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Max's election maps and assorted others

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Well, I got as far as the present-day oblast boundary inside Ukraine before I realised that a) said boundary actually aligns pretty well with the interwar Polish administrative boundaries I'm using as the base now, and b) the paste jobs I'd done before realising this were way off the mark. So most of what's new on this map - pretty much everything in present-day Ukraine, in fact - has been drawn twice, which is why it took a little while (or feels like it did for me, anyway). But I'm now past the Galician capital and about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way done. Worth noting that Lwów is also the only district for which I'm 100% confident of the subdistrict boundaries, because someone's put up very detailed maps of it on Wikipedia in an attempt to map the Polish language isle surrounding Lwów itself (extremely Wikipedia moments). For the rest of it, I've had to rely on educated guesses and period maps, but it should be roughly accurate. About level with the Krain districts, in any case.

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Here's where the language map gets interesting as well - while Western Galicia was overwhelmingly Polish, the east was far more mixed. Ruthenians (Ukrainians and related groups) made up a majority of the region's population, but there were significant pockets of Polish-speakers (most notably the Lwów area, as mentioned), in addition to some German settlements left over from the Josephinian era and, of course, the shtetls. Curiously, the areas of Galicia farthest from the Russian border, up in the mountains, were some of the most intensely Ukrainian - this does of course mirror the Subcarpathian areas of Hungary, and fits with those areas being generally less cosmopolitan and more isolated than the plains further north and east.

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Well, I think it's time we had the full overview.

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Will do a description of Galicia like I've done for the other crown lands, as well as election maps, some other time.
 
Okay, I'm not going to cut out Galicia from the overview maps and upload it again just so I can make this description a bit more readable. Go look at them, they're just a bit further up on this page.

The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was one of the three Austrian crown lands to be styled a kingdom, along with Bohemia and Dalmatia (formerly also Illyria, but we're not counting that since it was dissolved in 1848 and split into several different new provinces). In essence, it covered the lands gained by Austria during the Partitions of Poland, with the exception of the areas given over to Russia in 1815, and at 78,000 square kilometres and around eight million inhabitants, it was the largest and most populous Austrian crown land excluding Hungary. It included the ancient Polish capital of Krakow, which had been a city-state but was annexed by Austria in 1848, as well as the multicultural city of Lemberg (Lwów/Lviv), which was both its capital and largest city. In addition, it included most of the northern side of the Carpathian Mountains, with significant mining traditions in some of its mountainous regions, as well as a large chunk of the Central European Plain. A narrow majority of the population - around 55% - spoke Polish, with another 40% or so speaking "Ruthenian" (the Austrian catch-all term for any Eastern Slavic language not clearly identifiable as Russian, so mainly Ukrainian but also various Rusyn dialects in the mountains) and the rest being a mix of German, Yiddish and other trace minorities. Around 10% of the population cited their faith as Jewish, a number that got as high as 25% in some districts, but as far as I can tell, the Austrian census did not include Yiddish as a language option, and most of the Jews did not claim to speak German, but rather whatever language the local goyim spoke, usually Polish. There was also a large Roma community, which as you might expect just didn't show up on the census at all, at least not as an identifiable group.

Although the Poles were only a slight majority of the population in Galicia, the region's history as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth meant that the Polish szlachta (nobility) held a tight grip on almost all positions of authority in the province. By and large, at least after 1848, the Austrian authorities supported them in this, and from 1861 onwards, a diet (sejm krajowy) was set up in Lemberg to govern the province. Elected through roughly the same curiate system as all the other Austrian provincial diets, this body was dominated by the szlachta from the very beginning, and while the peasantry began to assert itself in the later years, it was never enough to shift power entirely away from them. Polish (and, to some extent, Ukrainian) intelligentsia did quite well in Galicia, where there was little of the repression and censorship that characterised life in Russian Poland nor the economic pressures exerted against Poles in Germany, and the region would give the interwar Polish Republic many of its leading figures and political movements. For the peasantry, it was quite a different story - poor education, inefficient agriculture and neglectful local authorities caused such pressure on the lower classes that "Galician misery" (nędza galicyjska) is still a familiar word for extreme poverty in the Polish language today. By 1900, the province was in such dire straits that for many, especially the Jewish population, their only viable option was to emigrate.

