PM's Election Maps And Stuff Thread

[prime-minister]

I've been lurking a while because I haven't had any new content I felt like posting, but I want to get started doing it so here we go! I'll mostly be posting my maps here, as well as possibly some graphics and draft ideas for stuff if people are interested in that. I might also do some reposts from my dA or from the Other Place to get them all in one place.

Anyway, I wanted to kick off with something new, and I’ve wanted for ages to do a Taiwanese map, so thanks to some very nice resources on the Chinese Wikipedia I finally got round to doing one!

Taiwan is an island between China and Japan, and that’s about all you can say about it without getting into some kind of political hot water. The de facto government of the island is known as the Republic of China, and is the descendant of the nationalist regime which governed mainland China until towards the close of the Civil War, the Communists consolidated their power and pushed the nationalist forces onto the island of Taiwan. In a frankly absurd situation, the People’s Republic of China argues that Taiwan is part of China, and Taiwan agrees, but argues that it should govern mainland China and not the PRC.

Well, sort of. That’s the argument of most of the ‘Pan-Blue’ alliance, led by the Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese: 中國國民黨, Zhōngguó Guómíndǎng), under the 1992 Consensus allegedly agreed by the PRC and ROC governments. The KMT ruled China and then Taiwan as a one-party state from the 1920s to the late 1980s, mostly because while Sun Yat-Sen really didn’t like the communist ideology of the Bolsheviks, he did like the dictatorship part (not even joking about that). After the anti-government 228 Incident, the Kuomintang brutally consolidated its rule over the island of Taiwan through the White Terror, enacting martial law and aggressively suppressing dissidents for almost 40 years.

Repealing this and turning Taiwan into a functioning democracy was a slow and complex process, largely enacted by Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of longtime KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek, during the former Chiang’s presidency from 1978 to 1988. These reforms came under pressure from the pro-democracy Tangwai (黨外) movement, which in 1986 gave rise to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, Chinese: 民主進步黨, Mínjìndǎng). The DPP's main ideological principles are liberalism and Taiwanese sovereignty, and despite spending its first six months as an illegal organisation, would ultimately manage to put significant pressure on the KMT to democratise the country, helping ensure reforms to make the Legislative Yuan and Presidency directly elected were enacted in the constitutional reform known as the Additional Articles of the Constitution.

The DPP would gradually gain strength over the course of the first decade and a bit of Taiwanese democracy thanks to fatigue with the KMT and particularly its corruption, culminating in 2000 with the victory of Chen Shui-bian in the presidential election leading to the first peaceful transfer of power in Chinese history. To support Chen, the ‘Pan-Green’ alliance was formed, comprising the DPP and allied left-leaning parties. Its emergence has led the ‘Pan-Blue’ and ‘Pan-Green’ alliances to form the backbone of Taiwanese democracy, with the KMT and DPP dominating their respective alliances but with allies holding seats of their own too.

Since 2008, Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan has had a very mixed mixed-member proportional system. It elects 113 members, 73 through single-member districts elected by FPTP, 34 through a national constituency elected by party list PR (which overseas Taiwanese also vote on) and 3 each by the lowland and highland Taiwanese Aboriginals elected by bloc vote. Just to make things more confusing, the Pan-Blue and Pan-Green alliances frequently function in the single-member districts with parties standing aside for each other or for like-minded independents, but the list PR seats are a free for all (it’s a little like Japan in that regard actually).

In 2008 it gave a massive landslide victory to the Kuomintang after the DPP and the Taiwanese electorate had soured on President Chen for his alleged corruption which they defended in 2012. However, the KMT lost much of its popularity when it supported the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA), a trade pact with the PRC, in 2014; the Sunflower Movement, as the protestors against the CSSTA became known, gained popularity by arguing the pact would put Taiwan under political pressure from Beijing, and this became a catalyst for the Taiwanese left.

Aided by this discontent, the DPP won a strong victory in the local elections, and its party chair Tsai Ing-wen managed to build up a strong lead in the run up to the 2016 presidential election, helped by the KMT being in disarray, as it was forced to withdraw its nominee Hung Hsiu-chu for the overwhelming unpopularity of her ‘one China, same interpretation’ stance. She secured the DPP’s best ever result and with this came coattails that gave the DPP a majority in the Legislative Yuan for the first time.

