OTL Election maps resources thread

[LancyIain]

I don't know about that Thande.

I vote in every election going since I turned 18 (in 2005), and I've only been able to vote once in my local community council election (for my ward) during this entire period. That's how often they go unopposed around here.

And even then, there were only two candidates (the guy I didn't vote for won, though ).

I've never personally seen an uncontested election at district or county level, and I certainly have the impression it is very rare at that level or higher. Once you get below that level though, my understanding is it is reasonably common.

 

[OwenM]

Aren't you supposed to write in a candidate name as well if you write in a party name in Sweden?
And don't you have substitute members for each full member - I would expect running out of seats for them to be very common (but also I suppose it would be more easily fixable).
And yeah, parish and community councils are often unopposed, I believe. In fact (especially in the really titchy ones) it's quite common for some seats to need to be filled by co-option (they don't bother with by-elections - this is how my Mum got on one once for six months) straight after the main election.

 

[Thande]

It strikes me that the little man method is a very good way of doing STV- you can show the councillors elected and the first preference votes popular vote winner in the same map.

You'd think so, but I tried it and the voteshares are so similar that it ends up as all pastel shades.

Possibly it might be better if we had little mans plus just a solid dark colour to show the popular vote topper with no majoritarian gradations (that might be what you meant, come to think of it)...

I don't know about that Thande.

I vote in every election going since I turned 18 (in 2005), and I've only been able to vote once in my local community council election (for my ward) during this entire period. That's how often they go unopposed around here.

And even then, there were only two candidates (the guy I didn't vote for won, though ).

That's Anglesey though--as Iain says, 'very special'. My point was that unopposed elections seem to be becoming increasingly less common in rural England (not sure about Wales as a whole).

Aren't Welsh communities equivalent to English parishes anyway--certainly unopposed elections remain the norm on parish councils, but that's because they have no power and nobody ever wants to stand--they have trouble making up the numbers at the best of times. I also recall only one election to my parish council since I have been able to vote, and that was in 2010.

One day I have to write a lengthy guide to Nordic Politics:

Why our Agrarian Movements are different from your Agrarian Movements
Progress Parties: The Scandinavian Tea Parties
Christian Democrats Who Look Longingly To Germany
Why Our Liberalism Is Pro-Compulsion, Technocratic and Paternalistic
Why the Social Democrats tend to be the most small letter-c conservative in Scandinavia, etc.

I think we would appreciate that.

 

[Alex Richards]

I've never personally seen an uncontested election at district or county level, and I certainly have the impression it is very rare at that level or higher. Once you get below that level though, my understanding is it is reasonably common.

It seems to vary a lot by council. Rural areas in particular seem to suffer from it more than urban areas. More spread out population?

Speaking of which, here's North Kesteven, post 2007 labelled ward map here. The 2003 map may be a bit off as I had to reconstruct it based on parish boundaries, LGBCE Data and Individual ward maps in the Lead Dataset of deprivation data from the 2001 census. As a consequence, here's the labelled ward map for that.

North Kesteven is another large chunk of rural Lincolnshire lying in the somewhat higher, though still relatively flat, west of county. As such it's very rural, mostly agricultural and home to several RAF bases. There are two settlements of note. North Hykeham was formerly a small village which has become an extension of the Lincoln Urban area and thus grown into a large town, though it retains a separate identity from Lincoln. Further south, Sleaford was the former seat of government of Kesteven County Council, and has long been the main focus of settlement in the area, with evidence of settlement going back to the iron age. It was primarily a market town for most of its history, but the arrival of the canals made it a minor industrial centre, with the economy primarily based in the export of agricultural produce.

Politically, the council has traditionally been too divided to produce a majority, with the main groups being Conservatives, Independent Councillors and the Lib Dems who are locally strong in North Hykeham. The Conservatives took full majority control in 2007 for the first time, and maintained it in 2011 where, against national trends, they increased their vote share and the Lib Dems have held on to their support. Meanwhile Labour have yet to recover since their vote collapsed in 2007.

 

[Utgard96]

Aren't you supposed to write in a candidate name as well if you write in a party name in Sweden?

