OTL Election maps resources thread

And all of the others, I presume, had an electoral roll that could be counted on both hands?

Not quite that bad (Penryn was also competitive it turns out), but certainly it was common to have a corporation of less than 30 members. But a fair few were where the local magnate employed the whole time and others were based on the securing of offices for the returning officer or important townspeople. Bodmin required the patron to pay for the annual ball at which the young ladies were presented. The rot seems to have set in with the exclusion bill when the Earl of Bath, being Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall at the time, demanded the surrender of most of the Borough charters and reissued them in such way as to be more able to pack the house with Court supporters and doubtful Tories in the Loyal Parliament of 1685.

Grampound BTW got down to about 40 when it was being sold for 300 guineas a man.
 
The Test Acts shouldn't have been an issue by 1831 but it might be something like that. I suspect half the reason why Wales was so anti-Tory in the later 19th and early 20th century, besides the sectarianism, was because the Tories were probably associated with the landowners who used to dominate politics before Reform. I.e. not a million miles away from the same reason why Rhode Island and Hawaii are so Democratic today.
And we're so anti-Tory today because... The same reason! :p
 

Thande

Donor
Re Alex's point, one thing I've noticed while going through this data is that a lot of the seats with very small electorates had fiercely competitive elections decided by a few votes. Bribery certainly played a part. Also, the source I was using had footnotes describing memorable fights and riots surrounding particular votes...
 
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You might want to talk to Makemakean about that, he keeps messaging me with obscure facts about the unreformed Swedish electoral system he's found out...

Well, I can't help it! I've been digging through this huge array of Swedish constitutional documents and come up with a vast pool of obscure but interesting facts about the country's history that's virtually unknown even among Swedes. This has a lot to do with the fact that Swedish historians traditionally have wished to emphasise Sweden's long-lost role as a great military power (Jag vet att du är, och du blir vad du var!), and so have spent far more time and resources on reconstructing detailed minutae of Gustavus Adolphus's and Charles XII:s every last battle while dismissing much of what went on in the Riksdag as booooooring, but enough about that.

Seeing I find all of this to be extremely interesting, I can't just sit on the information all on my own, but I have to forward it to... well, someone, and you just happens to accidentally have placed yourself in the line of fire. :eek:

Think of being acquainted with me as having a free subscription to some publication. Maybe not always, but sometimes, some nugget of what I send over actually interests you. ;)
 
I've actually been wanting to do a map of our unreformed Riksdag of the Estates, but I haven't found any kind of source on it anywhere, and likely won't until I go to a university.

While, as I informed you in the PM I sent you, you cannot do a map of the elections after party (as I mentioned, I tried to do that, but discovered that pinpointing individual Members of Riksdag's party affiliation is a wild goose chase), you can easily get one for the boundaries of the constituencies for the House of Peasants. They just used the härads as their constituencies, which each härad having one MR. As you mention, this was actually surprisingly balanced, far more balanced than it was for most of the time in the UK, but this wasn't by design as much as it was by accident.

The old härads' boundaries haven't really changed that much since the Viking Age, and was pretty much set in stone during the 1600s. The reason why it was balanced was that by dumb luck, the population ratios stayed pretty much static among farmers for much of Swedish history, with a minimum of immigration and emigration. People seldom moved away from where they had grown up. You didn't have that in England, and so what had once been sprawling metropolises, like Old Sarum, steadily declined into a hill with no residents, thus becoming rotten boroughs. Thus, there was never really an argument about changing the boundaries in the Riksdag, because there was no good reason to do it, and so Sweden never needed a Great Reform Act.

Though some national romantic Swedish historians like to use this to brag about that during the 18th century, Sweden was the most democratic nation in the world (I'm looking at you, Herman Lindqvist!), I would vehemently disagree and argue that the whole political machinery was simply to Byzantine and corrupt to even be considered vaguely democratic.

As far as the Burghers is concerned, that is just one big mess as for a long time the different cities could choose for themselves how to elect their representatives, then during the early 18th century they developed this very odd and complicated system of doing it, having the burghers elect electors after their particular line of business who then got to elect the representatives with the different electors having different amounts of vote after who had elected them, and the city council too had a specific say, etc., etc. Worst of all was that it was first in the late 1740s that rules were actually laid down about how many representatives a city was allowed to send, and then it was decided that with a few exceptions (Stockholm, Gothenburg and maybe (can't remember if or if not) Malmö),a city could send either one or two MRs to Stockholm.