Tsai’s government has quite actively pursued the DPP’s agenda, cushioned by its majority in the Legislative Yuan; perhaps its most well-known policy programmes internationally have been its vocal rejection of the Chinese political system of ‘one country, two systems’ and the 1992 Consensus, opposing Chinese reunification (at least on the current terms) and advocating for liberal Taiwanese nationalism, its support for the Hong Kong protesters and making Taiwan the first country in Asia to legally recognise same-sex marriage. It has also worked to support justice for Taiwanese indigenous peoples and reduction of unemployment and wealth inequality.

After first coming back to power the DPP initially appeared to be facing setbacks, culminating in badly losing the local elections in 2018, but Tsai’s support had strengthened again by the time of the 2020 election thanks to the Hong Kong protests and she won another landslide victory. The DPP won another majority in the Legislative Yuan, but with significant losses compared to its 2016 landslide, and despite its fairly well-regarded handling of the COVID-19 pandemic the DPP again suffered losses in the 2022 local elections, as well as facing recalls against members allied with the party.

As well as two independents, the DPP-friendly parties to be elected in 2020 were the New Power Party (NPP, Chinese: 時代力量,Shídài Lìliàng), a party formed from the Sunflower Movement which acts as a more left-wing alternative to the DPP outside of its coalition a little similarly to the Korean Justice Party, and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (TPP, Chinese: 台灣基進,Táiwān Jījìn), an independentist ally of the DPP.

The KMT’s traditional ally inside its coalition, the People First Party (PFP, Chinese: 親民黨, Qīnmín Dǎng) led by James Soong (who ran as an independent in 2000 and almost won), was shut out of the Legislative Yuan for the first time since its founding, but the centrist Taiwan People’s Party (TPP, Chinese: 民眾黨, Mínzhòngdǎng), founded by independent former Mayor of Taipei Ko Wen-je the previous year, took five list seats.

 

[vjw]

Congratulations on joining! Nothing more to add

 

[prime-minister]

I just remembered two maps I had lying around to share. So Ireland is obviously known for being the most prominent country in the Anglophone world (if you count it as such) to not use FPTP, but perhaps unsurprisingly, during one of Fianna Fáil's periods of dominance in the late 1950s and 1960s, it made a considerable effort to replace the STV system which made it harder for the party to win overall majorities in the Dáil. Both of these were voted down by the Irish electorate at referendums 9 years apart.


The 1959 referendum came very close to passing despite the steadfast opposition of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and basically everyone outside FF. It was most likely helped by the proposed Third Amendment advocating a nonpartisan Commission be in charge of drawing constituencies rather than the Oireachtas and the fact it was held on the same day as the presidential election where Éamon de Valera won his first term. The latter can be particularly clearly seen when comparing the stronger vote for Dev's opponent, Seán Mac Eoin, in several constituencies where No won (most obviously the Dublin and Cork ones, but also Longford-Westmeath) while many ones where Yes won (especially in Donegal and Galway) voted strongly for Dev. Interestingly, though, some places like Kerry and Tipperary went strongly for Dev but a lot less so for Yes.


The 1968 referendum failed by a much greater margin, probably not helped by the Third Amendment (which is why this was termed the Fourth) being voted on simultaneously which would have allowed rural malapportionment beyond the existing 5% variation in population across constituencies. This allowed FG and Labour to even more clearly point to FF trying to rig the system against them, and I wouldn't be surprised if the rise of the civil rights movement on the other side of the border further raised public suspicions. In any case, the amendment failed by a margin of over 20.5%, and the idea of FPTP in Ireland was basically abandoned.

Interestingly enough, the Third and Fourth Amendments to the Irish Constitution that were eventually adopted brought it into what was then the EEC and lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, so they had just as much constitutional significance as a switch to FPTP might have done if not more.

 

[prime-minister]

My brain works in weird ways sometimes- I found out someone’s subtitled the Dutch version of Robot Wars, and it made me want to research and map some old Dutch elections. To start with, here’s the 1946 election, the first after World War II.


