Max's election maps and assorted others

[Ares96]

The years following the end of the First World War were not an easy time for Europe, as the major powers reeled from the devastation of war and the new states of Central and Eastern Europe struggled to establish themselves and find a place in the global political and economic order. For a country like Denmark, firmly established as a state and as a nation with its own identity and largely untouched by the war itself, the political side of the post-war crisis was hardly felt - the Folketing elected in September 1920 yielded a relatively stable government and lasted three and a half years - but the economic side reared its head before too long. Denmark's biggest source of economic activity was selling surplus agricultural products to Germany and the UK, and with Germany in an economic tailspin, the Danish economy soon felt the effects. In 1922, Landmandsbanken, the biggest bank in Denmark and an institution that specialised in providing loans to farmers, declared bankruptcy, after which it was revealed that it had been systematically padding its books for years. The Rigsdag was forced to step in and provide a reconstruction plan, and (this is how you can tell it was a hundred years ago) several of the bank's executives were tried and jailed for fraud. Emil Glückstadt, the managing director, was found guilty and sentenced to prison time, but died before the sentence could be carried out.

The Landmandsbanken case marked the beginning of two unstable years for the Neergaard ministry, which only held minorities in either house of the Rigsdag and relied on support from the Conservatives to pass its programme. This turned out to be a big issue in light of the crisis, since the two parties' main ideological disagreement was trade policy. Venstre, being a right-liberal farmers' party, continued to believe in free trade and free markets, while the Conservatives believed tariffs were more necessary than ever to protect the Danish economy from predatory foreign actors. On top of which the krone was suffering heavy inflation (not as heavy as that of the German mark, but still), which would need government action to get back in check. Eventually, after many government crises, Neergaard was able to get his revaluation plan through the Folketing in early 1924, and went to the country immediately thereafter in the hopes of being able to present a strong record in government.

This met with mixed success, to say the least. The country was still in a deep recession, and most voters did not see Venstre as a party that had fought their corner especially hard over the previous four years. On top of this, it was pretty widely recognised that a new Venstre ministry would have to depend on Conservative votes, and that that would mean continued confusion over trade and economic policy. The Conservatives themselves underscored this point by attacking the government for not taking strong enough action to protect Danish businesses, while the opposition happily seized on the disunity to underline their calls for a strong and resolute government that would make all Danes better off. The Social Democrats proposed a plan to fight inflation and the rising deficit by instituting wealth and luxury taxes, which caused some rumblings among their opponents, but overall the party did not seem as radical as it had in the past, and more and more voters saw them as the less bad option.

When the country went to the polls, this was clearly and dramatically reflected. For the first time ever, the Social Democrats received not only the largest voteshare but the largest delegation in the Folketing, taking seven seats from Venstre and giving the lower house a slight left-wing majority for the first time since 1918. Nor would they return to passively supporting a Radical ministry - Zahle was never going to come back within eyesight of the King, and the Social Democrats held a clearly dominant position in a way they hadn't the previous time, so they were able to insist upon their own ministry led by party leader Thorvald Stauning, who had chaired the Copenhagen City Council during the Easter Crisis and was relatively respected by the King despite his working-class origins (he'd originally worked as a cigar sorter before becoming a trade union organiser and then entering party politics). Stauning's ministry made history on its first day by including Nina Bang, the first woman to serve in a parliamentary government anywhere in the world (the first overall being Alexandra Kollontai), as education minister. Of course, the parliamentary situation was essentially the same as before the election, only in reverse, and so it remained to be seen how much of its economic programme the new ministry would be able to get past the Radicals.

Oh, and in September, the Landsting held its first regular election since the 1920 dissolutions. Half of the constituency seats were renewed, but the members elected by the outgoing Landsting in 1920 all remained in place. It didn't yield too many surprises, with slight gains for the Social Democrats but a continued strong right-wing majority.

 

[Ares96]

Although Stauning came to power with high hopes, the fact was he had nowhere near a majority in either chamber of the Rigsdag, and this meant that as the economic troubles that plagued the Neergaard ministry continued, the only available course of action was to seek broad compromise to restore confidence in the economy. In particular, Stauning and his finance minister C. V. Bramsnes were concerned with revaluing the krone, which had sustained heavy inflation since the war, and initially they were successful in this - a broad parliamentary agreement was reached, the krone was revalued, and speculation soared on both Danish goods and the currency itself. However, it turns out sudden deflation is a very, very bad thing for a country as export-dependent as Denmark, and soon unemployment began to rise as businesses found it harder and harder to sell their goods abroad. The Stauning ministry's solution to this was to seek loans abroad and introduce a wealth tax in order to shore up the state's revenue shortfall. However, the Radicals, being largely a party of the educated middle classes, balked at this and voted against the proposals at the last minute, giving Stauning no choice but to go to the King and ask for an early election.

The resulting election campaign was unusually bitter, with the Social Democrats and Radicals (who, remember, had been in a full electoral alliance not ten years before) openly attacking one another and accusing one another of having brought down the "democratic front" - the Radicals believed the Social Democrats were using the crisis as an excuse to opportunistically push their reform agenda, while the Social Democrats believed the Radicals had sold out their alliance and the most progressive government in the country's history to protect their wealthiest supporters. On the opposition side, by contrast, the divisions were less than they had been in 1924. The crisis had convinced some in Venstre that state protections for Danish agriculture were more important than free trade, and that tariffs might not be such a bad idea as a result.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that a new party appeared in response to the agricultural crisis - the wonderfully-named Danmarks Retsforbund, which I'm choosing to render literally as the Justice League of Denmark (even if English-language sources usually call it the Justice Party). This was a single-issue party that campaigned for the introduction of a Georgist economic model, with a single tax on land value to replace all existing taxes, a policy that turned out to be quite popular among smallholders and tenant farmers who believed it would leave them paying a smaller share of overall taxes than the existing model. They'd actually stood for the first time in 1924, but failed to win any seats then - in 1926 they managed to get two of them, both in Jutland.

The election result was almost identical to 1924 in terms of votes - the Radicals lost a bit and the Conservatives gained a bit, but Venstre got exactly 28.27% of the vote in both elections, and the Social Democrats moved only about half a percentage point. However, quirks of the electoral law (specifically the fact that Venstre had never rated levelling seats in any election since that system's introduction, and they gained constituency seats this time) meant that Venstre still got a net gain of two seats, while the Social Democrats lost two (despite gaining a small amount in the popular vote) and the Radicals four. This was enough to tip the balance in the Folketing, and Venstre were able to form another minority government under Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, who'd been minister for agriculture under Neergaard.

 

[Ares96]

Okay, I will get back to Denmark at some point, but in the meantime, I've been travelling Europe and I've found a few things that I wanted to map. First off, while I was in Vienna I learned a fair bit about their troubled history, and in particular that of their public transport network. What makes it strange as major cities go is that it hit its peak population over a hundred years ago and still hasn't exceeded that figure - it was the capital of one of the great empires of Europe (albeit one in terminal decline), but the First World War cut it off from its hinterland, cutting its growth short, and the Second World War severely damaged it, causing a drop in population that it's only really started recovering from after the 1990s.

Of course, no one saw this coming before 1914. From about the mid-19th century, when the city's inner walls were torn down and railways began to be built connecting it to all corners of the Habsburg empire, Vienna saw constant explosive growth. From around half a million inhabitants in 1850, by 1900 it had 1.8 million, and it would reach well over two million before the outbreak of war in 1914. This was a pattern shared by many other European cities, and as with all of them, Vienna struggled to accommodate its new arrivals. Until this point, Vienna had been quite geographically compact, made up of the inner city (the area inside the old walls) and a set of eight Vorstädte (inner suburbs) which were in turn surrounded by the Linienwall, an old fortification that had been turned to serving as a toll barrier for people and goods entering the city. The toll was abolished sometime in the mid-19th century, however (I can't figure out exactly when), and some of the land of the Linienwall was used for railway terminals. Finally, in 1890, the decision was taken to tear down what remained of the Linienwall and annex the villages immediately outside it into the city to make way for future construction.

This presented a problem, however. The new Vororte (outer suburbs) were too far from the city centre to make walking to and from work feasible for its residents, and the city's network of horse trams was already under heavy strain. A new solution was needed, and ideally one that could simultaneously solve another problem Vienna had in common with most other European capitals: its rail network was split between several terminus stations, none of which had track connections to one another. The Austrian government, and the military in particular, wanted rail connections built through the city so that people and goods could more easily be shipped from one end of the empire to another. Already in 1882, an answer to both these problems had been found by Berlin, which built an elevated railway called the Stadtbahn across the city from west to east. Vienna's city fathers found this a good example, and in 1892 the city council approved the construction of a Stadtbahn for Vienna. After a series of technical and financial challenges during construction, the grand opening was finally held in 1898, and the initial network was completed in 1901.