The House of Clergy also had a democratic element to it. Much like in the UK, all bishops and archbishops were automatically members thereof, but during the 1700s it was decided that ordinary chaplains too should have representatives. Anders Chydenius, often heralded as the Father of Swedish Liberalism, was such an elected member of the House of Clergy.

As far as the House of Nobles were concerned, it looked pretty much like the old British House of Lords, with each noble family having exactly one representative. Originally they voted in bloc, oddly enough. This can be described as if in the House of Lords, first all Dukes voted and came to one opinion, then all the Marquesses voted and came to one opinion, then all the Earls, etc., and then finally, it was tallied so that there was one ducal vote, etc. and they were all weighted after their importance (the Dukes' vote would carry greater weight than the weight of the Barons' vote). This system however, was abolished in 1719, and then every member of the House of Nobles had one vote.

Gustav III noted that the extreme number of nobles Sweden had by his time was becoming ridiculously large (back in the 1500s it had been around 50, during his reign it was over 1000), and so drew up plans for massive reforms that would have made the Swedish parliament bicameral after the British model, but with additional modifications so that the House of Nobles only had 50 members, who had been elected by the noble families. But unfortunately, this plan never came to fruition because Anckarström decided to shoot Gustav III before he got around to it.

There was also at various times during the 1700s a movement to introduce a fifth estates (because the problem was apparently that we didn't have enough estates!) that would include the influential persons who for various reasons were excluded from representation in the other estates. What prevented reform from happening wasn't really a conservative mindset. Many people recognized and acknowledged that there was something seriously wrong with the Swedish constitutional settlement. The problem was that people tended to have very fanciful and different ideas about how a new parliamentary system should look, and so it dragged on all the way till the 1850s before serious reform happened, and even then it was fairly controversial, with De Geer, the Swedish Prime Minister who managed to get it through all the estates, alienated awfully many of his political allies in doing so.
 

Thande

Donor
Seeing I find all of this to be extremely interesting, I can't just sit on the information all on my own, but I have to forward it to... well, someone, and you just happens to accidentally have placed yourself in the line of fire. :eek:

Think of being acquainted with me as having a free subscription to some publication. Maybe not always, but sometimes, some nugget of what I send over actually interests you. ;)

Heh, no problem, it is interesting, it's just sometimes I lack context. I find myself in a similar position to you when it comes to finding out strange things about Britain's history (via JSTOR etc) even though Britain has more of a tradition of constitutional historians than you make Sweden sound like. For example, just yesterday I found a proposed Radical written constitution for Britain from 1832 which sounds bizarrely modern, in fact in some ways goes even further. My favourite part is the bit where they advocate an elected King, then add a hasty footnote saying loyalists need not worry because the British people would always re-elect the rightful heir anyway :D

Some of the oddities of the burgess element of Swedish parliamentarianism you mention sound reminiscent of the City of London or some other municipal corporations before they were reformed, where everything is based on different vocations or guilds getting a set share of the vote.

Anyway, I hope you and Ares 96 can do something interesting with the Swedish history, even if party identity is a bit fluxional. You could always do something like "Cap, Hat, Doubtful Cap, Doubtful Hat, and Unknown" as I did with the earlier English and British elections.
 
Heh, no problem, it is interesting, it's just sometimes I lack context. I find myself in a similar position to you when it comes to finding out strange things about Britain's history (via JSTOR etc) even though Britain has more of a tradition of constitutional historians than you make Sweden sound like.

It's true, and it's probably why my favourite historian of Sweden isn't actually a Swede but a Briton by the name of Michael Roberts.

For example, just yesterday I found a proposed Radical written constitution for Britain from 1832 which sounds bizarrely modern, in fact in some ways goes even further. My favourite part is the bit where they advocate an elected King, then add a hasty footnote saying loyalists need not worry because the British people would always re-elect the rightful heir anyway :D

Like the Stadtholder of the Dutch Republic? The rightful heir to the House of Orange would inevitably always be the one chosen.

If you have a link to that constitution, could you post it here and maybe as a footnote somewhere in Look to the West? The post-Inglorious Revolution Parliament always to me felt a bit implausible until you told me this.

Some of the oddities of the burgess element of Swedish parliamentarianism you mention sound reminiscent of the City of London or some other municipal corporations before they were reformed, where everything is based on different vocations or guilds getting a set share of the vote.

Reminiscent, but I think that in the end the machinations of the City of London slightly wins out when it comes to levels of needless complexity.

