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Projekt Enman (FPTP Sweden redux)

2022: Apportionment by county
I've been thinking about how best to update this for the 2022 results, and since we drew up the boundaries for 2014, it may be necessary to do a boundary review. I'm going to see how electorates have changed since 2014, which counties gain or lose seats, and take it from there.

EDIT:

Stockholm 78 (+3)
Uppsala 13 (nc)
Södermanland 10 (nc)
Östergötland 16 (nc)
Jönköping 12 (nc)
Kronoberg 7 (nc)
Kalmar 9 (nc)
Gotland 2 (nc)
Blekinge 5 (-1)
Skåne 46 (nc)
Halland 12 (+1)
Västra Götaland 59 (nc)
Värmland 10 (nc)
Örebro 10 (-1)
Västmanland 9 (nc)
Dalarna 10 (nc)
Gävleborg 10 (nc)
Västernorrland 8 (-1)
Jämtland 5 (nc)
Västerbotten 9 (-1)
Norrbotten 9 (nc)

About what I expected, Stockholm gains quite a bit, also some growth on the west coast (I imagine Gothenburg has also gained, but Västra Götaland is so big that it also contains a lot of stagnant areas, so gets no overall change), while industrial regions in the mid-north and the southeast lose out. I was always unhappy with the six seats drawn for Blekinge, so hopefully bringing it down to five should make things a bit more balanced.
 
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2022: The Southeast
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I've now done the whole southeast region (by a somewhat arbitrary definition - I don't think anyone considers Västervik part of the southeast, but it is in Kalmar County, so). This follows a slightly tighter electorate differential, allowing a maximum 15% deviation from quota rather than the 2:1 rule Tayya and I used for the 2014 boundaries. This means that only a few constituencies are left untouched.

I did Blekinge first, and I'm actually a lot happier with these boundaries than I was with the 2014 ones, because it gives fairly equitable representation to the different ends of the county. The two western constituencies, which were quite a bit over quota before, are now about the right size, while Ronneby ends up a bit under and takes two polling districts from western Karlskrona to make up the numbers. Karlskrona itself, meanwhile, goes down from three very undersized seats to two fairly even ones, with some slight fiddling necessary to even out the sizes of the two constituencies but generally a pretty good balance. I will note that Nättraby is very poorly connected to the rest of the "rural" Karlskrona seat, but I still think it fits in better there than it would anywhere else.

Kalmar County had probably the least drastic set of changes, which is slightly unfortunate given how arbitrary the boundaries of Kalmar's urban constituency were and are. The main change made here is that Kalmar was over quota, so a few polling districts have been moved into what was the Mönsterås constituency, which instead loses Mönsterås town and has its name changed to "Norra Möre" (which makes a nice symmetry with Södra Möre, the seat covering Torsås and the southern Kalmar countryside). For lack of a better place to put it, Mönsterås is brought into the under-quota Hultsfred-Högsby seat, which as a result gets renamed to Hultsfred-Mönsterås. Öland, thank God, continues to be bang on quota, and so do most of the seats in the north of the county.

Kronoberg ends up somewhere in between the two - it doesn't lose a seat, but most of the reason it doesn't is the aggressive growth of Växjö, which is continuing to establish itself as the region's major urban centre. As a result, both of its constituencies end up hugely over quota while most of the rural ones are well under. I addressed the latter problem by adding two districts from the south end of Alvesta to the Älmhult-Markaryd seat and two from rural Växjö to the Tingsryd-based Södra Värend seat, which brought the two within an acceptable size range. This did leave Alvesta and Norra Värend far too small, and so I added the entire Lammhult/Norrvidinge region to Alvesta, and merged the rump of Norra Värend with Hovshaga (Växjö's newest and northernmost district) to form what I will admit is a fairly awkward urban-rural hybrid seat. There is sort of a core of commuter-belt villages with Sandsbro, Rottne and Braås, but the western and eastern ends of the constituency don't have much in common, and I can imagine Uppvidinge getting ignored in favour of the much more prosperous and densely-populated west of the constituency. This leaves Växjö itself, now without Hovshaga, and it was a relatively simple matter of moving districts from south to north until the two constituencies ended up about evenly-sized. The boundary now runs directly north and west of the city centre, and the southern constituency is more dominated by Teleborg than ever before.