The reason I'm not translating the word Stadtbahn, btw, is that it's genuinely hard to describe what exactly the Wiener Stadtbahn was when it opened. It's been called one of Europe's first metros, but as mentioned, one of the reasons it was built was to connect the railway termini, and so its lines were connected to mainline railways and used by goods, post and troop trains on a regular basis. In addition, even the local trains that served the Stadtbahn itself were steam-powered, and many of them crossed onto the mainline rail network to take in additional suburban stations. The only such lines that were considered part of the Stadtbahn proper were that between Hauptzollamt and Praterstern, which connected the network to the Nordbahnhof, and the segment of the Westbahn between Penzing and Hütteldorf, which connected the Stadtbahn's Vorortelinie, the westernmost and most technically demanding line of the network, with the rest of the network in the southwest.

There was also the issue that the Stadtbahn was, well, just not very useful for the local population. Trains were slow, infrequent, unreliable and - as a result of using steam power while running partly underground, especially in the inner city - unpleasant to use. On top of which, the originally-planned network had been pared down significantly, with segments and stations of limited strategic importance removed, but many of those segments were ones that would have been vitally important for passenger service. Local wits dubbed it the Um-die-Stadt-Bahn ("around-the-city railway"), and the population largely shunned it. Instead, the electric tramway opened at about the same time became the backbone of the city's public transport system, and would remain so for the next several decades. But as with the horse trams before them, the electric trams were unfit to handle the passenger volumes of a city the size of Vienna, and so it wasn't long after the opening of the Stadtbahn before yet more plans began to be drawn up.

In 1911, the city council again decided to approve the construction of a new rail network, this time a separated underground system inspired by the Paris Metro. This was intended to have three lines, at least to begin with: the first would cross the inner city in a north-south direction, then turning west to serve Mariahilf, the Westbahnhof and the Schmelz, a former military exercise ground now slated for construction, before terminating at Ottakring on the Vorortelinie. The second line would add an east-west crossing, then split in two to follow both Alser Straße and Währinger Straße to their respective Stadtbahn stations, and in the latter case on to Gersthof in the northwest. The third line, finally, would follow the Ring around the west side of the inner city (complementing the Stadtbahn in the east) and then head south to serve Wieden and Favoriten. All three lines were planned with future extensions in mind.

Construction on the first line of the Elektrische Schnellbahn, as it was dubbed, was slated to begin in autumn of 1914.



We know what happened next, of course. The empire that lent its glory and power to Vienna collapsed into a heap of military failure and ethnic conflict. The Habsburgs were expelled from the country without ceremony or pardon, and it was all the new Austrian state could do to save itself from bankruptcy, let alone fund large infrastructure projects. Even the Stadtbahn had been closed down in 1918 owing to chronic coal shortages. One of the few institutions that retained any agency whatsoever in this new environment was the city of Vienna, run since 1919 by the Social Democratic Workers' Party, which set about doing what it could to improve the transport situation. In 1923, seizing on a plan proposed multiple times before the war, the city council voted to buy the bulk of the Stadtbahn (the segments coloured darker on the maps) and electrify it, reserving it for local traffic. The Wiener Elektrische Stadtbahn (WESt) was opened on 3 June 1925, and while it was still not as useful as some would've liked, it now ran three times as frequently as it had before the war and both trains and stations were free from coal smoke. The WESt remained in service under that name until 1989, and most of its length and all of its stations are today integrated into the U-Bahn. Line U6, which follows the old WESt alignment along the Gürtel, still uses overhead power wires and tram-like rolling stock just as it did before the conversion.

 

[Ares96]

The interwar period was... certainly a fun time to be Viennese. When we left off, the Social Democrats had taken power and used their mandate to raise taxes on various luxury goods, which were then in turn used to fund social projects, the most prominent of which was their mass social housing programme. These projects were opposed by the national government, but Vienna was now a state in its own right, and the new constitution left precious little space for the national government to interfere in state affairs. That changed in 1933, when the entire presidium of the National Council resigned at once and Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß used this as an excuse to declare the parliament "self-abolished", dissolve it and rule by decree. Over the next year or so, he would consolidate his rule into a proper dictatorship, merging the parties that supported his government into a new movement called the "Patriotic Front", which was consciously modelled on the Italian Fascist Party and similar movements across Europe. After a brief uprising of leftist paramilitaries in February 1934, the power of the Social Democrats over Vienna was broken, Mayor Karl Seitz removed from office and a new administration loyal to Dollfuß installed.

Part of the new "Austrofascist" regime's efforts to consolidate its power was a mass purge of the tramway staff, who were among the most solid supporters of "Red Vienna" and thus regarded as a potential focus of resistance to the new order. Weirdly enough, this meant that, when the Austrofascist regime fell and the Nazis took over in 1938, part of their effort to consolidate their power was to rehire all those socialist tram workers - sometimes the false and slanderous line that the Nazis were socialists accidentally gets corroborated by real-life historical events. This was probably not entirely politically motivated, however - that was part of it, but also the Nazis were very big on urban expansion - generally and for Vienna specifically. Very shortly after annexing Austria, they promulgated a series of laws that expanded the municipality of Vienna enormously, bringing it to nearly five times its earlier surface area and adding some 200,000 people to its population. They planned to expand the actual city to match, and that included improving its urban transport system. Which, in turn, meant that the old plans for an underground railway were dusted off and updated.

The plan eventually presented by Siemens in spring 1939 was fairly similar to the pre-war plan - the three lines had essentially the same layout in the inner city, although their alignments were straightened out considerably to allow higher speeds. In the suburbs, however, the network was a lot bigger. The Nazis were generally not too set on realism or achievability, and this was no exception - the 1939 U-Bahn plan included lines to suburbs that are either currently set to receive U-Bahn service sometime around the early 2030s (Hernals) or that have never been included in current extension plans at all (Gersthof, Lainz and Mauer). The first line scheduled to be built was the one between Mauer and Engerthstraße, which is thus labelled Line 1 on here (just like its 1914 equivalent). As with the previous time, their timing was absolutely impeccable - construction was set to start in August 1939.



Oh, and unlike the 1914 map I had, this one didn't have stations on it, so most of them are conjectural. Take it all with a grain of salt.

 

[Ares96]

With thanks to @Makemakean and apologies to @Erinthecute, here's the first of what will hopefully be a few more maps of Weimar-era elections. Thankfully, because I've already posted some simpler ones to the DA, that means I can just copy-paste the writeups from those ones for a little while, so here goes.

One of the first things the National Assembly did after convening in Weimar in February 1919 was set up a temporary republican government with itself as the legislative branch and a Reichspräsident (president) heading the executive. The Weimar Coalition parties, who held a solid majority in the Assembly, nominated Friedrich Ebert (SPD), the incumbent chancellor and President of the Council of People's Deputies. The only candidate against him was Count von Posadowsky-Wehner (DNVP), Interior Minister around the turn of the century, against whom Ebert won a crushing 73-12 majority of the Assembly delegates. Taking office on the 11th, Ebert appointed a cabinet two days later, made up of the Weimar Coalition parties and headed by Philipp Scheidemann (SPD). To liaise with the republican state governments being formed around Germany, a Staatenausschuss (states' committee) was also created, and this came to include representatives from all the German states as well as the fledgling Republic of German-Austria, where opinion favoured a union with Germany now that the Habsburgs weren't a factor anymore.

With the business of creating a national authority over with, the Assembly turned to its two most important tasks: making peace with the Allies and drawing up a constitution for Germany. The former proved both extremely easy and extremely difficult, as the peace negotiations started in January included only the five principal Allied powers, who came to an agreement among themselves and then presented Germany with finalised terms to either sign or face a resumption of war. The terms were harsh: Germany would abandon its wartime gains in the East (most of which had already slipped away), give up an additional ten percent of its territory and seven million citizens, desist from any attempt to unite with Austria, surrender all its colonies to the disposal of the League of Nations, reduce its army to 100,000 personnel and its navy to a fraction of its former size, pay a staggeringly enormous indemnity, and accept sole responsibility for causing the war. To ensure compliance, the Allies reserved the right to occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years, and German troops would not be allowed west of a line running 50km east of the Rhine.

The terms caused an uproar in Germany from the moment it became public. The territorial losses, while painful, had been expected, and stung less than the indemnity, the war guilt clause and the fact that Germany itself hadn't been party to the negotiations. The Foreign Minister tried to call for a peace based on the Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted during the armistice, but none of the Allies were interested in negotiating. Philipp Scheidemann resigned as Minister-President rather than having to endorse the treaty. Ebert was as opposed to it as Scheidemann, but as ever, took a more cautious line. He sent a note to Paul von Hindenburg, who was still in overall command of the Army, asking if the Army could possibly hold its own if the war were restarted. When Hindenburg said no, Ebert decided he had no choice but to push for ratification. The Assembly approved the treaty by a two-thirds majority, and it was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on the 28th of June, the fifth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. The war was over.

The Assembly was nearly done with its new constitution at this point. Rather than a pure presidential system like the American one or a pure parliamentary republic like the French one, the delegates opted to draw up a system that would mix elements of both. The result was something oddly similar to the Kaiserreich that came before it. The President (Reichspräsident), elected to a seven-year-term by popular vote, would appoint and dismiss the cabinet. The Chancellor (Reichskanzler) would preside over the cabinet, but had less authority over the individual ministers than was the case under the Empire. The cabinet would stand and fall as a unit, but it became common for ministers to serve in their positions over multiple cabinets.