Anyway, I hope you and Ares 96 can do something interesting with the Swedish history, even if party identity is a bit fluxional. You could always do something like "Cap, Hat, Doubtful Cap, Doubtful Hat, and Unknown" as I did with the earlier English and British elections.

Well, we do have some pieces of information about where the different parties were strong (the Caps for example had Gothenburg as a stronghold because it was a port town and thus wanted relatively free trade and exposed to the Northern Sea and thus wanted peace), but it still remains difficult considering the extreme levels of corruption that took place in the Riksdag, where majorities were shamelessly bought and sold. Heck, at one point the Hat leader von Fersen even managed to bribe Pechlin, the leader of the opposition, into deserting the Caps and joining the Hats!

Actually, you guys bear some of the blame for that, interestingly enough. It started with the French giving the Hat leadership an awful lot of money so that they could buy majorities in the Estates (the Hats were strongly pro-war and the French wanted Sweden as an ally in various campaigns of theirs). The British then naturally had to step in and start giving the Cap leadership an awful lot of money, for the simple reason that "it will at least annoy the French, and that's all the argument we need to spend money on this."

So, you probably need to add a sixth category to that, "will support either side if you pay him enough". :p
 
While, as I informed you in the PM I sent you, you cannot do a map of the elections after party (as I mentioned, I tried to do that, but discovered that pinpointing individual Members of Riksdag's party affiliation is a wild goose chase), you can easily get one for the boundaries of the constituencies for the House of Peasants. They just used the härads as their constituencies, which each härad having one MR. As you mention, this was actually surprisingly balanced, far more balanced than it was for most of the time in the UK, but this wasn't by design as much as it was by accident.

The old härads' boundaries haven't really changed that much since the Viking Age, and was pretty much set in stone during the 1600s. The reason why it was balanced was that by dumb luck, the population ratios stayed pretty much static among farmers for much of Swedish history, with a minimum of immigration and emigration. People seldom moved away from where they had grown up. You didn't have that in England, and so what had once been sprawling metropolises, like Old Sarum, steadily declined into a hill with no residents, thus becoming rotten boroughs. Thus, there was never really an argument about changing the boundaries in the Riksdag, because there was no good reason to do it, and so Sweden never needed a Great Reform Act.

I could easily make a hundred (I don't know why, but I generally prefer the translated name) map of much of the south, and assuming there's maps of all of them on Commons, I'll probably have the entire country done fairly quick, but Finland is going to be trickier.

Though some national romantic Swedish historians like to use this to brag about that during the 18th century, Sweden was the most democratic nation in the world (I'm looking at you, Herman Lindqvist!), I would vehemently disagree and argue that the whole political machinery was simply to Byzantine and corrupt to even be considered vaguely democratic.

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with you. That would be like saying Italy is the most democratic nation in the world today.

As far as the Burghers is concerned, that is just one big mess as for a long time the different cities could choose for themselves how to elect their representatives, then during the early 18th century they developed this very odd and complicated system of doing it, having the burghers elect electors after their particular line of business who then got to elect the representatives with the different electors having different amounts of vote after who had elected them, and the city council too had a specific say, etc., etc. Worst of all was that it was first in the late 1740s that rules were actually laid down about how many representatives a city was allowed to send, and then it was decided that with a few exceptions (Stockholm, Gothenburg and maybe (can't remember if or if not) Malmö),a city could send either one or two MRs to Stockholm.

Maybe we could do a map of the various systems used before it was standardised? And I have a hard time believing Malmö would send more than two delegates, as I think both Karlskrona and Norrköping were bigger cities at this point.

Gustav III noted that the extreme number of nobles Sweden had by his time was becoming ridiculously large (back in the 1500s it had been around 50, during his reign it was over 1000), and so drew up plans for massive reforms that would have made the Swedish parliament bicameral after the British model, but with additional modifications so that the House of Nobles only had 50 members, who had been elected by the noble families. But unfortunately, this plan never came to fruition because Anckarström decided to shoot Gustav III before he got around to it.

So basically like the Scottish representative peers? That sounds fairly interesting actually. Perhaps we'd see this institution survive with some modification until the present day, just as it did in Britain.

There was also at various times during the 1700s a movement to introduce a fifth estates (because the problem was apparently that we didn't have enough estates!) that would include the influential persons who for various reasons were excluded from representation in the other estates. What prevented reform from happening wasn't really a conservative mindset. Many people recognized and acknowledged that there was something seriously wrong with the Swedish constitutional settlement. The problem was that people tended to have very fanciful and different ideas about how a new parliamentary system should look, and so it dragged on all the way till the 1850s before serious reform happened, and even then it was fairly controversial, with De Geer, the Swedish Prime Minister who managed to get it through all the estates, alienated awfully many of his political allies in doing so.