After the Netherlands was liberated, Queen Wilhelmina dismissed the war cabinet formed by the government-in-exile and convened a cabinet including three of the prewar parties- the Christian democratic Roman Catholic State Party (Roomsch-Katholieke Staatspartij, RKSP), the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, SDAP) and the social liberal Free-thinking Democratic League (Vrijzinnig Democratische Bond, VDB), with Willem Schermerhorn of the last of those three parties serving as Prime Minister. However, public pressure to hold a new election after eight years was understandably high, given the Staten-Generaal didn’t reconvene until November 1945 and when it did reconvene it comprised the members elected to the preceding term (minus collaborators and those who had died during the war, obviously).

In the leadup to the election, all the governing parties were to rebrand themselves. The SDAP and VDB, helped by the friendly relations between Schermerhorn and Deputy Prime Minister Willem Drees, chose to merge their parties (along with a minor Christian socialist party, the CDU) into a new left-wing party called the Labour Party (Partij van de Arbeid, PvdA). Their decision was based on a movement called the Doorbraak, seeking to break the pillarisation of Dutch politics into Catholic and Calvinist religious lines by forming a united progressive party to stand against them. The PvdA also took inspiration from the success of the British Labour Party, reflected in its name and its first electoral campaign, which even used the slogan ‘Doe als Tommy; hij koos Labour’ (‘Do as Tommy; he chose Labour’), and while it didn’t emulate Labour’s landslide, it did come close to becoming the largest party.

A few months before the PvdA’s formation, the RKSP had also reformed itself into the Catholic People’s Party (Katholieke Volkspartij, KVP), adopting a more pragmatic catch-all platform both religiously (despite the name, it was now open for non-Catholics to join) and ideologically (being open to cooperation with both the PvdA and the Protestant parties) and mainly seeking to keep itself in power. This worked well for it, at least in the short term, as it won a larger share of the vote than the RKSP or its predecessor the General League of Roman Catholic Caucuses (catchy name there) ever had and remained the biggest party in the Tweede Kamer.

The surge for these two parties was accompanied by an underwhelming performance by the Protestant parties; the Anti-Revolutionary Party (Anti-Revolutionaire Partij, ARP) was isolated for its fierce opposition to decolonisation in Indonesia, the Christian Historical Union (Christelijk-Historische Unie, CHU) was damaged by some figures in the party like Piet Lieftinck (who had been Minister of Finance and oversaw ‘financial sanitation’ to solve Dutch hyperinflation after the Reichsmark, which the guilder was linked to, collapsed) left for the PvdA, and the Reformed Political Party (Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij, SGP) was... well, doing its own crazy thing in its little corner of Dutch Protestant politics just as it always does.

Of more note were two parties from outside the governing coalition which surged in support. The biggest winner of the 1946 election amongst the opposition was, as you might expect, the Communist Party of the Netherlands (Communistische Partij Nederland, CPN), who secured their best ever result here. The factors for this are probably obvious (Resistance, Cold War not in full swing, leftists supporting them over the PvdA for loyalty to The Revolution, yadda yadda yadda). The other notable success story was the Freedom Party (Partij van de Vrijheid, PvdV), the successor to the old Liberal State Party, which would in 1948 be joined by right-wing dissidents from the PvdA to form the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), which would go on to do some things in Dutch politics later down the line.

Although the KVP had fought against the socialist economic planning advocated by the PvdA, and it could in theory have allyed with the other Christian parties, in practice the Catholics were more opposed to the Protestant parties than to the socialists (plus governing with the PvdA was more practical for the reasons mentioned above and since it would be a continuation of the existing government). The Queen appointed KVP Minister of the Interior Louis Beel as Prime Minister to replace Schemerhorn, and he and the PvdA formed a new grand coalition with Drees continuing as Deputy Prime Minister.

The new government, nicknamed the ‘red-Roman’ coalition, was the first time an alliance between the Catholics and socialists had been formed after a Dutch election, and despite the divisions between the parties ideologically, it would ultimately be crucial to building the Dutch welfare state and ending the colonial war in the East Indies, and through these issues, had a significant impact on Dutch postwar politics going forward...