The legislature would consist of the Reichsrat, appointed by the states and the provinces of Prussia and serving only an advisory function, and the much more powerful Reichstag. The Reichstag would be elected from largely the same constituencies as the National Assembly, but instead of apportioning seats directly to the constituencies, the "Weimar Constitution" established a system where a constituency list would get one seat for every 60,000 votes. Surpluses of more than 30,000 votes at the constituency level would be moved up to something called a Wahlkreisverband, a union of two or three constituencies (typically), where the same calculation would be made, then surpluses of more than 30,000 from that level would be moved to national level and the process repeated. The upshot was that the Reichstag was elected in a highly proportional way, but an extremely opaque one that also caused the number of members elected to fluctuate with turnout. In the eight elections held under the Weimar Constitution, the Reichstag would have anywhere between 463 and 608 members.

Contrary to the wishes of some Assembly delegates, the Weimar Constitution maintained the principle of federalism. The state governments that had formed would be recognised and given powers under the Constitution, and the boundaries, based on lines of princely ownership that no longer held significance, were largely maintained. In addition, Prussia functioned as a federation within the federation, with its provinces given broad powers of their own and the Prussian state legislature operating as a miniature of the national one with a Staatsrat appointed by the provinces.

The most ominous part of the Weimar Constitution, though, was Article 48, which dealt with emergency powers. It provided for the suspension of state governments that failed to exercise their obligations to the nation, and gave the President authority to suspend civil rights and govern by decree if "public security and order" (die öffentliche Sicherheit und Ordnung) were threatened. This would become the instrument for both Hindenburg's suspension of parliamentarism in 1930 and, of course, the establishment of Hitler's dictatorship in 1933.

For now though, the organs of state were in the hands of sober, responsible social democrats, committed republicans, who would only use their powers in good faith to defend the republic, never to subvert it. Well, except for that whole bit where they'd already conspired with the armed forces to suppress left-wing dissent and strike down their own people. Not everyone in the SPD was happy with this, and over the course of 1919 and early 1920 a large number of members and supporters moved over to the more left-leaning Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, USPD).

It wasn't just the left that grew restive. On the 13th of March, 1920, Berlin was the scene of a military coup, as a reactionary Freikorps brigade tried to overthrow the republic by force. The coup had been masterminded by General Walther von Lüttwitz, commander of the Army units in and around the capital, and civil servant Wolfgang Kapp - as a result, it is known to history either as the Kapp Putsch or the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch. The government had to flee to Dresden to avoid detention by the coupmakers, but the victory of German nationalism and tradition over the weak socialist traitors was not to be, as the army and civil service failed to defect and the coup was crushed in a hundred hours.

The response from the left was a general strike in support of the republic, which turned into an armed uprising when communists in the Ruhr region decided they'd rather use the opportunity to launch the true workers' democracy they'd been deprived of by the treacherous SPD the year before. The result was about the same as it had been the year before: the uprising was brutally crushed, with around a thousand militants killed in the fighting or through summary executions, and the government's dependency on the Freikorps to keep order was deepened right after the Freikorps had shown their true colours. Times were not great for the Weimar Coalition, though at least the immediate crises were all over.

The first national elections under the Weimar Constitution took place on the 6th of June, 1920, thirteen weeks after the Kapp Putsch and nine weeks after the end of the Ruhr uprising. Turnout was just about 80% in spite of everything - lower than in 1919, but not by much. The result was a massacre for the Weimar Coalition. The Centre, supported by its devout Catholic rural electorate, maintained most of its votes, but both the SPD and DDP were cut in half. The USPD won eighteen percent, making it the second-largest party, and the DVP and DNVP, both anti-republican at this time, made corresponding strides.

The Weimar Coalition parties had gone from a three-quarters majority in the National Assembly to just over forty percent in the first Reichstag. They would never regain their majority at any point in the republic's history.

EDIT: The borders in Saxony have been updated (still guesswork in places though, all I had was the towns above 2.000 people in each constituency) and a few details shifted around to make the key line up with the maps still to come.

 

[Ares96]

Heave away, haul away...

South Australia is the least populous mainland state of Australia, with some 1.8 million inhabitants as of 2021. Much like neighbouring Western Australia, a lot of that is concentrated in the state capital, Adelaide, which is home to just over three-quarters of the state's population, or 1.4 million people. Adelaide is one of the oldest cities in Australia, and having been incorporated in 1840, the Corporation of the City of Adelaide is its very oldest local government body, predating Sydney by two years. Typically for Australia, the boundaries of the city proper are the same now as they were then, which means that technically speaking, only about 25,000 people live in Adelaide itself with the remainder in suburban municipalities. Adelaide's city centre is laid out in a grid with wide streets and large green squares, likely inspired by cities like Philadelphia and Savannah, and surrounded by a ring of parks that form a physical barrier between it and the suburbs, which is likely part of why the city proper has never expanded. The city is a few miles inland, and the creatively-named harbour suburb of Port Adelaide and the corridor connecting it to the city was and is one of the most heavily industrialised urban areas in Australia, being home to the main Holden factory until 2017, as well as industries ranging from the ASC shipyard to Coopers brewery to a significant chunk of News Corp (which was founded there).

The remainder of the state is, as mentioned, fairly sparsely populated, but it's nevertheless unique as it's the only Australian state never to have been a penal colony. Instead, it was founded as a settler colony by high-minded British gentry who wanted to build an ideal society away from the overcrowding and pollution of England (stop me if you've heard this one before - and yes, of course there were already people living there). The need to attract settlers through means other than penal transportation meant the state became quite ethnically diverse from early on, with a particularly large contingent of Germans - this also meant a strong cultural backlash during World War I, when a huge number of towns and streets across the state changed names to avoid association with "enemy cultures". Due to this different settlement pattern, South Australia is also the only Australian state to have something approaching a regional accent, although it's quite faint compared to the differences you get in virtually any other English-speaking country.

So I've completely lost the plot here... ah yes, elections. As mentioned (or at least strongly hinted), South Australia was intended as a sort of yeoman farmer's paradise, and even though it was clear from very early on that Adelaide was going to be dominant in population terms (as early as 1851, the city held a quarter of the colony's inhabitants, and the surrounding County of Adelaide nearly half of them), the fathers of the colony made sure that the rural interest would always be more than adequately represented. Thus, its first constitution (enacted in 1856) called for no more than a third of the representatives in the House of Assembly to be elected from the capital. Even as the province-then-state enacted some very radical reforms, including giving women the vote as early as 1895, this disparity remained in force. In fact, it would be reinforced over time.

As with the country at large, South Australia saw a political realignment during the Great Depression, as the Labor Party (in government in the state as well as federally) was wracked by infighting over how to deal with the crisis while their opponents slowly began to unite against them. This went even further in South Australia than it did nationally, as all non-Labor forces formed a coalition dubbed the "Emergency Committee" and swept the state in the 1931 federal election, winning all seats except intensely working-class Hindmarsh. This success encouraged the two main right-wing parties, the Liberal Federation and the Country Party, to begin negotiating an all-out merger, which was achieved just in time to win a landslide in the 1933 state election. The newly-christened Liberal and Country League would be led by former Liberal leader Richard L. Butler, whose Gawler origins put him right on the border between Adelaide and the country, and the Country Party were able to secure a number of concessions from the party they were effectively joining. Most infamously, this included the re-entrenchment of the 2:1 rule in the new 1934 constitution, which also changed the electoral system from the old multi-member constituencies to single-member preferential voting. Of the 39 constituencies drawn up for the 1938 election, 13 were in Adelaide and 26 were country seats. This ratio was maintained when the seats were redrawn in 1956, even though the census that redistribution was based on showed that some 60% of the state (484,000 out of 797,000) lived in the capital. This created a farcical situation where the seats were drawn somewhat equitably within each division and followed quota pretty well, only the quota was about 23,000 for an Adelaide seat and 6,500 for a country one.

Even though Butler was responsible for implementing it, this system has become known to history as the "Playmander", after his successor, Thomas Playford IV (the numeral distinguishes him from his grandfather, who served as Premier in the 19th century). This is somewhat understandable, since even though it wasn't his creation, Playford was able to use the unequal electoral map to remain in office for a staggering twenty-seven years. He first came to power in 1938, when Butler used the death of a South Australian MP as an excuse to move into federal politics (he would, incidentally, lose the by-election in an upset, a sign of the right's impending troubles at the federal level), and even though he was initially chosen as a compromise candidate, he didn't leave office until 1965. There were basically three reasons for this: firstly, the state enjoyed a long period of explosive economic growth, as Adelaide became home to all those industries mentioned earlier and extractive and defence industries sprung up around the rural parts of the state. Secondly, as is so often the case in small polities, the world of Adelaide politics was quite chummy, and Playford, very much the pragmatic developmentalist type, was often on better terms with the Labor opposition than he was with his own backbenches. (In)famously, Mick O'Halloran, who led the Labor Party for most of the 1950s, dined at Playford's house once a week, and once said Playford did a better job serving Labor's constituents than he himself ever could.