You can if you want to, but it's not required. When we moved to open-list in 2002 everything got kind of fuzzy.

 

[Thande]

Good work on North Kesteven Alex, we appreciate the reconstructive work! Record of even quite recent boundaries may only exist in dusty archives in the place in question, if at all.

Did you ever do North East Derbyshire? I'm filling in your work on an East Midlands map and I notice it's a blank space.

After doing NY I have a hankering to do another American state legislature...stay tuned.

 

[Alex Richards]

Good work on North Kesteven Alex, we appreciate the reconstructive work! Record of even quite recent boundaries may only exist in dusty archives in the place in question, if at all.

After doing NY I have a hankering to do another American state legislature...stay tuned.

Annoyingly I can't find any information at all about the historic party control of South Holland Council. I think the Dutch Province is complicating matters.

 

[OwenM]

You can if you want to, but it's not required. When we moved to open-list in 2002 everything got kind of fuzzy.

What exactly was the system before that? My impression had been it was all write-in until then....(but that most voters wrote in a list advertised by the parties outside the polling station).
Certainly that's what that electoral system changes site I found seems to say.

 

[Nanwe]

What exactly was the system before that? My impression had been it was all write-in until then....(but that most voters wrote in a list advertised by the parties outside the polling station).
Certainly that's what that electoral system changes site I found seems to say.

From my comparative politics book: In Sweden before 1998 preference votes matered little, but then the rules were changed: candidates who receive preference votes from at least 8% of their party's voters now leapfrog candidates who were placed above them on the list but receive fewer preference voters. Because most preference votes are cast for the candidates already near the top of the list, not many MPs are elected out of list order due to preference votes (ten in 2002 and six in 2006).

 

[OwenM]

Although obviously we don't have precise statistics, I expect that's a similar proportion to the number of MPs whose elections were decided by personal votes here.

 

[Nanwe]

Although obviously we don't have precise statistics, I expect that's a similar proportion to the number of MPs whose elections were decided by personal votes here.

And all of them in by-elections?

 

[OwenM]

Oh, if you look at by-elections instead of just generals, it's probably slightly higher. Maybe even the dizzy heights of five per cent.

 

[Utgard96]

What exactly was the system before that? My impression had been it was all write-in until then....(but that most voters wrote in a list advertised by the parties outside the polling station).
Certainly that's what that electoral system changes site I found seems to say.

I think you just chose a list from the available ones, or wrote in a party on a blank paper. I don't think there was any form of preference voting at all. Of course, this was before my time.

 

[OwenM]

Looking at the site, it says that parties would have people handing out pre-printed ones outside the polling station.
So basically seems like a less formalised version of your current system, without preference votes or the state paying to print ballot papers.

 

[Utgard96]

Looking at the site, it says that parties would have people handing out pre-printed ones outside the polling station.
So basically seems like a less formalised version of your current system, without preference votes or the state paying to print ballot papers.

That sounds about right. The whole "different ballots for each party" thing is fairly unique to Sweden as far as I know - Finland (which is the state that's closest to us in juridical terms) does not use it, instead having a system where the voter writes a candidate number on a blank piece of paper (thus, preference voting is required there, although most people vote for whoever is at the top of their preferred party list).

 

[Tayya]

For what it's worth, the personal vote threshold was lowered to 5% this year. I think it only led to a couple of extra MP replacements, though. Especially here in Stockholm, where the party leaders usually top the list, the top candidate tends to get a clear plurality of the list vote.

The most notable personal votes incidents of 2014 were probably:

1. Some guy wrote in former cross-country skiing Olympic champion Thomas Wassberg for the Sweden Democrats in Berg municipality. Since too few people were on the list, he was elected as a replacement candidate, much to his own public annoyance.

2. The Christian Democrats had their two junior Ministers topping the list in their stronghold Jönköping. Not only did they lose on of their two seats there by just a three-digit number of votes (possibly fewer than the amount of votes for the Christian Values Party, which is exactly what it sounds like), but nationally unknown backbencher Andreas Carlson won the personal votes on the back of 70% support in his native municipality, knocking out both Ministers from the Riksdag.

 

[Dizcorp]

I don't know about that Thande.