 

[prime-minister]

Here's a little WIP I've been trying to do that I could use a hand with. Since AJRElectionMaps ended their excellent series on Kiwi elections in 1990, I wanted to try doing 1993 as it's both a very dramatic election and the last election held in New Zealand under pure FPTP. The problem is I could only find the full vote totals for some of the seats, and while Wikipedia has the majority in raw votes for every seat, without knowing the voteshares I can't use those to finish the map. If anyone knows where to get the rest of the results so I can finish it it'd be much appreciated!

Here's the map so far for anyone who's curious (also note that some of my attempts to edit the 1987 boundaries from Max's map to the 1993 ones may be off):

 

[Thande]

Here's a little WIP I've been trying to do that I could use a hand with. Since AJRElectionMaps ended their excellent series on Kiwi elections in 1990, I wanted to try doing 1993 as it's both a very dramatic election and the last election held in New Zealand under pure FPTP. The problem is I could only find the full vote totals for some of the seats, and while Wikipedia has the majority in raw votes for every seat, without knowing the voteshares I can't use those to finish the map. If anyone knows where to get the rest of the results so I can finish it it'd be much appreciated!

Here's the map so far for anyone who's curious (also note that some of my attempts to edit the 1987 boundaries from Max's map to the 1993 ones may be off):
View attachment 68728

Just tagging @Ares96 as this is his work specifically you're using as a base (AJRElection maps is me, him and @Alex Richards ).

 

[prime-minister]

Just tagging @Ares96 as this is his work specifically you're using as a base (AJRElection maps is me, him and @Alex Richards ).

I thought that was the case, I hope it's OK that I'm using his base by the way!

 

[Ares96]

Here's a little WIP I've been trying to do that I could use a hand with. Since AJRElectionMaps ended their excellent series on Kiwi elections in 1990, I wanted to try doing 1993 as it's both a very dramatic election and the last election held in New Zealand under pure FPTP. The problem is I could only find the full vote totals for some of the seats, and while Wikipedia has the majority in raw votes for every seat, without knowing the voteshares I can't use those to finish the map. If anyone knows where to get the rest of the results so I can finish it it'd be much appreciated!

Here's the map so far for anyone who's curious (also note that some of my attempts to edit the 1987 boundaries from Max's map to the 1993 ones may be off):
View attachment 68728

Very very nice, I wanted to keep going but I couldn’t find the constituency boundaries and David was getting sick of me by then.

 

[prime-minister]

Very very nice, I wanted to keep going but I couldn’t find the constituency boundaries and David was getting sick of me by then.

Thank you! And fair enough then, I might keep looking for the results myself and of course if I do I'll complete the map and post it.

 

[prime-minister]

A couple of years ago on the Other Place I made some maps of the first three Spanish elections after the transition to democracy (which you can also find on my DeviantArt), and I've finally got round to mapping and doing a writeup for the fourth.

On the surface, the 1982 election looked like the start of a social democratic revolution for Spain given the progressive manifesto the PSOE had had and its large victory in the local and regional elections in May 1983. However, while González’s time as Prime Minister of Spain would not be short-lived, the excitement of the left for his government very much would be.

As González assumed office, Spain’s economy was only worsening, with a 15% inflation rate, $4 billion current account, 17% unemployment rate, public budget deficit and a GDP growing almost half as fast as the OCDE forecast it should be. These looked set to prove a considerable roadblock to the government trying to fully reintegrate Spain into the international community, and González’s Economy Minister Miguel Boyer would try to compensate for this by devaluing the peseta and pursuing industrial restructuring to close obsolete industries. As one might expect, the voters who had voted in an ostensibly socialist government had were displeased by this, and strike action from even the pro-socialist UGT against these economic policies occurred during González’s first term.

It’s worth noting, however, that the government didn’t pursue quite as merciless an economically dry policy agenda as in other countries that elected more right-wing governments, and kept true to some of its key commitments, including the 40-hour work week, 30 days of annual leave, free education expansion from 14 to 16 and the reform of university education. It also nationalised the collapsing Rumasa merchant banking-affiliated company to prevent it from bankruptcy, though this led to a judicial conflict that would drag on until December 1986.

On social policy, González’s government was much more progressive in many areas. Over the course of its first term it established the General Health Law that created the Sistema Nacional de Salud (SNS) and became the basis for universal healthcare in Spain, introduced laws to partly decriminalize abortion, reorganized the armed forces to give more civil power over the military while increasing the wages of forces members, and of course successfully integrated Spain into the EEC (helped by González and French President François Mitterand having a good working relationship).