The third factor, then, was the Playmander. But while it did very clearly disadvantage Labor, it wasn't as devastating as one might expect. Rural South Australia had quite a few industrial towns (especially around the Spencer Gulf in the "north" of the state) whose workers were staunch Labor voters, and the LCL were often challenged in the agricultural belt by various independents. The LCL never held more than 23 seats in the lower house all through Playford's tenure, which made him quite vulnerable to backbench revolts, and from 1950 onwards they'd either hold steady or lose seats at every election. Of course, this was not only in spite of Labor frequently winning the two-party-preferred vote (as far as we can tell, anyway), but also just seemed to have nothing to do with the popular vote in general. In 1953, even as Labor won 53% of the 2PP vote, the LCL won 21 seats to their 14 (and four independents), and in 1956, this balance was essentially unchanged (Labor won one seat from an independent, and that was it) even as the LCL went back to a slim 2PP majority. The insidiousness of the Playmander was less in the fact that it delivered artificial LCL majorities (although, as mentioned, it did do that quite frequently), and more in how it did it - by making sure a few thousand rural voters held more influence over election results than the bulk of the state's population, and thus detaching state politics from the concerns of the majority.

Although perhaps we shouldn't be too hasty, there is a factor that makes comparing popular vote totals from one election to another quite hard: unopposed returns. In 1956, a whopping sixteen seats in the lower house were uncontested, and while this was higher than any other election during the Playford era, it wasn't much higher. There were another several seats where only minor parties opposed the incumbent, which brings us to the likely reason why the Labor vote fell between 1953 and 1956: the 1955 party split. This was a lot less dramatic in South Australia than elsewhere, as AFAIK no incumbent politicians joined what was then "Anti-Communist" Labor (later the DLP), but they did stand a few candidates, largely in working-class Adelaide seats, which brought down the Labor vote slightly in those areas. Not that it really mattered, because there were only three seats in the entire state where any redistribution happened. Only one of those - the rural seat of Chaffey - changed hands as a result.

 

[Ares96]

I've finally gotten around to a project I've had lying around for a very long time - updating the 1919 Italian map to incorporate majority shading calculated from the ISTAT documents uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. I've also shifted the colour scheme around a bit, mainly to make the liberal bloc's map colours more closely match their little mans (and also accurately reflect how chaotic it was). I have the 1913 results available as well (and, I suspect, even older ones), but for obvious reasons, those are going to be harder to do.

 

[Ares96]

So while the Italian electoral system of 1919 was a pretty good one by their standards and by the standards of the time (if only because it was relatively simple), it was by no means perfect. In particular, the apportionment of seats between the constituencies did not follow population, but rather was determined by how many single-member constituencies there'd been in each province before. Now, those were fairly closely attuned to population figures when they were drawn up... in 1892. Yeah.

Calculating the seat apportionment with a regular Hare-quota largest-remainder method (which is how most countries do it AFAIK), then, basically gives us a map of population change from 1892 to 1911 (which is when the population figures cited in the 1919 results document are from - guessing they didn't have a lot of time for a new census in the time between, what with the world war and all). Which is itself sort of interesting. Obviously, the major cities are underrepresented - Milan, then as now Italy's biggest industrial centre, is owed a whopping five seats compared to its OTL allocation. It's only the second most underrepresented constituency in terms of population per deputy, though, narrowly being edged out by Rome. The latter was not actually a very large city when it was made the capital of Italy in 1871, but a combination of government jobs, policies encouraging urban growth and massive rural poverty across Italy in this period ensured that it grew like a sponge, tripling in population between 1871 and 1921.

That rural crisis is also sort of visible, but interestingly, it mostly shows up in two specific traditionally agricultural regions - Piedmont and Campania. All provinces in the former, and all but Naples in the latter, were overrepresented by 1919. This includes Turin, which, even though its seat was one of Italy's biggest cities, also included a lot of rural areas that were not doing great at this point. The most overrepresented province, however, was Potenza, which was owed about seven seats but had ten. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Apulia, eastern Sicily and large parts of the northeast were actually underrepresented slightly, despite essentially being rural (although some provinces, like Bari or Brescia, had a significant industrial presence).



So what does this tell us about the election results? Well, recalculating the results of all over- or underrepresented constituencies is not something I'm keen on right now, but at a cursory glance, the five seats owed to Milan would probably mostly go to the PSI, with some to the PPI and Liberals. Bergamo and Brescia were both huge PPI strongholds, while Udine and Venice were somewhat evenly split between PPI and PSI. Rome was evenly split between the PSI, PPI and the "old left" bloc, while Naples was a stronghold of the latter, as (for the most part) were Apulia and eastern Sicily. Most of the underrepresented constituencies in the north (all but Cuneo, in fact) were PSI strongholds, while all the ones in the south were won by the old left. So most likely, the old left would be the main losers out of this - which makes sense considering they mostly based their support on rural patronage networks, and most of the overrepresented constituencies were rural. It's a bit harder to get a feel for which parties would gain, but the PSI would probably break even or even lose out slightly, while the PPI might make small gains.

 

[Ares96]

I did a thing.

 

[Ares96]

(Yes, I know the threadmark is wrong, shut up)

So I moved the old 1919 map to the new base. I don't actually have results at lower levels (and I'm not sure they exist - @Erinthecute may correct me if I'm wrong), so this is not actually adding any new information, but still, it looks a bit cleaner and it makes comparison with the later maps easier.

 

[Ares96]

Here's a quick late-night project. Five years ago now (yes, five years), I made some maps of Chile in the 1960s and 70s, but I was never quite pleased with those - in particular, I could never figure out how the area around Santiago was organised. I was pretty sure the mess of tiny municipalities the city is divided into today weren't there then, but even ignoring that, Pinochet's administrative reforms meant that the basic shapes of the old administrative units often weren't available. At the time, instead of the regions and provinces of today, Chile was divided into 25 larger provinces (provincias), many of which were equivalent to today's regions, and a number of departments (departamentos) below that. Wikipedia has no good map of the latter, their provincial maps are all from the 1910s, and the only thing I learned by googling it was that departamento is also the Chilean Spanish word for "apartment".

I've since learned a bit more about online archival research, but there's still huge problems finding anything good from this period - stuff that's new enough to feasibly be under copyright but old enough to have been created on paper through entirely analogue methods is usually hard to find digitised, and this was no exception. Looking it up in the National Library of Chile's online database, I found a relatively decent map of the 25 provinces from 1967, which will no doubt help with adjustments of the main map but provides little help for Santiago. A few searches later and I found this, which I believe is a map of mineral resources (my Spanish is not great) but which also includes municipal boundaries as of 1970 - eureka. Only one small problem - even though they've clearly scanned it and put up a preview on the website, the full map has not been made available (rights issues?). I don't really have the budget to go to Santiago and check it out, so I did the best I could using it and the information on Wikipedia.



When the Province of Santiago was reorganised in 1927, three departments were created: Melipilla, which covered the municipalities along the coast and in the coastal ranges of the province's southwest, Maipo, which covered a small area south of the Maipo River that had previously formed part of O'Higgins Province, and Santiago, which covered the entire rest of the province. This was basically fine at the time - the 1927 municipal reform also expanded the city of Santiago to cover most of its then-urban area, actually making it substantially bigger than it is today, so there wasn't much need for the department to coordinate governance across suburbs or anything like that. However, 1927 was also the beginning of a long period of urbanisation, and Santiago would grow prodigiously over the next few decades (even up to today, although I believe it's starting to taper off).

This meant that the Santiago department would eventually need to be split, but at least to begin with, this was mainly to separate out rural areas from the city. In 1937, San Bernardo was raised to department status, followed by Talagante in 1940 - both areas bordered the other departments, the northern and eastern areas remaining part of the Santiago department. The southeast was eventually split off in 1958, forming the new department of Puente Alto, which also took over Pirque from the Maipo department and reduced it to an even smaller area. In 1963, finally, some of the southern suburbs were split off into a new department named after the popular former president Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who had died in office of TB in 1941. This left the Santiago department controlling most of the suburbs (all but the southern zone) as well as the northern rural areas of the province. When Pinochet raised the departments to provinces and the provinces to regions in 1976, the latter were split off as the new province of Chacabuco, but the province of Santiago still covers the bulk of the urban area.

(The municipalities west of the coastal ranges were also split off into the new department of San Antonio in 1933, but since that was moved into the Valparaíso region by the aforementioned 1976 administrative reform, it's not on my basemap and thus not on this - sorry about that)

As far as I've been able to tell, the municipal boundaries were surprisingly stable during this period. It wouldn't surprise me if there had been a fair few boundary adjustments, but the new municipalities created between 1927 and 1973 were all in the eastern suburbs of Santiago itself. Providencia saw its rural areas split off in 1932 to create Las Condes, while Ñuñoa saw La Florida split off in 1934 and La Reina in 1963, still leaving it significantly bigger than it is currently. And in 1939, La Cisterna was split in half to create La Granja - both of which were bigger then than now, though not by much. Santiago proper still covered quite a few suburban areas, and would continue to do so until 1981, when it was reduced to its old urban core by another one of Pinochet's territorial reforms.