Well, I read in Bo Eriksson's book about Lützen that the army commanders tended to sit as a fifth estate during Gustav II Adolf's reign, but I can't remember how that actually worked in practice.
 
I could easily make a hundred (I don't know why, but I generally prefer the translated name) map of much of the south, and assuming there's maps of all of them on Commons, I'll probably have the entire country done fairly quick, but Finland is going to be trickier.

Well, härad just looks ugly when seen in an English context, but hundreds... Well, it's not a hundred people, and it just bugs me. Anyway, I'll probably end up using hundreds when I finally get around to my timeline, as I intend to translate all names and titles. My idea is that I want to present Sweden in such a way that it isn't thought of as a "foreign country of foreigners", which you end up having if you don't translate things. Like, compare Kaiser to Emperor. The former stresses the "foreignness" of the head of the German government.

Maybe we could do a map of the various systems used before it was standardised? And I have a hard time believing Malmö would send more than two delegates, as I think both Karlskrona and Norrköping were bigger cities at this point.

You could begin by trying to do a flowchart of how Burgher MRs were elected. Here is the post I couldn't find earlier:

How you Elect Representatives to the Estate of the Burghers of the Swedish Riksdag:

All cities are legally compelled to adopt a system as close to that of Stockholm which is described below, with certain guidelines as to how far they are allowed to depart from it.

It is to be declared before the council house and in all the churches that there is on the appointed date to be a general election, and on that date every burgher of the city is to come to the council house for the vote. A burgher is a person who is either an official or has received a charter to do commerce in the city[1] and has paid his or her tax to the crown and the borough. If you do not come, your vote will be considered forfeited.

At the council house, the voters are now to be divided into forty-eight classes according to their trade, wealth and position. There are to be twenty-four classes of people involved in commerce and twenty-four of those who are officials and civil servants. Each class elects one elector. Of those twenty-four elected by the merchants, twelve are to be grocers, and twelve are to be of the other trading guilds. There are specific rules regarding the eligibility to be elected an elector: You have to have been born in Sweden, you have to have lived in the city and been a burgher for a minimum of seven years.

Now these forty-eight electors are to elect the ten representatives of the city. This is done in the following fashion:

Six are elected by block-vote, wherewith the grocers have two votes, those of the other guilds have one vote, and the officials have three votes. Those six with the greatest numbers of votes have then become elected representatives. Interestingly, the law stipulates that this election is to be by secret ballot.

Now, in order to ensure a specific representation by the magistrate of the city, the forty-eight electors are to nominate six candidates out of the mayor and the council. Once these six candidates have been nominated, the magistrate are to elect four of these. The four of these to receive most votes are now become elected representatives as well.

And that is how you elect your Third Estate MPs!

[1] This mercantilist rule actually meant that women could in theory be allowed to vote, and in some places, like Kristianstad, they actually did and played prominent political roles.
So basically like the Scottish representative peers? That sounds fairly interesting actually. Perhaps we'd see this institution survive with some modification until the present day, just as it did in Britain.

One of the fundamental ideas of my timeline is that Gustav III:s coup d'etat goes a bit different in this timeline, with Gustav III getting those ideas about bicameralism much earlier (due to interference in the timeline by the Order). He thus ends up with a Riksdag in which he has mashed together the two upper and two lower chambers respectively. Because of this being more stable than a quadrocameral system, Swedish parliamentary reform after that is far more gradual than it was in OTL.
 
So how would that work when there's only one or two delegates? I'm guessing that when there's one they all agree on one candidate and when there's two the merchants elect one and the officials one, but I'm far from sure.

How many delegates did Gothenburg elect, by the way?
 

Thande

Donor
If you have a link to that constitution, could you post it here and maybe as a footnote somewhere in Look to the West? The post-Inglorious Revolution Parliament always to me felt a bit implausible until you told me this.

I based Populist Britain on "OTL demands by bourgeois Radicals + oh wait, this is what happens when you have actual working class people suddenly thrust into a position of power they've never had before" which as we know from OTL does not always end well, especially when their representatives got their power through leading militias in a civil war. LTTW Britain got off relatively lightly, having the luck of the draw that their proletarian strongman was actually a decent guy for the most part and it didn't fall apart too violently after he died.