The results depicted above are for scenario C, which now matches the blocs commonly used by reporting of the election IOTL. So it's S+V+C+MP versus SD+M+KD+L, and as you can see, that produces a very clear urban-rural divide in this region even with the Centre on the left side. In scenarios A and B, the map is mostly red, but SD wins in the Sölvesborg-Olofström seat in both, also taking Ronneby in scenario B, while the latter also sees both Alvesta and Öland go blue by narrow margins.
 
2022: Malmö
After much kneading of numbers, I've finally figured out a set of boundaries for Malmö that both fit quota (in fact, all seats are within a thousand electors of it, which is a good deal tighter than strictly needed) and don't make me want to claw my eyes out. There's quite a lot of change from 2014-18, so best get right to it.

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The city centre seat (Centrum) is badly over quota, largely because of continued new development in Västra Hamnen, and this means it loses a lot of territory - its southern boundary moves from Föreningsgatan to Kanalen, which actually brings it below quota again, so I've moved most (but not all) of Ribersborg into this seat to compensate. I was hesitant to do this at first, because it feels like bringing all the most right-wing parts of the inner city together, but to my surprise the seat still ends up going red in two out of three scenarios. I'm thinking I might do "notional" 2018 results (obviously all of these are notional results, but you get what I mean) just to make it easier to tell what results are due to boundary changes and which ones are actual votes changing hands between the two elections.

Malmö's growth between 2014 and 2022 means it's now entitled to eleven seats - actually a bit more than that - in its own right, as opposed to the ten-and-a-half it had, and this in turn means huge changes to the former border-crossing seat of Kirseberg-Arlöv. Specifically, Arlöv moves out, and the area of Kirseberg south of the old railway line (which is more suburban in character than the rest of the district, with mostly owner-occupied houses and large amounts of both green space and industrial land) moves over to Husie, which was under quota. The constituency is thus reconfigured as a much more urban seat, taking in areas from both Centrum, Möllevången and Rosengård-Sorgenfri, and renamed "Värnhem" after the square that serves as its main transport hub and commercial centre.

Speaking of constituencies named after transport hubs, a new seat (you could see it as a continuation of the old Eriksfält seat, but I'm choosing not to do that as they only share four polling districts) is created in the south-central part of the city, and I decided to call it Södervärn as that feels like the most neutral name, being not a very populous area that's nevertheless centrally-located in the seat and has a major bus station that makes it a focal point for the area. This seat is almost entirely rental housing, mixed between four-to-six-storey tenements in the older eastern part of it (Sofielund and Södervärn proper) and panel blocks of anywhere from four to fifteen storeys surrounded by green space in the newer western areas (Lorensborg, Borgmästaregården and Gröndal). In between the two is Södervärn bus station, the hospital precinct and a large area of underdeveloped commercial/industrial land that includes the Mobilia shopping centre as well as a large number of smaller health and social care institutions. It's also home to both the Malmö Stadium and Pildammsparken, Malmö's largest and most famous urban park, which I almost named the seat for before realising it was far too peripheral to it.

The main seats Södervärn takes voters from, aside from Möllevången, are Slottsstaden and Hyllie, both of which shift dramatically away from the city centre. Slottsstaden doesn't change quite as radically in makeup as you might expect from the map - it gives up some of Malmö's most prosperous inner-city neighbourhoods and exchanges them for some of its most prosperous inner suburbs, while the core of middle-class rentals and co-ops stays in place. Hyllie, meanwhile, had to change drastically because of the rapid development of its namesake district, which started out as a railway station, a big stadium and an even bigger shopping centre surrounded by mounds of sand and dirt, but is now beginning to see a significant amount of residential housing built as well. The loss of its northern end to Södervärn is accompanied by the transfer of six polling districts - three (the Lindeborg area) from Fosie, two (Hyllieby, the very suburban former church village of Hyllie parish, and Elinelund, a new-build area very similar to Hyllie itself, albeit smaller) from Limhamn, and one (the anonymous and sleepy village of Vintrie, largely unchanged for decades despite now being surrounded by highways and railways) from Oxie-Bunkeflo. The result is a very different kind of constituency, much more suburban and less dominated by large post-war housing estates, and this makes it a bit less red than it was.