Initially, the province was divided into two electoral districts: district 7, which covered the department of Santiago, and district 8, which covered the rest of the province. To account for its growing population, as well as the disparity of interests between the city and the rural areas around it, district 7 was split into three parts for the 1932 election, with the city forming district 7A all by itself while the remainder of the department was divided west-east into districts 7B and 7C. These were reorganised slightly in 1937, when San Bernardo was detached from whichever one of 7B or 7C it had been part of previously and attached to 8, and possibly saw another small border change when Pirque switched from Maipo to Santiago/Puente Alto - I'm not sure when exactly that happened or whether the electoral map was adjusted to take this into account. What I do know is that after 1937, there was no reapportionment of seats among these districts (or, I think, anywhere in Chile except the far south, which had a few seats added in the 60s). In 1973, district 7A recorded 392,033 votes, while 7B had 324,115 and 7C 573,170, and yet the seat apportionment was the same as it had been for over thirty years. Clearly some sort of change was going to become necessary as the city kept growing, but for obvious reasons, it would take another good while before any such change came.

 

[Ares96]

Next up is May 1924, the election so nice they held it twice - first they redid one constituency in September, and then in December, the entire thing. Again, a crosspost of the old DA description:

The parliamentary impasse created by the 1920 elections was solved, three weeks after the elections, by the appointment of a centre-right minority government, led by the Centre's Constantin Fehrenbach (who had been President of the old Reichstag and then the National Assembly) and consisting of Centre, DVP and DDP. The SPD chose to go into opposition, but supported the government tactically so as to maintain the republican front. Benefits were modestly increased during Fehrenbach's eleven months as Chancellor, but he would focus above all on foreign affairs, as Germany and the world settled into its post-war reality.

Chancellor Fehrenbach travelled to Spa in July 1920 to meet with David Lloyd George and Alexandre Millerand and, hopefully, work out a satisfactory repayment plan for the enormous war reparations stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles. The Spa Conference came to no definite conclusion on the size of reparations, but set proportions for payments to each of the Allied Powers, and required Germany to deliver five million tons of coal a month to the Allies for six months. Though the Allies promised to pay for the coal, the take was less than it would've been if sold commercially, and the shipments deprived German industries of fuel. There immediately arose tensions within the government over how to deal with the situation, with the still right-wing DVP urging a more confrontational line, and this eventually caused the fall of the Fehrenbach ministry in May 1921. It was replaced by a centre-left coalition of Centre, DDP and SPD, led by the more left-leaning Centrist Joseph Wirth, who had been Finance Minister in Fehrenbach's cabinet.

By then, the collapse of the German economy had begun in earnest. Terms for the payment of reparations and war debt (Germany having funded its war effort almost entirely through borrowing) were finally set by the Allies in April, and Germany made its first payment on schedule in June. The currency markets reacted about as well as you'd expect to the sudden disappearance of two billion 1914 marks from the economy, and the German currency entered its infamous inflationary death spiral. By the end of 1921, one US dollar was worth 330 marks. By the end of 1922, the figure was 7,200, and by November 1923, four trillion (we'll get to the details of that second crash later on). The government paying its reparations by printing paper money and using it to buy foreign currency did not help matters.

Wirth's strategy was to make an earnest attempt to comply with Allied demands, and thus demonstrate that actually following them would be a financial impossibility. However, almost everyone to his right was convinced he was really no more than a cypher for the Allies, and calls for his assassination went up by the day. In August, former Finance Minister and current informal government adviser Matthias Erzberger was killed while holidaying in the Black Forest. His assassins were right-wing nationalists who viewed him as a traitor for having signed the Versailles Treaty, and escaped to Hungary before they could face justice. Erzberger's funeral became a pro-republican political rally, with thousands in attendance and Chancellor Wirth delivering the eulogy.

Meanwhile, the government had come to the realisation that there was one foreign power that wasn't bound by the Allied diplomatic conventions and might be amenable to trade - Soviet Russia. After an international conference in Genoa in April 1922 ended in failure, German and Soviet representatives travelled to Rapallo, a short way down the coast from Genoa, and signed a treaty of friendship there. The two countries agreed to renounce all claims on each other's territory, to establish a firm peace based on equality and mutual goodwill, and to resume trade. The Treaty of Rapallo also included secret clauses establishing military cooperation between the Red Army and the rump Reichswehr, although these were publicly denied at the time.

The German foreign minister responsible for negotiating the treaty was Walther Rathenau, an engineer, businessman and billionaire who was the head of the AEG sphere, which included as many as 84 different companies located across the globe. Rathenau was also Jewish, and even though he was a moderate liberal by inclination who only happened to see Realpolitik benefits to aligning with the Soviets, the right naturally saw the Treaty of Rapallo as the first blast of the trumpet in the Judaeo-Bolshevik takeover of the German nation. Two months after the treaty was signed, Rathenau was riding a car from his home to the ministry when one of the passengers in a passing car opened fire with a submachine gun. It was the second assassination of a prominent democratic politician by right-wing extremists in less than a year, and it soon transpired that the same organisation was responsible for both Erzberger's and Rathenau's deaths. Organisation Consul, a death squad made up of former Freikorps soldiers, was in fact responsible for at least 354 murders since the end of the War. When the Reichstag convened the following day, Wirth made the most famous speech of his career: "There stands the enemy, who trickles poison in the wounds of a nation. There stands the enemy - and there is no doubt about it - the enemy stands on the right!"

A law banning the O.C. (don't call it that) was passed within a month, but the death of Rathenau and the ensuing nationwide panic had caused renewed government instability. Wirth's recipe for ending this crisis was to attempt to bring all democratic parties together into a grand coalition, but his efforts met with no success, and he finally resigned the chancellorship in November 1922. President Ebert, hoping to achieve national unity by different means, replaced Wirth's government with a technocratic ministry chaired by HAPAG director Wilhelm Cuno. It was hoped that Cuno, as a shipping magnate with good connections in London and New York, would be in a unique position to sort out Germany's foreign policy issues, but this was too much to bargain for. Cuno's proposed repayment plan was vetoed by the French, and when Germany fell behind on coal shipments, the Allies invoked the enforcement clauses in the Treaty of Versailles and occupied the Ruhr Area.

The occupation of the Ruhr would last more than two and a half years, from January 1923 through to August 1925. It was a provocation the German government could not allow to stand unanswered, and though no one had any desire to restart the War, the locals were urged to passively resist the occupation authorities. The occupation and the resultant protests would result in around 130 German civilian deaths, and the economy of the Ruhr Area, Germany's largest industrial engine, came to a near-complete halt. Again, the mark entered a cycle of inflation, this time the worst ever seen in the history of the world. By the autumn of 1923, basic commodities cost billions or trillions of marks, and banknotes were being used as cheap wallpaper. Savings vanished overnight, and there seemed to be no way to salvage the collapsing currency. The French government refused to treat with German representatives unless passive resistance was ended, which left Cuno with precious few options. In August, a series of wildcat strikes erupted calling for Cuno's resignation, and for a brief moment it seemed as though Germany was heading toward a general strike. That motion was quashed, however, by the SPD leadership, which was convinced the crisis needed to be solved by parliamentary means or else there might be another revolutionary crisis. A vote of confidence was tabled in the Reichstag on the 12th of August, which passed easily, and Cuno left office, his technocratic experiment a dismal failure.

This time, efforts to bring about a grand coalition were successful, and the DVP's Gustav Stresemann (a monarchist at heart, like most of his party, but a tacit supporter of the republican front as a guardian of German democracy) became Chancellor with a broad majority in the Reichstag. The new government immediately set about resolving the crises facing Germany one by one. The strikes of August were resolved through the creation of a binding arbitration system, which passed the Reichstag with broad support in early October. Passive resistance to the Ruhr occupation was dropped as an official policy in September, and President Ebert signed a declaration of emergency that broadened the government's powers in domestic affairs greatly (though not as greatly as the laws allowed - more on that in later instalments...). Hyperinflation was solved through the introduction of a new currency, the Rentenmark ("mortgage mark"), which was backed by government bonds that were in turn index-linked to the price of gold. Twelve zeroes were cut from prices, and the new mark proved reasonably stable.

Most notably, Stresemann initiated talks with the French, the British and the Americans, of which the latter two were far more favourably inclined to the German perspective now than they had been in 1919. By the time those talks came to fruition, Stresemann's chancellorship was over - the strikes in August that had brought down Cuno were the end for the SPD, but only the beginning for those on their left. In October, the Comintern adopted a plan of action to bring down the "bourgeois" Weimar Republic and replace it with a communist state, and in October, the state elections in Saxony saw the KPD enter government on the state level for the first time ever, as the SPD's junior coalition partner. Stresemann smelled a rat, and using the emergency powers vested in him by President Ebert, he ordered the Saxon government dismissed from office and the state placed under commissioners' rule. This decision caused the SPD to abandon the Stresemann government and go into opposition, and that in turn sealed Stresemann's fate. As soon as the Reichstag reconvened, a motion of confidence was tabled, and failed - technically, this did not force Stresemann's resignation, but he still left office rather than try to cling on. In the new cabinet, a centre-right minority government similar to the Fehrenbach cabinet, Stresemann accepted the position of Foreign Minister, which allowed him to carry on treating with the French into 1924.