There was one big exception to this progressivism, however- due to the Basque nationalist ETA committing further terrorist activities, the government introduced harsher penalties for crimes of terrorism, and from 1983 to 1987 supported the illegal establishment of GAL (‘Antiterrorist Liberation Group’) death squads which kidnapped and killed ETA members (and sometimes also just Basque nationalists). This would eventually be revealed in the early 1990s, and is popularly known as the guerra suica (‘dirty war’).

This wasn’t the contentious issue most of the Spanish public were focused on during this period, however- that was the issue of Spanish membership of NATO. As mentioned in the 1982 writeup, the PSOE had pledged to withdraw from NATO, but the US and EEC were determined for it to stay, much to the chagrin of Fernando Morán, González’s first Foreign Minister who resigned due to the party switching to supporting NATO. This was, however, conditional on a referendum, in which the PSOE stressed three key terms it had made for joining: opting out of NATO’s military structure, a ban on the US storing nuclear weapons on its territory, and gradually reducing US military presence in Spain.

Despite the PSOE being basically the only party to campaign for NATO membership, Spain voted to remain in NATO by a larger margin than expected. González chose to call a snap election four months ahead of schedule to coincide with the Andalusian regional election largely because of this. The best way to sum up the 1986 election is that, if 1982 was the Spanish equivalent of the UK in 1997, 1986 was the UK in 2001- the enthusiasm for the more left-wing governing party had died down significantly, but by and large about the same proportion of voters were prepared to back it for another term, and most who weren’t just abstained (though nowhere near as many as in the UK in 2001).

The most notable thing about it, really, is how fractured the opposition was. The AP-PDP alliance had incorporated the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal, PL) that had been part of the UCD when that party finally collapsed, and now used the common name the People’s Coalition (Coalicion Popular, CP). The CP ran to the PSOE’s right, pushing for privatisation of public companies and healthcare assistance, a harsher war on Basque nationalism, a war on drugs, revising the divorce law and recriminalizing abortion. However, most voters saw it as too right-wing and a poor opposition, which was not helped by its decision to encourage voters to abstain on the NATO referendum despite supporting Spanish membership of NATO, which it did purely to try to undermine González. It suffered a small loss of seats compared to 1982 and the alliance would break apart by the following year.

More successful was the CDS that former PM Adolfo Suárez had formed prior to the 1982 election. Surprisingly, Suárez criticised the PSOE from the left, claiming it had broken its promises from the last election, and advocated for Spain’s foreign policy to be less dependent on the US and for a more interventionist economic agenda that would create a better welfare state and fairer distribution of income. Between this and his status as the heir to the UCD’s old position, the CDS tripled its voteshare and increased its seat total almost tenfold in 1986.

At the same time as Suárez, Catalan politician Miquel Roca was in the process of trying to develop a centrist party to capitalise on discontent with the main two, and his party CiU allied with the Galician Coalition (but sadly not the POG) and an assortment of other regional parties to form the Democratic Reformist Party (Partido Reformista Democrático, PRD). Functionally the CiU did well out of the alliance, but it didn’t elect a single member outside of Catalonia and Galicia and like the CP basically fell apart after the election.

Finally, big changes had occurred in the PCE. Its old leader Santiago Carrillo had resigned after the party was routed in 1982, and his successor Gerardo Iglesias had not shared Carrillo’s conciliatory profile. Under his leadership the PCE aggressively attacked the PSOE for ignoring trade unions with regards to the economic restructuring, and was especially hostile to Spanish membership of NATO. It had worked with a number of smaller parties (noticing a theme here?) first to campaign for Spain’s exit from NATO in the referendum, and then formed an alliance with them to fight the 1986 election under. This alliance would become United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU).

In any case, the headline of the election was that the PSOE won a second, though reduced, majority, giving González a renewed mandate despite the dissatisfaction of many voters.

 

[Nanwe]

I would just caution that the CDS campaigned in a weird way, some of its candidates attacked AP and PSOE from the right, and others from the left. It was a very personality party, to be honest.

Also, for the PCE, Carrillo didn't as much resign as get pushed out by the 'Afghan' faction of the PCE, led by Gerardo Iglesias.