Another oddity about Galicia was the fact that it was the only province to have its own electoral system for the Reichsrat. There were significant differences in how the constituencies were drawn from one place to another, but in Galicia the rural constituencies actually elected two members each, with the result that the province only had 70 constituencies for 106 members. This was officially to allow representation for minority groups in ethnically mixed areas - in practice, since the west tended to be almost entirely Polish while the east was a mix of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, this had the added bonus of diluting the representation of Ukrainians and allowing Poles to take 78 out of 106 seats in the 1907 elections. In fact, "Ruthenians" were the single most underrepresented ethnic group in the Reichsrat, with 102,470 people per representative, compared to 49,680 on average for the whole empire. Of course, part of this is due to Galicia itself being underrepresented, as the Reichsrat was apportioned based on tax revenue, which was not good news for a province characterised by endemic poverty and famine.

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(election results to be added later)
 
Very disappointed that you didn't mention that, yes, they elected 2 members, but through a three-round system. It's so nuts.

But very impressed you have the boundaries of the urban districts in Lviv or Krakau.
 
Nanwe said:
Very disappointed that you didn't mention that, yes, they elected 2 members, but through a three-round system. It's so nuts.
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I was actually meaning to ask you for help with that, because I still can't wrap my head around how exactly it worked.
Nanwe said:
But very impressed you have the boundaries of the urban districts in Lviv or Krakau.
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Maps of Lemberg from this era are actually surprisingly easy to come by, so those boundaries were the first part of Galicia I was able to finish. Krakow was even easier since the boundaries just followed its districts, which had very predictable boundaries themselves (helped by just how small the city was at this point - it was greatly expanded in 1910, but the electoral map was not updated to reflect this).
 
Ares96 said:
I was actually meaning to ask you for help with that, because I still can't wrap my head around how exactly it worked.
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TBH I barely understand it, but according to the electoral law (Art. 34) [sidenote: this website is great as it has the electoral law for nearly all Cisleithanian provinces]

I have an excel with all results for 1907 in case you want to check it out or the vote margins for that matter. And this is the document with the breakdowns of vote shares, and some explanations behind the logic of the system.

§ 34. Werden von ein und demselben Wahlkörper gleichzeitig zwei Abgeordnete gewählt, so ist zunächst derjenige als gewählt anzusehen, welcher mehr als die Hälfte aller abgegebenen gültigen Stimmen für sich hat. Neben dem mit absoluter Stimmenmehrheit Gewählten ist als Zweitgewählter derjenige zu betrachten, welcher mehr als ein Viertel der abgegebenen gültigen Stimmen für sich hat.

Hat im ersten Wahlgange keiner die absolute Stimmenmehrheit erreicht, so ist ein zweiter Wahlgang einzuleiten. Wenn auch in diesem Wahlgange keiner die absolute Stimmenmehrheit erlangt hat, so ist zur engeren Wahl (§ 35) zu schreiten.

Wenn im ersten oder zweiten Wahlgange zwar ein zu Wählendern die absolute Stimmenmehrheit erreicht hat, die übrigen Stimmen aber auf zwei oder mehrere Personen derart zersplittert sind, daß keine mehr als ein Viertel der abgegebenen Stimmen für sich hat, so ist hinsichtlich des zweiten zu Wählenden die engere Wahl (§ 35) einzuleiten. Sind im ersten oder zweiten Wahlgange überhaupt nur für eine Person Stimmen abgegeben worden oder sind die für das zweite Mandat abgegebenen Stimmen auf eine Person vereint, ohne daß die zur Wahl erforderliche Stimmenzahl erreicht wurde, so ist für die Wahl des zweiten Abgeordneten ein neuer Wahlgang gemäß § 33 einzuleiten.

§ 35. Handelt es sich um die Wahl eines Abgeordneten, so haben sich bei der engeren Wahl die Wähler auf jene zwei Personen zu beschränken, die bei dem vorangegangenen Wahlgange - in dem in § 34, letzter Absatz, vorgesehenen Falle nach demjenigen, der die erforderliche Stimmenzahl erreicht hat - die relativ meisten Stimmen für sich hatten.