The new Chancellor was Wilhelm Marx, a Centrist of the old school who, contrary to what his name would imply, was no great friend of the left. His government was focused on ending the crisis and restoring Germany's financial stability, and to this end, the highly controversial Lex Emminger was promulgated over the opposition of the Reichstag, abolishing jury trials and replacing the former twelve-member juries with panels consisting of three judges and six lay judges. This was presented as a cost-saving measure, and faced stiff opposition from the legal profession as well as the left, but it remains the foundation of the German judiciary to this day.

There was little else Marx had time to do before the general election was due. The Reichstag's term was set to expire in June, but Marx's government decided to call the election for the 4th of May. The campaign was every bit as spirited as that of 1920, and saw the government attacked from both left and right, the KPD invoking the dismissal of the Saxon government as a sign that Germany was sliding toward fascism while the DNVP invoked the Rapallo Treaty, the French troops still in the Ruhr and the ongoing negotiations as signs that Germany was sliding into a position of servitude to foreign powers.

The election result saw a massive rightward shift, as the KPD failed to capture the support of the former USPD (which had merged back into the SPD in late 1922) while the DNVP grew hugely, mostly off of DVP voters who resented their party's turn to constructive engagement with the hated republic. The DNVP remained the clear right-wing opposition, but new forces also entered the Reichstag. In November of 1923, a disaffected former soldier named Adolf Hitler gathered around two thousand followers and attempted to overthrow the Bavarian state government, using Mussolini's march on Rome as a blueprint and acting with the blessing of the former army commander Erich Ludendorff. The "Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch", which was soon rechristened the Beer Hall Putsch by the foreign press, saw sixteen insurgents killed by police as order was restored, and Hitler himself was captured and imprisoned for treason. The trial of Hitler created a martyr for the extreme right, and a coalition of Hitler's NSDAP (temporarily banned after the putsch), Ludendorff's supporters in the völkisch movement and some right-wing splinters off the DNVP cobbled together a Reichstag candidacy under the name of the "National Socialist Freedom Movement". This managed to gain 32 seats in the new Reichstag, which along with the DNVP and KPD factions meant that even the broad coalition led by Stresemann would've enjoyed no more than a threadbare majority.

Though the situation was less dire than in 1920, there were still French troops in the Ruhr and the reparations issue was still unsolved. Germany's troubles would continue...

This is the last one I have one of these writeups for, so next time I'm going to have to do it from scratch.

One thing that's worth noting is that this election is an example of the de facto electoral threshold in the Weimar electoral law: although the basic rule was one seat per 60k votes, there was also a provision that no party's Reichswahlvorschlag could receive more seats than its connected Kreiswahlvorschläge had gotten on the constituency level. So although the USPD remnant got enough votes for four seats nationwide, those votes were spread out fairly evenly across the country, and weren't enough to get a constituency seat anywhere. As a result, the party got no seats on the national level either. Both the DSP and the WP were also hurt by this, although the WP's alliance with the BBB meant they got at least one seat more than they would have if they formed an RWV by themselves.

 

[Ares96]

Latvia had an election yesterday, and that sent me down a wiki rabbithole that eventually led me to discover that they actually have a very good supply of old election reports from the interwar period scanned and made available through their electoral commission - benefits of having the same constitution and basically the same electoral law as they had back then, I suppose. The reports are in Latvian, a language I do not even remotely speak (so with that in mind, please accept my apologies for the Latvian in the image below - I really tried), but most of the table keys are also in French, a language I can sort of squint my way through. So with that in mind, here's the very first election ever held in an entity calling itself "Latvia", the 1920 Constituent Assembly election.

This election was called pretty much immediately after the armistice between the Latvian national forces and the Red Army in February 1920, and held in April, before there was even a formal peace treaty in place. So the Russian Civil War was very much still raging at this point, even if it wasn't raging within Latvia anymore, and the Bolsheviks, who had some measure of support among the Latvian workers, boycotted the elections. This meant there was effectively only one left-wing force available to vote for - the Social Democratic Workers' Party, organisationally descended from the Latvian Mensheviks, who consequently cleaned up and won nearly 40% of the vote. This wasn't enough for a majority, however, and between the two different Agrarian parties (Latgale had its own one, because they're kind of weird even now and were extremely weird before that part of the country was swamped by Russian migration during the Soviet era), the small bourgeois parties and the various ethnic minorities, the Assembly was essentially centre-right in temperament. The Constitution they wrote, the Satversme (a neologism intended to sound more Latvian than the usual "konstitūcija"), created a parliamentary republic with broad judicial and popular oversight over public power, avoiding most of the social rights that were becoming popular to put in constitutions around this time as well as any notion of abridging the right to private property. A bill of rights was intended to be passed along with the Satversme, but this was voted down by the assembly and not added to the constitution until 1998.

 

[Ares96]

The Constituent Assembly lasted about two years, during which time it managed to pass a number of significant laws beside the Satversme - it set up key cultural institutions for the new republic, established universal public education, reformed marriage and property laws (including a massive land reform intended to increase the number of self-owning farmers, a measure that probably had a bigger impact on Latvian society than the new constitution itself), and reformed the local government system to make town and parish councils directly elected under universal suffrage (under the Russian system, the richest landowners sat on the council by right while the other landowners got to elect representatives and the landless had no say whatsoever).

The centre-right "unity coalition" that had governed Latvia through the independence struggle fell in June 1921 for reasons unknown to me, and was replaced with a new coalition between the agrarian parties, the centrist Workers' Party (now fading into irrelevance everywhere but Latgale) and a breakaway right faction of the LSDSP, who dubbed themselves the Mensheviks (mazinieki, a word that I've also seen translated as "minimalists"). The new government was led by Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics, previously the Foreign Minister under Ulmanis, who was half-Jewish (as the surname hints) but grew up in rural Courland and considered himself Latvian through and through, leading as he did the first Latvian cabinet with no national minorities represented. His government's activities were concerned largely with further statebuilding, including the establishment of the lats as a new national currency and the standardisation of Latvian spelling, replacing the old orthography based on German with a new one that closely represented the language as spoken (hence all the diacritics in modern Latvian writing).

With the Satversme passed and set to go into effect in November 1922, the Assembly dissolved itself and called for a new Saeima, or parliament (the Latvian word is almost certainly related to the Polish sejm, both meaning "meeting" or "assembly", but there was a fun controversy in the 19th century where a Latvian nationalist claimed to have "coined" the term independently and strenuously denied it had any connection whatsoever to any other language), to be elected in early October. The electoral law used for the Constituent Assembly was essentially carried over to this new body, with two slight modifications - firstly, the number of seats up for election decreased from 150 to 100, which was deemed enough for a country the size of Latvia, and secondly, the voter would now be allowed to strike out names from party lists and replace them with candidates from other lists - a form of panachage, basically. The Constituent Assembly spent a lot of time discussing Switzerland as a model for republican government, and no doubt this innovation came from there.

The elections resulted in some losses for both the LSDSP and the agrarians, who did especially badly in Latgale - the Latgalian Farmers' Party was reduced to a single seat, its place as the main voice of rural Latgale taken over by the Christian Farmers' and Catholic Party, which was an overtly Christian democratic organisation modelled on the German Centre Party and directly supported by the Catholic hierarchy. The liberal Democratic Centre also gained slightly, while the minority bloc essentially stayed put (as one might expect). The Mensheviks, who had hoped to seriously compete with the "rump" LSDSP for the working-class vote, suffered what can only be described as a fiasco - with some 6% of the vote and seven seats, they did place third, but it was a poor third, and not enough to save their coalition with the agrarians in government. When the First Saeima met, it elected an LSDSP member to chair it, and President Čakste called on the LSDSP to attempt to form a government. The overall left-right balance hadn't really shifted, however, and they would be hard-pressed to find anyone willing to support them.

 

[Ares96]

It's done.

I don't have the language map done yet (because I can't find any information about the district-level makeup of Croatia-Slavonia, the Hungarian census books only have them by county and municipality for some reason), but here are the electoral constituencies.



What I have found is a constituency map (though not a very good one) of Croatia, so I might map some of those elections as a special treat. And because I still can't find a good map or description of the Hungarian parliament's constituencies.

 

[Ares96]

Friendly reminder that this started out as a project to map the former Austrian districts in South Tyrol.

 

[Ares96]

Now for something tangentially related to the Austrian elections (pinging in @Heat here feels appropriate). I recently decided to redo my old interwar Polish election maps on a better base, and the ones I've found results for will be coming, but first off, one I haven't found the actual results for.

In November 1918, with Germany defeated, Austria-Hungary wiping itself off the map and Russia deep in the throes of civil war, a group of aristocrats and military officers in Warsaw proclaimed the rebirth of the Polish Commonwealth. This new Polish state wasn't quite built from scratch in that moment, as the Central Powers had allowed the Russian part of Poland to form its own government and raise Polish troops to fight alongside them, and indeed the Regency Council formed the previous year now made up the core of the new Polish state. Shortly after declaring Polish independence, however, the Council voted to cede all authority to Józef Piłsudski, a veteran independence activist and former socialist who was instrumental in forming the Polish Legion under Austrian auspices during the early stage of the war, only to then get jailed by the Germans when he refused to allow his soldiers to swear an oath to the Kaiser. This somewhat chequered political background made him an appealing figure to both the right and left wings of the Polish national movement, and his military past meant he was better suited to defend the new state than any of the noblemen who ran the Regency Council.