I can't post the constitution because of the JSTOR rules, but if you have access yourself I can give you the link. One of the most interesting bits was their advocacy for female suffrage, in which they say the main argument against women in politics is that it's too rough-and-tumble (that book of British elections I've been using mentions highlights of all the best fights at by-elections!) and they claim their reforms to the electoral system will stop political violence, thus making it all right for women to take part. You don't really hear the arguments framed that way, but then this is 1832 we're talking about, before the Great Reform Act had even gone through - in fact the constitution is framed as being a far more extreme 'replacement' for the Reform Bill which was currently stalled in Parliament. Somewhat reminiscent of how some Americans were advocating single-payer healthcare when "Obamacare" was stalled in Congress a few years ago, etc.
 
I'm done with the hundred map for Sweden itself. The left map has them coloured by which historical province (landskap) they belong to, and the right one has them coloured by what type of entity they were - the yellow are regular hundreds, whereas the red is bergslag, the blue skeppslag and the green the tingslag of Norrland.

härader.png

Worth noting is that while the hundreds in the south were indeed extremely monolithic, being virtually unchanged since the late middle ages, the tingslag of the north did change rapidly over time, especially in Lapland, as it was settled. This map depicts the situation around the turn of the 20th century, and will need to be changed to fit the period.

härader.png
 
Been working on this. Those sources psephos linked to above were very helpful, and I also did a version that distinguishes between opposed and unopposed returns - trouble is that the sources are incomplete, because they were typically done in the 1840s and didn't bother listing data about all the constituencies that were abolished in 1832. As they were rotten boroughs I suppose you can assume they were unopposed, but there you are.

Nice Thande. Do you have, or are planning to make, maps of the 1865 and 1880 elections as well, the ones before the next two refform acts? That second one would be interesting to contrast with the 1885 election, what with the redistribution of seats etc.
 

Thande

Donor
Nice Thande. Do you have, or are planning to make, maps of the 1865 and 1880 elections as well, the ones before the next two refform acts? That second one would be interesting to contrast with the 1885 election, what with the redistribution of seats etc.

I don't have good sources on the 1867-1885 boundaries yet. Or the 1832-1867 ones for that matter, but I do intend to attempt the latter at some point.
 

Thande

Donor
This guy has maps for some counties at least. There's even some maps for boroughs showing the extent of the 1832 expansion.

Yeah, I've seen those, some are useful but they tend to just show the borough without much contextual surroundings. The Vision of Britain series may be of some use here though.

Anyway, I've also done a map of 1830 to accompany my map of 1831. Look at how many Tory seats fell as the voters decisively went for Reform in 1831; in fact it's the first time in over 100 years that party numbers had changed as the result of an election (as opposed to a new faction forming in Parliament and then being given public support in an election). Whig and Tory identities were firming up as pro and anti reform, and there were some defections in between 1831 and 1832, with anti-reform Whigs and pro-reform Tories switching sides. One particularly weird case is a Cornish MP who identified as an Ultra-Tory but sat on the Whig benches because he was so incensed with the Duke of Wellington for passing Catholic Emancipation. It was divisions between the Tories that allowed Earl Grey to form a Whig minority ministry after the 1831 election and then have it expanded to a majority by the landslide of 1832.

z-1830_final.png
 
I'm done with the hundred map for Sweden itself. The left map has them coloured by which historical province (landskap) they belong to, and the right one has them coloured by what type of entity they were - the yellow are regular hundreds, whereas the red is bergslag, the blue skeppslag and the green the tingslag of Norrland.

Worth noting is that while the hundreds in the south were indeed extremely monolithic, being virtually unchanged since the late middle ages, the tingslag of the north did change rapidly over time, especially in Lapland, as it was settled. This map depicts the situation around the turn of the 20th century, and will need to be changed to fit the period.

It wasn't really as much about the boundaries changing during the middle ages as it was about them for a very long time being only very vaguely and ambiguously defined. After all, the hundreds have their origins in farmers getting together to provide for mutual defense, not in actual administrative districts, so there was never any need for overly clear boundaries. Doesn't make the situation any better that cartography was in its infancy and all maps had to be drawn by hand.

Excellent work, though! I look forward to seeing your map of Finland. :)

I don't think I've ever seen a complete map of the hundreds of England, although a chap on Wikipedia has done some maps of individual counties' hundreds / rapes / wapentakes.

Wait, what the-...?!
 
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