Fosie is also more geographically coherent than before, now taking in most of the triangle between Ystadsvägen, Trelleborgsvägen and the outer ring road. It remains a thoroughly working-class, multicultural, and tenant-dominated seat, as does Rosengård-Sorgenfri, which sees only a minor shift south, losing Kristinelund and taking in Augustenborg and Persborg and becoming more centred on the two commuter rail stations along the old line toward Trelleborg. Husie, similarly, sees only minor change, expanding a bit in geographic area but remaining a thoroughly suburban seat with a solid but not overwhelming majority of owner-occupied housing.

Lastly, Oxie-Bunkeflo. There's not actually very much change to it, but the loss of Vintrie creates a geographic cleavage that sort of underlines how awkward this seat was to begin with. I may end up looking into the alternative configuration I thought of, but didn't implement, last time around, where Bunkeflo gets paired with Vellinge and Oxie with Svedala instead, but I don't actually know if the numbers would add up for that.

You're probably interested to see the results, so here they are. As mentioned, 2022 saw a lot of change towards the Social Democrats specifically among middle-class voters in the cities, and this means every seat in Malmö goes red in scenario A - only Limhamn holds out, and by a shockingly narrow margin at that. Meanwhile, Möllevången sticks with the Left Party by a razor-thin margin (45 votes) in spite of the boundary changes.

In scenarios B and C, the social divide in Malmö becomes a lot more clear, but most of the city remains either solidly or narrowly red. Oxie-Bunkeflo turn blue in both scenarios, especially strongly so in scenario C where the Sweden Democrats and Moderates - both quite strong in exurban Malmö - pool their votes, while Centrum actually switches back in scenario C due to a respectable 8% voteshare for the Centre Party. In general, minor parties did quite well in that constituency, and the Social Democrats won the seat in scenario A with just 24% of the vote.

Oh, and in case anyone wonders, Nyans gets just shy of 10% of the vote in Rosengård-Sorgenfri, 5.8% in Fosie and 3.1% in Hyllie. They barely have a presence anywhere else in the city, and I imagine in an actual FPTP scenario they'd only bother to stand candidates in those three seats, maybe Södervärn as well if they could find someone to stand for them.

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2022: Scania
Rural Scania turned out to be a tougher nut to crack than I was expecting. Even though there hasn't been that much population growth, the fact that Arlöv is no longer in a Malmö constituency means I've been forced to rejig the entire central west coast, and on top of that the tighter quotas mean a lot of my old seats are too big or too small now. Kävlinge and Sjöbo were particular headaches, both being about half a quota and isolated by natural communities, but after much deliberation and trying of alternatives, I ended up deciding to split the rural Lund Municipality seat in half and assign half to each. Similarly, I had to cut up Helsingborg's rural surroundings - including adding the Laröd/Hittarp area to one of the urban seats, making it that much bluer (Laröd is one of the richest and most conservative villages in Scania, probably in the country too) - to fit the Landskrona leftovers, since I had to reconfigure the Svalöv seat. The former Kristianstad County sees less change overall, with Hässleholm's two seats both being very undersized and pushing boundaries across much of northern Scania west to compensate, and a whole new division of Ängelholm which I don't like but have very few alternatives to.

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As you'd expect, the Sweden Democrats do well here - in scenario A, they nearly tie the Social Democrats with 18 and 19 seats respectively. The Moderates end up with eight, which I imagine is a pale shadow of what they would've gotten under Reinfeldt, while the Left hold their single seat in Möllevången by a typically razor-thin margin.