Piłsudski's rule was largely focused on military matters, as you'd expect, but one of his other early priorities was to ensure that Poland got a democratic constitution. To this end, just a few days after taking power, he signed a decree announcing legislative elections to be held in January 1919, and establishing 70 electoral constituencies from which the delegates of the new Sejm Ustawodawczy (Legislative Sejm) would be elected. If all seventy constituencies sent representatives, the Sejm would consist of 513 members, with 241 coming from the old Russian partition, 160 from Galicia and Cieszyn Silesia, and 112 from the eastern Prussian provinces. Of course, that's quite a big if.

In actuality, the list of 70 constituencies did not reflect the territories actually controlled by the new Polish government, but rather its territorial ambitions. Although unstable, the German government still had a decent hold on its eastern territories at this point, and in eastern Galicia, Polish claims were being contested by the newly-proclaimed West Ukrainian People's Republic. On the appointed day, 26 January 1919, only 43 constituencies actually held elections, choosing 291 delegates between them. Piłsudski also signed a decree allowing 28 former Imperial Council representatives from eastern Galicia and 16 Polish-speaking Reichstag members to sit in the new Sejm, meaning that the body that met in Warsaw on 10 February consisted of 335 members. A number of elections would later be annulled and redone, while border regions not under Polish control in January 1919 held proper elections later on. By the end of its term, the Legislative Sejm consisted of 442 delegates, of which 373 had been elected directly while another 33 were co-opted from older parliamentary bodies and 26 were indirectly elected.

Given this, I'm sure you can imagine it's hard to say anything definitive about exact party balance, but one thing we can say is that it was broadly speaking a right-wing body. The Communist Party and several other left-wing groups boycotted the elections, seeing them as a bourgeois sham designed to draw the proletariat's attention away from the fledgling world revolution starting in Russia right at that moment, and the PPS (the more Polish nationalist branch of the left) wildly underperformed expectations winning only about 10% of the vote. Significantly better off was the left-leaning peasants' movement, led by the PSL - "Liberation" (Wyzwolenie) in the Russian partition and the PSL - "Left" (Lewica) in Galicia, and these groups alongside the PPS would form the core of the left opposition throughout the Second Republic.

 

[Ares96]

This has been an extremely long time coming, but I spent my shift yesterday at (what used to be) the Karlskrona city archives, and since there wasn't a ton to do on a Friday afternoon, I got around to looking at the old council records to try to figure out some of the older ward divisions. My conclusions from looking at them were two: the books of council proceedings for Karlskrona look like absolute dogshit compared to those of the other cities I've looked at, but they are also pretty exhaustive and don't actually seem to be poorly bound, so that's something. Also, I remembered I had a pretty good basemap from ages ago when @Makemakean and I tried to do a local history TL in a month, and while I had to invert the land and sea layers which didn't make the end result too pretty, it did save me a lot of tracing.

Karlskrona was founded in 1680 to serve as the main base of the Swedish Navy - some popular histories claim Charles XI intended to eventually move the capital there, or at least make it a sort of winter capital, but I don't know how much there is to back that up. Whatever the truth of that, the island of Trossö went from housing one (1) farm to being the third city of the Swedish Empire by 1700. Its growth stalled a bit during the Age of Liberty, but it had a critical mass of around ten thousand inhabitants, and when Gustav III started his naval expansion in the 1780s, Karlskrona entered a sort of golden age. Which unfortunately didn't last too long - his eventual war against Russia wasn't a total writeoff, but the fact that it wasn't was largely an accidental stroke of luck on Sweden's part, and by the time it ended, a captured Russian ship had already brought the deadly bacterium Borrelia recurrentis to Karlskrona, resulting in a devastating epidemic which combined with an equally devastating fire in 1790 to bring a definite end to the city's flourishing. The early 19th century was another time of stagnation, and in the 1830s Karlskrona lost its place as Sweden's third city to rapidly-industrialising Norrköping (which would in turn lose it to the even more rapidly industrialising Malmö a couple of decades later). Things only turned around when the railway arrived in 1874, which allowed a number of light manufacturing industries to spring up - the most famous being the hat, kerosene lamp and porcelain factories, each of which was nationally renowned in its field - and started the only major period of population growth in Karlskrona's history aside from its founding years. From around 16,000 inhabitants in 1870, the city passed the 30,000 mark sometime during the Second World War and essentially stayed put until well into my lifetime.

By far the largest employer throughout all this was the Navy, both the actual naval base and the attached shipyard. The shipbuilders, their distinctive dialect and their alleged eccentricities formed a key element of the city's culture, and the admiral who commanded the base was generally regarded as the most important person in the city, ahead of both the magistrates, the guilds and the county governor. For most of the city's pre-1862 history, its politics were dominated by a sort of town-and-gown conflict between the naval hierarchy and the guilds, but when the guild system was abolished and a directly elected city council was introduced, the short-term effect of this was to simply allow the naval officer class to seize control of the civilian administration as well. As in most of Europe, these two sides eventually united to combat the rise of the trade union movement - whose main exponent, obviously, was the Metalworkers' Union section that organised the shipyard - but the fact that the shipyard was owned by the Crown and depended on an expansive naval policy for work meant that the usual class dynamics worked a bit differently. The union tended to be a lot less radical than shipbuilders' unions elsewhere, and a lot of the more comfortable workers voted for more "patriotic" right-wing options. As a result, Karlskrona wasn't as left-wing a place as you might expect given how industrialised it was - the Social Democrats won a majority for the first time in 1938, but lost it again in 1946, and a Liberal-Conservative majority ruled until the 60s.

The city was contained on Trossö and nearby islets (most prominently Björkholmen, just to the west, which is close to the shipyard, was the spiritual home of the pillemausare, and is where I'm currently sat writing this) for most of its history, partly because the original city plan was overly ambitious for the size the city eventually turned out to be, but mainly because of the position of the island a few kilometres off the mainland with only a single bridge connecting it. Until the railway arrived, most people and most commerce entered Karlskrona by boat, but the arrival of the railway had an interesting side effect - the two different railways (one standard-gauge, one narrow-gauge) built their stations at the old entrance to the city, and a strip of land was filled in across the bay separating Trossö from the larger island of Vämö to its north to accommodate the rail platforms and yards. The city began to grow north along the old highway and the western shore of Vämö, and the more prosperous burghers who were tired of the grime and congestion of Trossö (which had some of the worst slums in Sweden at this time - in the 30s, the government appointed a commission to investigate urban housing conditions and designate areas in urgent need of renovation, and Karlskrona was the only city with two entries on this "official" list of slums) began to build garden suburbs around the edges of the city. In 1910, a tram line was opened to connect some of these to the city centre, and this operated with no route changes or extensions until 1949.

By 1944, which is the earliest set of boundaries I've found, Karlskrona was divided into three constituencies which elected 14 councillors each for a total of 42 seats. Two of these constituencies were south of the bridge, in the old urban core of Trossö and surroundings, while Vämö and its neighbouring islands made up the third constituency. Each one was divided into exactly three wards, which makes things very neat, although these wards were apparently very unbalanced and would get hacked apart in the next rewarding. One thing worth noting, although it hardly mattered for electoral purposes, is that the city's territory also included the two small islands of Kungsholmen and Hästholmen, at the south and west approaches to the harbour respectively, which were annexed in 1904 to facilitate the construction of naval fortifications there.

 

[Ares96]

The 1952 municipal reform was not too dramatic in Karlskrona's case - it expanded north a bit on the mainland, although the new boundary was drawn somewhat arbitrarily and specifically avoided the few population centres there, so I assume it was more about providing land for post-war housing expansion than consolidating the urban area. Only 456 people lived in this area, so there wasn't much change in electoral terms - one new ward was added covering the entire mainland territory of the city. More significant for the map of the city (although I haven't depicted them properly here) were the islands of Aspö and Tjurkö, on either side of the main approach to the city from the south, which had both been independent municipalities but had serious economic troubles that would only have gotten worse as municipal governments were expected to form the backbone of the new welfare state. Aspö had 752 inhabitants and Tjurkö 298, but both retained their own parishes and their own electoral wards for obvious geographic reasons. Even though AFAIK the ferries left from the western side of Trossö, the islands were nonetheless added to the first council constituency and their wards numbered 4 and 5, hence the gap in ward numbers on this map.

Aside from the new mainland ward and the two islands, the only changes to the ward map were to level out the populations. In the 1950 elections, ward 3 had some 2,000 registered voters while wards 6 and 9 (now renumbered 8 and 11) each numbered around 4,000. Splitting off the mainland solved the latter problem, but some of the other ward changes were extremely awkward. The new ward 7 included a slice of Björkholmen that was totally detached from the rest of the ward, and ward 1 similarly now cut across the old bridge to take in three blocks of Pantarholmen - an especially egregious change given that Pantarholmen was now split between two different constituencies.



