the Swedish crown, rendering the mercantilist goals behind Helsinki moot. It would stay a complete backwater for quite some time, and although the construction of Sveaborg starting in 1748 brought some life to the city, it was still far from the most important place east of the water. When Russia took over in 1809, it had around 4,000 inhabitants, less than half of the population of Åbo, which had been the capital of Finland for as long as "Finland" had been a concept.
It was likely the military presence combined with the city's location near the narrowest point of the Gulf of Finland that made Alexander I choose it as the new capital in 1812. In any case, he wanted to make sure the capital was not Åbo, which he saw as too close to Sweden both geographically and culturally, with its Swedish-speaking aristocracy and lingering Swedish institutions like the cathedral and university. Helsinki, on the other hand, had burned down during the Finnish War, which gave the Tsar and his administrators a free hand to design the ideal capital for the new country. Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, a former Gustavian courtier who had narrowly avoided execution for treason in 1794, was appointed to plan the new city, and Ehrenström hired the German architect Carl Ludwig Engel, who happened to be passing through on his way home from Saint Petersburg, to design its principal buildings. The two men designed a model neoclassical city, and Ehrenström's wide straight boulevards and Engel's monumental colonnades still define Helsinki to this day.
Ironically, given Alexander's desire to found a city separated from the old Swedish aristocracy, the old Swedish aristocracy soon came to dominate the new city. The decision to move the university after Åbo's great fire in 1827 brought in a large number of Swedish-speaking academics, and that same class continued to dominate the administrative state, so Helsinki remained a Swedish-speaking city for many decades. However, the university did become a hotbed of Finnish nationalism over the course of the 19th century, as academics documented the myths and culture of the Finnish peasantry, standardised and expanded the Finnish language, and made efforts to Finnicise their own personal lives, up to and including changing their names. This "Fennoman" movement was initially supported by the Russian state, who saw it as primarily directed against Sweden, and Alexander II in particular enjoyed very good relations with the Finnish people. But this support was based on a misunderstanding of the Fennoman project - they opposed the dominance of Swedish culture within Finland, but they largely wanted to remain under Swedish law, and certainly they did not want to see Russian law imposed on them. This was completely lost on Alexander's successors, who imposed stricter and stricter limitations on Finnish autonomy, culminating with the assassination of Governor-General Bobrikov by Eugen Schauman in 1904 and the general strike of 1905, parallel with the Russian revolution of the same year, which ended with Finland given wider self-rule and a unicameral parliament elected through universal suffrage - the first territory in Europe to extend this privilege to women as well as men.
Significantly for us, however, this reform did not extend to local government. City councils in Finland continued to be elected under the pre-reform system, which restricted the vote to taxpayers and allowed a single voter to control as many as 25 votes according to the amount of tax paid. (Worth noting that this was still more liberal than the Swedish system, whose upper limit was 40 votes after 1910 and 5% of the total votes before that.) This was a particular issue in Helsinki, because it meant that the Swedish-speaking elite maintained their grip on the city's institutions even after the population had become majority Finnish-speaking. Although the city remained primarily a military and administrative centre, some industry did spring up around the harbour in the late 19th century, helped by the arrival of Finland's first railway in 1862. The railway also brought in a steady stream of people from the interior, most of them working-class and Finnish-speaking, who settled around the industrial harbour northeast of the old city. This created a strict socioeconomic divide, which is still present today albeit in a slightly different form, between the eastern suburbs and the rest of the city.
Finland became independent in 1917 - I won't go into detail about that process, this is long enough already - and after three months as the capital of Red Finland, German troops recaptured the city in April 1918, allowing the White government under Mannerheim to return to power. The Whites did a lot of questionable things, which I also won't go into detail about, but after the German defeat in World War I put paid to their plans to introduce a monarchy, they did create quite a good democratic system (no doubt helped by Mannerheim's lack of desire to run the country in peacetime). One of their reforms was the introduction of universal and equal suffrage in local elections, and this was first implemented in December 1918. The 60 members of the Helsinki City Council, which had previously been elected in fifteen constituencies, would now be elected citywide under proportional representation, with 20 seats up for election each year. This was the system in use until 1925, at which point they moved over to full-council elections once every three years. At the same time, the council was reduced in size to 59, which I assume was to prevent deadlocked votes more than anything else.