 

[prime-minister]

I would just caution that the CDS campaigned in a weird way, some of its candidates attacked AP and PSOE from the right, and others from the left. It was a very personality party, to be honest.

Also, for the PCE, Carrillo didn't as much resign as get pushed out by the 'Afghan' faction of the PCE, led by Gerardo Iglesias.

That would make sense considering it was basically a vehicle for Suárez. And fair point about the PCE, I'm not familiar with the 'Afghan' faction to be honest but I'm guessing from the name it was sympathetic to the DRA?

 

[Nanwe]

That would make sense considering it was basically a vehicle for Suárez. And fair point about the PCE, I'm not familiar with the 'Afghan' faction to be honest but I'm guessing from the name it was sympathetic to the DRA?

They were pro-Soviet intervention, yeah, the hardcore, anti-Eurocommunist faction of the PCE, which ended up winning over Carrillo, taking the PCE back into republicanism and anti-establishment politics more generally

 

[Time Enough]

They were pro-Soviet intervention, yeah, the hardcore, anti-Eurocommunist faction of the PCE, which ended up winning over Carrillo, taking the PCE back into republicanism and anti-establishment politics more generally

Does always amuse me that more often than not, the Pro-Soviet/Hardcore Communist Parties of Europe were able to weather the death of the Soviet Union better than the EuroCommunists (though a lot of that was down to most EuroCommunists just becoming Social Democrats after the collapse of the Berlin Wall).

 

[prime-minister]

Guess who found another map they made ages ago and never got round to posting anywhere?

The 1995 presidential election, held at the end of François Mitterand's second term, were widely seen as hopeless for the PS considering... basically everything to happen to them so far in the 90s, really, but especially the 'petit oui' result of the 1992 referendum and the 1993 legislative election where they were utterly routed. Ironically, after picking Lionel Jospin over party leader Henri Emmanuelli, Jospin ran a surprisingly strong campaign, winning the popular vote in the first round over his two RPR competitors.

The RPR divided between Prime Minister Édouard Balladur and ex-PM, Mayor of Paris and 1988 presidential candidate Jacques Chirac. Balladur had promised not to run against Chirac in 1995, but broke this promise because of his support from right-wingers and ended up running to the right of the more traditional Gaullist Chirac. Chirac's attacks on the 'social fracture' and 'dominant thought' both strengthened his position against Balladur, and ultimately he came over 2 points ahead of Balladur. The rift between the two led Chirac to refuse to make Balladur PM once he ascended to the Presidency.

The election also had prevalent competitors to the RPR's right, namely well-known face in the racism fandom Jean-Marie le Pen and Philippe de Villiers, ex-communications minister under Chirac and former member of Giscard D'Estaing's UDF who had veered to the right and formed the Movement for France (MpF) to oppose the more pro-European consensus of the major parties. He won his home departement of Vendée, while le Pen won the traditionally right-wing Alsace-Lorraine and riviera departements that are generally its strongholds.

In the second round, Chirac reinforced his pivot to the centre and the competition between him and Jospin proved surprisingly cordial, especially compared to the harsh conflict in the first round. The most prominent conflict in the debates ended up being the question of term limits, with Jospin saying, 'It is better five years with Jospin than seven years with Jacques Chirac. That would be very long.' The wimpiness of that quote sums it up to me, really.

Despite his lead in the first round, but unsurprisingly considering how much it had been down to division on the right, Jospin was beaten by a fairly comfortable margin. Having said that, he had clearly revitalised the PS, and only good things would go on to happen for him. Certainly not a second run for the presidency coming to a deeply depressing end seven years later, no siree.

EDIT: Changed the shade of purple I used for Villiers, hopefully this purple stands out better from Jospin's pinks.

 

[Ares96]

The Villiers shades might not be quite distinct enough from the Jospin ones on there.

 

[prime-minister]

Big Canadian boi incoming.

This is obviously a similar idea to the one Thande did ages ago for US presidential elections, but with some substantial differences. Canada's swinginess and receptiveness to parties besides the two major ones, and how long that's been a thing, are obvious, plus both the landslides and the speed with which they were overturned (aside from in the 90s, though of course that's more due to the split on the right than Chrétien's government being that beloved) really stand out. I think the 'wrong winner' results also stand out more because mapping Canadian elections this way shows how much those results are due to one party absolutely dominating a small number of provinces despite their opponents being more popular elsewhere.