The 1951 boundary changes were controversial from the beginning, and when the time came to draw up a new electoral roll in 1961, it was decided that the boundaries should be drawn more reasonably - especially those of the constituencies, but also the wards as far as practical. The city's population had grown since 1951, and turnout had jumped from the low 60s before the war to the high 70s for most of the 1950s, so for those reasons it was seen as reasonable to increase the overall number of wards to 15. One new ward (10) covered all of Pantarholmen, splitting it off from wards 1 and 9, while Hästö was given its own ward (13) and the mainland ward was split in half to account for the growth of the new housing estate in Marieberg. To make the constituencies slightly more even, Långö (ward 9) was moved from the third to the second constituency, and the seats were redistributed so that each constituency actually elected a proportionate number of councillors rather than strictly fourteen each.



These boundaries, although they made a great deal of sense, did not stick around long, because Karlskrona merged with the neighbouring municipality of Lyckeby after the 1966 local elections, which meant they had to redraw the wards yet again. And unfortunately, I wasn't able to find those boundaries the other day.

 

[Ares96]

A lot happened between 1919 and 1922 in Poland, indeed, probably too much to write here. Unquestionably the biggest thing was the Polish-Soviet War, in which Polish forces advancing east to reclaim former Polish lands and realise Józef Piłsudski's ambition of creating a Poland strong enough to defend itself from the neighbouring great powers rather inevitably came into conflict with Red Army forces advancing west to link up with the German Spartacists and kickstart the world revolution. The Soviets did pretty well for a long time, but were finally stopped at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920, in what became known in Polish historiography as the "Miracle on the Vistula". Soon enough, the Poles were marching east again, and in March 1921, the Polish and Soviet governments signed a peace treaty in Riga, which drew a very favourable eastern border for Poland. They didn't get the entire former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as Piłsudski had wanted, sure, but all of Galicia and Volhynia and a good chunk of Belarus ended up in Polish hands. At about the same time, the border with Germany was finalised following plebiscites in Masuria and Upper Silesia. Those borders ended up less favourably for Poland, because the plebiscites had been held right when it seemed like the Polish state was on the verge of collapse, and so plenty of Polish-speaking locals voted to stick with the devil they knew.

Far from all of these territories were ethnically Polish. Minorities existed almost everywhere, sure, but most of the eastern lands (the Kresy, which just means "border regions" in Polish) were majority East Slavic, and the former German partition had sizeable German minorities throughout. And, of course, there were Jewish communities all over the country. Most of the Jews in Germany had made a strong effort to assimilate and speak Standard German after the ghettos were dissolved, but in Galicia and the Russian partition, where they were surrounded by Slavic peoples rather than Germans, this was understandably quite a lot harder - not to mention the repression they faced from Russian state authorities in particular. So there was a very strong Jewish identity in Poland at this time, and the Yiddish language was one of the largest minority languages in the country with over two million native speakers. Although opinion was divided among these groups on whether they ought to be part of Poland, most of them recognised the threat of Polish ethnonationalism winning control of the new state, and at the initiative of Yitzhak Grünbaum, a veteran Jewish community leader and journalist, a number of different minority groups united for the November 1922 parliamentary elections as the Bloc of National Minorities (Blok Mniejszości Narodowych, BMN). The BMN's leadership was made up of an equal number of Jews, Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians, although Grünbaum acted as the unofficial leader of the movement, his skills as a journalist and community organiser carrying over very well into parliamentary work. The BMN didn't gather quite every minority group, however, with several Jewish and Ukrainian groups staying out of it - most of the latter boycotted the elections altogether, dismayed by the way Poland had subsumed the West Ukrainian People's Republic in 1919.

It may be worth stopping here to dwell on the nature of Polish nationalism, which had been divided into two broad camps even before the war. As mentioned, Piłsudski was an advocate of territorial expansion, believing that Poland would never be able to defend its independence if it didn't cement itself as a significant player in European politics in its own right. Supporters of this style of Polish nationalism, known as the "Jagiellon Concept" after the royal house that had built up the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, believed in a place for ethnic diversity, carrying on the PLC's tradition of being somewhat welcoming to groups like the Jews and the Greek Orthodox Eastern Slavs, but also generally believed that the Poles had a historic role as the leading ethnicity of the state and that the other ethnic groups in the area would welcome them as liberators. On the other hand, there were the supporters of the "Piast Concept", named for the dynasty of dukes and kings who founded the Polish state in the 10th and 11th centuries. Led by the National Democracy (Narodowa Demokracja, ND or Endecja) movement, they were generally a lot less keen on expanding Poland's borders, and a lot more keen on making sure any Polish state was politically stable and homogenously Polish. In their view, the expansive and permissive nature of the PLC was precisely the thing that had made it vulnerable, and military adventures by the new Polish state were only bound to make enemies of the peoples around them. The important things would be to secure a close relationship with the West, especially with fellow Catholic powers like France, and to make sure that (Catholic) Poles would be the masters of their own destiny within Poland. It shouldn't surprise you that they pretty much all saw the Jews as the single biggest threat to this, and that's worth bearing in mind for the 1928 election especially.

In 1922, there wasn't really an organised political party advocating for Polish nationalism based on the Jagiellon Concept, which might come as a surprise given that its proponents had effectively governed Poland since 1919. However, that power was concentrated in the person of Józef Piłsudski, who relied on emergency laws to impose his will on the administration. The Legislative Sejm, on the other hand, was dominated by Piast Concept supporters, who drew up a constitution modelled on the French one with a very strong parliament and a ceremonial presidency. This annoyed Piłsudski so much that he refused to stand for the presidency and declared he would retire from politics as soon as a successor could be elected. Obviously, this emboldened his rivals, chief among them the Endecja's political wing the People's National Union (Związek Ludowo-Narodowy, ZLN), who formed an electoral alliance with the Polish Christian Democratic Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Chrześcijańskiej Demokracji, PSChD or Chadecja) led by Silesian activist and former Reichstag deputy Wojciech Korfanty, as well as a number of other right-wing Christian groups who formed the Christian-National Club (Klub Chrześcijańsko-Narodowy, KChN). This alliance was dubbed the Christian Association of National Unity (Chrześcijański Związek Jedności Narodowej - you'll sometimes see this rendered as "Christian Union of National Unity", but I'm choosing to avoid the tautology since it's not there in Polish). Local wits decided to abbreviate this name to Chjena, which is pronounced like "hyena", and despite their own protests, this abbreviation very quickly became ubiquitous.

The Chjena's mockers could laugh all they wanted, because the situation was very clearly favourable for the alliance. In western Poland, especially the ZLN's strongholds in Greater Poland and the Chadecja's one in Silesia, they were completely dominant, and although they were a lot weaker elsewhere in the country, they won a commanding lead in the popular vote with almost 30% of the Sejm vote and almost 40% of that for the Senate (which had a smaller electorate, I believe you had to be 30 to vote for it and 40 to stand for election). Of course, that's not a majority, and the rest of the scene was divided between the BMN, the two different PSL factions left standing, and the PPS, in addition to a gaggle of smaller parties. None of them got along very well, but they all hated the Endecja enough to block them from influence. When the new National Assembly met in joint session to choose a president, the Chjena's candidate, the Ambassador to Paris Count Maurycy Zamoyski, lost by a fairly big margin to Piłsudski's preferred candidate, the renowned engineer, PSL-"Wyzwolenie" member and former Minister of Public Works Gabriel Narutowicz. However, after just five days in office, Narutowicz was assassinated by a rogue art critic and Endecja supporter named Eligiusz Niewiadomski (these names, my God), and the election had to be rerun. Once again, the Chjena put up a candidate, this time the historian Kazimierz Morawski, who again lost, this time to the PSL-"Piast" politician Stanisław Wojciechowski, a friend of Piłsudski's who had been active in the PPS alongside him back in the 1890s. Although thought close to Piłsudski, Wojciechowski would in time become one of his key enemies, as discontent with the unstable parliamentary regime of which Wojciechowski was the figurehead grew out in the country.

Speaking of which, although the new Sejm was able to elect a president twice over, forming a government proved rather harder. The nonpartisan, but conservative, ministry led by Julian Nowak continued in office through most of December, being replaced by a caretaker ministry headed by General Władysław Sikorski (who played a key role in the Miracle on the Vistula and would play an even more key role in the Second World War). This lasted well into 1923 before a parliamentary government could finally take office, headed by Wincenty Witos of the PSL-"Piast" and comprised of them and the Chjena parties (to give some idea of how universal that name had become, the coalition was known as the Chjeno-Piast). This in turn lasted about six months, and then the carousel started back up again.



As a corollary, I made a turnout map, which I think is a pretty good illustration of what would become known as the "Poland A"/"Poland B" divide. Areas west of the Vistula, including Western Galicia to some extent, were generally highly industrialised, highly literate and highly politically conscious, which is reflected here in turnout levels of around 80%. The east, on the other hand, tended to be a lot less economically developed and also a lot less ethnically Polish - the figures for Eastern Galicia specifically are affected by the Ukrainian boycott, and those constituencies will look very different in the next election, but then again, so will the entire country. Because you see, not all was well in the state of Poland, and the military especially were deeply dismayed to watch the country they had fought to liberate descend into political backstabbing and corruption within months of its creation. Rumblings were heard through the barracks and the boardrooms, calling for a "cleansing" (sanacja) of the Polish body politic, and they would soon find backing from the highest possible quarters.