I vote in every election going since I turned 18 (in 2005), and I've only been able to vote once in my local community council election (for my ward) during this entire period. That's how often they go unopposed around here.

And even then, there were only two candidates (the guy I didn't vote for won, though ).

You'd think so, but I tried it and the voteshares are so similar that it ends up as all pastel shades.

Possibly it might be better if we had little mans plus just a solid dark colour to show the popular vote topper with no majoritarian gradations (that might be what you meant, come to think of it)...

...

That's Anglesey though--as Iain says, 'very special'. My point was that unopposed elections seem to be becoming increasingly less common in rural England (not sure about Wales as a whole).

... so I'm not the only one who would have liked to have seen a ward breakdown of my home county of Anglesey (hi Analytical Engine, where are you from?).

As a Parliamentary constituency Anglesey has been a battleground between Labour and Plaid Cymru since the 90s (Ieuan Wyn Jones, former leader of Plaid Cymru, sat here from 1992 to 2001, when he left for the Assembly). The Tories usually have a strong third-place showing as well, having held the seat back between '79 and '87.

Following Ieuan Wyn Jones's resignation last year, local journalist Rhun ap Iorwerth dominated the by-election with a whopping 58% of the vote, leaving Labour and UKIP to fight over second and third with 16% and 14% respectively. The Conservatives' support was severely damaged however, retaining only 8% of the vote (down 20% from 2011's Assembly election).

Also, the county council's politics have been somewhat crazy in the last few years, with delayed elections, temporary governance from Cardiff and what have you.

I'm having trouble finding a map of the old pre-2013 boundaries, the only map I can find is some proposed boundaries on Anglesey's county council website from when the debate about single- and multi-member-wards was raging (and it's hard to find some of the boundaries as they're overlaid somewhat).

If I can find a map and adapt it without too many headaches then I'd love to throw together an Alex Richards/Thande-esque map & summary.

 

[Utgard96]

I'm fairly sure I remember seeing a map of Anglesey on here a while back, even though I can't find the exact link. Try looking through the archives on the wiki.

 

[Thande]

... so I'm not the only one who would have liked to have seen a ward breakdown of my home county of Anglesey (hi Analytical Engine, where are you from?).

As a Parliamentary constituency Anglesey has been a battleground between Labour and Plaid Cymru since the 90s (Ieuan Wyn Jones, former leader of Plaid Cymru, sat here from 1992 to 2001, when he left for the Assembly). The Tories usually have a strong third-place showing as well, having held the seat back between '79 and '87.

Following Ieuan Wyn Jones's resignation last year, local journalist Rhun ap Iorwerth dominated the by-election with a whopping 58% of the vote, leaving Labour and UKIP to fight over second and third with 16% and 14% respectively. The Conservatives' support was severely damaged however, retaining only 8% of the vote (down 20% from 2011's Assembly election).

Also, the county council's politics have been somewhat crazy in the last few years, with delayed elections, temporary governance from Cardiff and what have you.

I'm having trouble finding a map of the old pre-2013 boundaries, the only map I can find is some proposed boundaries on Anglesey's county council website from when the debate about single- and multi-member-wards was raging (and it's hard to find some of the boundaries as they're overlaid somewhat).

If I can find a map and adapt it without too many headaches then I'd love to throw together an Alex Richards/Thande-esque map & summary.

As Ares said, I already did Anglesey a while back at Analytical Engine's request: http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/resources/anglesey_over_time_shaded.png

It's using the old colour scheme because I never updated it, but you get the idea.

 

[Dizcorp]

As Ares said, I already did Anglesey a while back at Analytical Engine's request: http://wiki.alternatehistory.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/resources/anglesey_over_time_shaded.png

It's using the old colour scheme because I never updated it, but you get the idea.

Aha! Good stuff. Thande, and thanks for the link. A bit more green than I had imagined - Plaid's local machine must be working well these days on the island (their support correlates somewhat with the Welsh language). The canolbarth (the large landlocked chunk, which includes Llangefni, seat of the local authority) from a cursory glance at the votes appears to be the greenest (and the Welshest).

Did you also do one of those lovely writeups to go with the image? (keep up the good work by the way, it has been quite educational reading these things!)