I also find it amusing how the NDP have won all the territories at various times because they're single seats with very small electorates which they can fairly easily win based on local issues- despite how malapportioned the territorial ridings are, they actually tend to represent the NDP's consistent if small role in Canadian politics more accurately than the two-party contests in the provinces often do.

 

[prime-minister]

It randomly dawned on me that there is a source for the 1993 NZ election: the TVNZ election night results! Well, sort of. They're a bit off because their 'final' figures are actually preliminary ones published once the result in each seat was clear (aside from Waitaki, which they of course misreported as a Labour gain instead of a narrow National hold), so I checked their margins against the final margins found in the table on Wikipedia and altered the margins accordingly. In any case, voila!

While my writeup probably won't be to the standard of David's, I'll give it a go nonetheless.

The Fourth National Government was swept into office with a mandate from the electorate to reverse 'Rogernomics', and Prime Minister Jim Bolger's wing of the party did sympathise with this idea; Bolger's plan had been to make Bill Birch, one of the champions of the 'Think Big' interventionist programme from the Muldoon era, his Minister of Finance. However, the popularity of the neoliberal Ruth Richardson within the party and the threat of the Bank of New Zealand going bankrupt and a severe fiscal deficit in the coming year forced his hand.

Richardson's first budget in 1991, nicknamed the 'Mother of all Budgets', slashed unemployment, sickness and welfare benefits, things even the Fourth Labour Government hadn't touched. The government also enacted the Employment Contracts Act to replace collective bargaining rights with individual employment contracts, massively disempowering unions. Not surprisingly, this led to a long-term rise in inequality, and even less surprisingly, the voters who had abandoned Labour over 'Rogernomics' were furious about 'Ruthanasia'.

While Labour were reforming somewhat in opposition, with 'Rogernomics' critic Michael Cullen as Shadow Minister of Finance, the party was still led by Mike Moore, who had just lost by the biggest landslide since first coming to power, and wasn't doing much to shake its previously strong association with neoliberalism. Forces on the left were coalescing around two forces that had stood against both Labour and National in the previous election- the NewLabour Party of ex-Labour chair Jim Anderton, and the Greens, who had between them won 12% of the vote in 1990, formed a grouping named the Alliance. They were also joined by the Democrats (née Social Credit), the Māori rights party Mana Motuhake, and later the Liberal Party, made up of National dissidents.

The Alliance quickly made a splash, making significant gains on the Auckland Regional Council and then in 1992 almost winning Robert Muldoon's old electorate of Tamaki at a by-election. Further aiding its position besides the protest vote and its consistently anti-neoliberal position was its steadfast support for electoral reform. After Labour and then National had pledged to hold referenda on the system and then tried to dodge the issue once elected, voters had come to distrust them both on the issue (and many other issues, of course).

When a non-binding referendum was held on replacing FPTP (or FPP as it was generally known in NZ), 84.7% of respondents voted to do so, expressing a strong preference for a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system that would give fairer representation to smaller parties. Despite the overwhelming success of the non-binding referendum forcing the government to allow a binding referendum at the same time as the following year's election, government politicians and business leaders fought hard against it. This is believed to have ended up damaging the campaign for keeping FPTP, though, as it tied the current system to the deeply unpopular current government.

As if the existing political establishment didn't have enough problems, one of their own subsequently defected from National. Winston Peters, who had been dismissed from cabinet in 1991 after criticising the government's policy, sued and then resigned from the party and Parliament in April 1993, forming a new party named New Zealand First. NZ First was unspokenly conceived as a Muldoonist party, inheriting his socially conservative, economically populist stances and directing them back at a National Party applying laissez-faire economics. While it polled far behind the other three parties, Peters won his Tauranga seat resoundingly both at the by-election and at the general election, and it also upset Northern Māori MP Bruce Gregory, the first time since 1938 that any party except Labour had won a Māori seat.