The 20s saw some political excitement in Finland, with the right wing squabbling over how exactly the new republic should be governed, the Agrarians steadily peeling off more and more of their rural voters, and the Social Democrats splitting in half over the legacy of the Civil War. The supporters of the Red government had formed the Communist Party of Finland in 1919, and while this was almost immediately banned by the Finnish authorities, a sequence of front lists stood for election in the 20s with varying degrees of success. The final crackdown only came in 1930, spurred on by the quasi-fascist Lapua Movement, whose supporters eventually formed the Patriotic People's Movement (IKL) once they began facing police crackdowns and decided maybe the parliamentary road to power was worth pursuing after all. The IKL never got very far electorally, mostly taking votes from the nationalist end of the National Coalition Party, and they had a particularly hard time in Helsinki given the multicultural nature of the city, and especially of its elite. Instead, the main forces in the capital were, as they always had been, the Social Democratic Party, which now had a solid hold on the working classes once again, and the Swedish People's Party, who remained the main right-wing force in the city with particularly strong support in the southern area. However, even at this time, the SFP were being squeezed as the city kept growing, and more and more Finnish-speakers began to attain wealth and education enough to join its upper crust. These new men and women of Helsinki largely voted for the Coalition, although the Progressives had a strong niche among them and the academic class. There was also a Swedish equivalent to them, the confusingly-named Swedish Left, who had been formed by SFP dissidents who opposed the party's monarchist line, and were basically a joke everywhere outside the capital. In Helsinki, however, they had a solid niche, winning four seats in 1933.
I had already mapped the 1933 election before - it was the subject of the book I found in Lund way back when - and so the above is simply a retread of that map, changed to fit my current style and with some islands recoloured now that I know roughly how the polling areas were drawn. Below, however, is a new map of 1936, the final election held before WWII, which as you can see did not feature a staggering amount of change. The Social Democrats and the Coalition each gained one (1) seat, while the Progressives and the Swedish Left each lost one (1). The map is hardly any more interesting - the SDP made some gains around the western harbour, while the Coalition won a second district in Töölö (the spiritual home of that new Finnish-speaking bourgeoisie, and also the site of the new Parliament House opened in 1930). The SFP held their pole position on the right, but would not keep it for very long after the war. Because Helsinki was about to enter its most intense period of growth ever, and it would emerge nearly unrecognisable.
Helsinki 1918
And of course, as I was writing those maps up, I found the 1918 election results in an earlier report that also had boundaries. The difference, again, was not huge - though it is worth noting that this would've been one of the absolute last elections contested by the Finnish and Young Finnish parties before their realignment along republican/monarchist lines the following year.
A minor update on the South African election front - I still haven't found any good map sources, but I have been able to get access to all general election results from 1910 onwards, so with that in mind, I've added some stuff to the set of Cape Town maps I made previously. The main addition here is the 1943 result, which was quite boring, what with it being a wartime election and Cape Town being extremely pro-British - the United Party were unopposed nearly everywhere, with just a few HNP candidates on the more Afrikaans-speaking fringe (and one in Gardens for reasons that escape me) and a couple of Communists in the working-class seats of Salt River and Woodstock. The three seats on the edge of this map - in clockwise order, Vasco, Cape Flats and South Peninsula - I don't know the exact borders for, so take those lines with a grain of salt. Granted I don't know the exact borders of Wynberg (the southernmost "urban" seat) in 1943 either, but past me was apparently confident enough to make a guess, so that seat is on there.
Very good work Max, it can't have been easy to find some of those sources.
Actually it turned out to be easier than any previous step of this process - some guy on Wikipedia sent me a message asking if he could email me the full set. Turns out it's sometimes useful to be on there.