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Scenario B makes the map a bit bluer overall, but the red bloc also pick up a couple of seats in the towns. It is noteworthy just how many seats will still elect the Sweden Democrats even when the opposition is arraigned into two blocs, though. A French-style runoff system, while impossible for me to calculate within the scope of this project, would likely be interesting in the Chinese sense.

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Scenario C brings no surprises whatsoever, the map is solidly blue aside from Malmö, Lund, the most working-class parts of Helsingborg as well as Landskrona and Kristianstad's urban seats. I'm honestly kind of surprised the latter two hold out, neither town has what you'd call a cosmopolitan reputation and Landskrona in particular was an early SD stronghold.

Nationwide tallies thus far:

Scenario A
S 40
SD 20
M 8
V 1


Scenario B
RG 42
ALL 17
NAT 10


Scenario C
OPP 46
REG 23
 
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2022: Halland
Halland is the only county outside Stockholm to actually gain a seat, going from 11 to 12. I was expecting most of this growth to be concentrated in the north end of the county, which is increasingly becoming outer suburbs of Gothenburg, but in fact it seems like Halmstad did a lot of the growing as well. The county town of Halland goes from two urban seats and a rural area split between two constituencies that extend further out, to two urban seats, a hybrid rural-urban seat covering the western suburbs and then an unchanged eastern rural constituency. Laholm remains just the right size for one seat, while Falkenberg and Varberg each have an urban and a rural seat (with the boundary between the two rural seats being slightly north of the municipal boundary) and Kungsbacka - the home of most of the county's Gothenburg exurbs - is once again split into three seats, one for the town itself, one for the Onsala peninsula in the west, and one covering the more rural eastern part of the municipality.

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Halland tends to be a right-leaning county, but it's specifically a stronghold of the rural right, which tends to be split between different parties. As a result, scenario A gives us a lot of very marginal red seats, similarly to what we get in Kronoberg, while the Moderates break through in the very wealthy western suburbs of Halmstad as well as the Kungsbacka area, and SD win in Laholm and the rural Kungsbacka seat.

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In scenario B, the Alliance parties break through across most of the county. The only rural seat where the left bloc wins is the one combining eastern rural Halmstad with Hylte, both of which are heavily post-industrial.

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In scenario C, meanwhile, that too falls - it's a very good seat for the SD, who get almost 30% by themselves and nearly win the seat in scenario A. This leaves us with a perfectly clean urban-rural split outside Kungsbacka, which is all solidly right-wing.

Nationwide totals:

Scenario A
S 47
SD 22
M 11
V 1


Scenario B
RG 47
ALL 24
NAT 10


Scenario C
OPP 54
GOV 27
 
Finland 2023: Capital Region
Might as well post the Finnish ones here too. I figured out how to get results from Tilastokeskus (by candidate, unfortunately, but it's not that much work to collate them), which lets me actually calculate results as opposed to guessing who won where. Happy to say I've only gotten a couple of them wrong so far, but it's not a 100% perfect record even so. The Left only won in Kallio, whereas Pasila-Vallila narrowly went SDP, but that's the only one I got wrong in the capital region itself.

I've also done two combined scenarios broadly modelled on the Swedish ones, with scenario B lumping the Greens, SDP, Left and the tiny Feminist Party together against the Coalition, Centre, SFP, KD, Movement Now and Korjausliike (the remnants of Blue Future, which barely existed in this election but still made the cut because why not) on one hand and the Finns and their various splinters (aside from Korjausliike) on the other. Scenario C, meanwhile, is a straight government-opposition thing, with the Centre and SFP joining the red-green bloc while the Coalition and Finns are counted together with KD and Movement Now as the opposition.

It's always quite interesting to be reminded of how different Helsinki is from Stockholm politically, especially its suburbs: because Finland is so much whiter, the Finns have done much better in working-class east Helsinki and Vantaa than they ever would in equivalent parts of Stockholm. This means Vantaa is entirely blue in scenario C, while several wealthier and more Swedish-speaking parts of Helsinki became redder due to the presence of the SFP in the left coalition.

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