Among the three largest parties, as expected the Alliance was shafted by the FPTP system, though it did still win two seats. National's lead was massively slashed and Labour making a substantial recovery compared to its rout three years prior, though National scraped a majority thanks to a recount in Waitaki going its way. The Labour caucus proceeded to decapitate Mike Moore, who had further embarrassed the party with his 'long dark night' speech that came across as triumphalist despite Labour's narrow loss, and Bolger dismissed Richardson as Finance Minister as a result of 'Ruthanasia' almost costing National the election.

However, the real legacy of the 1993 election wouldn't be the election itself so much as the aforementioned referendum. By 53.86% to 46.14%, voters chose to introduce MMP, and so the 1993 House of Representatives would be the last one elected by FPTP.

 

[prime-minister]

Japan in 2009 has to be one of the weirdest elections in history when you put it in the grander scheme of the country's political culture. At first glance you'd assume it was a landslide defeat for the LDP based on scandals, economic frustrations and exhaustion with it after decades in power that made it a watershed election comparable to the US in the 1994 midterms or the UK in 1997. But the DPJ government which won it was described as exemplifying 'the paradox of political change without policy change' having campaigned on policies that were basically indistinguishable from the LDP, and proceeded to tear itself apart for the following three years, with its flagship policy of a consumption tax getting quashed by the LDP when that party returned to power in 2012 by a landslide as big as they'd ever had.

 

[prime-minister]

Sometimes you just get the idea to look up a country you know quite little about. Anyway, have a Mongolian election map.

In all honesty, my main association with Mongolia is the band The Hu, but modern Mongolia is an interesting place. In spite of being surrounded by two famously hostile and imperialist neighbours, it's been a de facto independent nation since the 1910s, a de jure one since after the Second World War and a fairly stable democracy since 1990 (supposedly, the country's leader Jambyn Batmönkh was urged to crack down on the protests and flatly refused, saying 'We few Mongols have not yet come to the point that we will make each other's noses bleed').

I say 'fairly' stable because while Mongolia has enjoyed peaceful transitions of power and most of its elections are considered to be free and fair, there have been big lapses on this front, most infamously in 2008 when the opposition claimed the election had been rigged and protests led to aggressive police brutality and a fire starting at the governing MPRP's headquarters. After the 2009 election saw the opposition DP win the presidency, the MPRP accepted the result, and subsequent elections have been largely without incidents of this kind.

Mongolia has alternated a lot between voting systems- from the first democratic elections until 2004 it used single seat FPTP constituencies, in 2008, 2016 and 2020 it used bloc vote multi-member constituencies (I find it kinda amusing that despite using a bunch of different electoral systems for the provinces in my China TL, I've never used that one), and in 2012 it used a proportional system, which apparently is being restored for the 2024 election.

I decided to map 2020 the same way as the bloc vote seats from my Taiwan map, with the background colour denoting the party to get the largest voteshare versus the second largest and the colours behind the little mans telling you how far they each were ahead of the next strongest candidate. Next election they'll be changing it back to a proportional system, and although the sources I've found weren't clear if it'll be mixed-member like 2012 I presume so.

Results-wise, the 2020 election was fairly dull, with the Mongolian People's Party (MPP, formerly the MPRP- it dropped the word 'Revolutionary' from its name in 2010) winning re-election with a slightly reduced but still dominant majority while the DP lost 9 points in the popular vote but still gained seats compared to its 2016 rout. Incidentally, those parties are fairly humdrum- the MPP is a social democratic party which still has a sight tinge of post-communism and the DP is a liberal-conservative and somewhat nationalist outfit that claims authority by association with the revolution.

The two parties that each won one seat are more interesting, at least. The Mongolian People's Revoutionary Party (MPRP) split off from the MPP when it changed its name because it wanted to pursue a more populist and nationalist stance, and won a seat as part of Our Coalition in alliance with the Civil Will-Green Party, which is a green party, and the Mongolian Traditional United Party, a hard-right nationalist outfit. It dissolved in 2021 and folded back into the MPP (The Artist Formerly Known As The MPRP), because this split wasn't absurd enough already.

The Right Person Electorate Coalition, meanwhile, elected one member from the National Labour Party, which suddenly started picking up steam after the election due to the popularity of its one MP Togmidyn Dorjkhand, the second place finish of its candidate Dangaasürengiin Enkhbat in the 2021 presidential election, and its rebrand as the Hun Party (yes, really).