Sind in der engeren Wahl zwei Abgeordnete zu wählen, so findet die engere Wahl zwischen jenen drei Personen statt, die beim letzten Wahlgange die relativ meisten Stimmen für sich hatten, wobei jene zwei Personen als gewählt anzusehen sind, auf welche die relativ meisten Stimmen entfallen sind.

Bei Stimmengleichheit entscheidet das vom Vorsitzenden der Wahlkommission zu ziehende Los, wer in die engere Wahl zu bringen sei.

Jede Stimme, welche bei der engeren Wahl auf eine nicht in diese Wahl gebrachte Person fällt, ist als ungültig zu betrachten.

Sind bei der engeren Wahl alle abgegebenen gültigen Stimmen zwischen den in die Wahl gebrachten Personen gleich geteilt, so entscheidet das vom Vorsitzenden der Wahlkommission zu ziehende Los, wer von ihnen als gewählt anzusehen sei.
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§ 34. If two deputies are elected at the same time by one and the same electoral body, the one who received more than half of all valid votes cast is to be regarded as elected first. In addition to the person elected with an absolute majority of votes, the second elected person is the one who has more than a quarter of the valid votes cast.

If no one has achieved an absolute majority of votes in the first ballot, a second ballot must be initiated. If no one has achieved the absolute majority of votes in this ballot either, a shortlist (§ 35) is to be taken.

If, in the first or second ballot, one person to be voted has achieved the absolute majority of votes, but the remaining votes are split between two or more people in such a way that no one has more than a quarter of the votes cast for himself, the second person to be voted has the shortlist (§ 35). If votes were cast for only one person in the first or second ballot, or if the votes cast for the second mandate were for one person without the number of votes required for the election being reached, a new ballot is appropriate for the election of the second deputy § 33 to initiate.

§ 35. If a deputy is to be elected, the voters in the shortlist must limit themselves to those two people who, in the previous round of voting - in the case provided for in § 34, last paragraph, after the person who has reached the required number of votes - who relatively had the most votes for themselves.

If two deputies are to be elected in the shortlist, the shortlist will be between those three people who received the relatively most votes in the last ballot, with those two people who received the relatively most votes being elected .

In the event of a tie, the lot to be drawn by the chairman of the electoral commission decides who is to be shortlisted.

Any vote cast in the shortlist for a person not included in this election shall be considered invalid.

If, in the shortlist, all valid votes cast are divided equally between the persons put into the election, the lot to be drawn by the chairman of the election commission decides which of them is to be regarded as elected.
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Ares96 said:
Around 10% of the population cited their faith as Jewish, a number that got as high as 25% in some districts, but as far as I can tell, the Austrian census did not include Yiddish as a language option, and most of the Jews did not claim to speak German, but rather whatever language the local goyim spoke, usually Polish.
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This carried over into the diaspora, for what it's worth, in terms of identifying place of origin and not just language. For a long time, our extended family assumed we were Polish Jews based on the language categorization and during immigration proceedings, despite the fact that the region whence we came wasn't part of Poland at any point except the interwar period. It wasn't until much later that it became clear the borders would fall well within the historical Ruthenian region, and now modern-day Ukraine.

From what I understand from genealogical research, this is not uncommon for Galician Jews, and it all goes back to the census data you're talking about: people were essentially forced to choose with whom they identified, either their neighbors or the linguistic roots of what they spoke. I think it's understandable why most would choose the former in this case!

And on a personal level, it didn't help that no one would spell "Gwoździec" consistently...
 
Nanwe said:
TBH I barely understand it, but according to the electoral law (Art. 34) [sidenote: this website is great as it has the electoral law for nearly all Cisleithanian provinces]

I have an excel with all results for 1907 in case you want to check it out or the vote margins for that matter. And this is the document with the breakdowns of vote shares, and some explanations behind the logic of the system.
Click to expand...
And I thought Massachusetts in the early 19th century had the most unnecessarily complicated way to elect a small number of delegates.
 
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