Random international maps thread

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I often tend to make maps of random interesting elections around the world when I feel like it. So instead of littering this place with a thread for each country, I'll lump them all in this place.

I finished this interesting map of the 2008 Spanish elections in Euskadi.



the last red on the key is Aralar.

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Explain patterns! Explain patterns!

PSOE (uh, sorry, PSE-'EE') won the major towns of Vitoria, Bilbao and San Sebastian (and won overall in all 3 provinces and the overall CAPV). The left bank of Bilbao, which is deep red, is very working-class and industrial (with lots of non-Basque immigrants from the 60s-70s). There's also old iron communities around there. PNV won the right bank but PP did very well (came a close second in Getxo, a very wealthy suburb of Bilbao). Bizkaya province, outside Bilbao and Abadino/Ermua (mostly metallurgical areas), is rural-conservative-Basque, providing the PNV's base. The area around Gernika is also basically old Basque heartland. Guipuzcoa province is also deeply nationalist, and was the best province for Batasuna (when it ran) and left-nationalist movements such as EA or Aralar. The large Basque cooperatives (Mondragon) in metallurgical areas explains that a lot. Though these areas seem to have split between PNV and PSE-EE (which has an element of Vasquismo or whatever to it), most mayors in that area are from the banned EAE-ANV (a socialist nationalist party, now banned). San Sebastian and its surrounding are very industrial, and also have lots of non-Basque migrants. Irun, the deep red town on the French border, looks like a New Town-type industrial area (Hendaye in France is also industrial and a PS stronghold. The French Basque Country traditionally voted for the right, while the Protestant Bearn voted for the left.

The south of the CAPV, the province of Araba, is the least Basque area and thus the PNV's worst province. The string of PP communities along the Rioja border are likely all Castillian areas in practice.

I'm doing Navarra and it's quite interesting. I will likely do Aragon after that, it's a region which I'm rather politically-sociologically clueless about.

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Excellent stuff. Surprised at the amount of blue, you'd think it was the 2010 map.

Anyways, here is Navarra:



Nafarroa Bai (Navarre Yes) is the coalition of Basque parties which favour the reunification of Navarre with the CAPV. It includes the PNV, EA and Batasuna. Compare the strong points of Nafarroa Bai with this map.

Anyways, Navarra is most certainly very conservative but not Castillian at any rate. This was a Carlist stronghold, it has a special status of fiscal autonomy, and maintains the name 'foral community' in reference to the Medieval fueros (or laws) whose preservation was at the root of the Carlist uprising. The right in Navarre is the Navarrese People's Union (UPN), which is fiscally centrist and favours strong decentralization unlike the PP, although both parties were sister parties until 2008 when the UPN voted Zapatero's budget. The UPN last ran separately from the PP at the local level in 1983 and 1987 and both times the UPN was the largest party. Navarre is regionalist, Euskadi is nationalist (yes, France, there's a difference).

The UPN seems to have won the mountain regions which stretch, iirc, from the southern tip of the Basque border up to the border with France running in a diagonal line across the state. The south is more flat, likely more agricultural. I don't know why southern Navarre and Aragon are Socialist areas, but my personal guess, likely all wrong, is some sort of rural activism or agricultural unionization movement of some sort; like we've seen in France.

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Nobody gives a sh**t, but I found cool maps:

Czech(oslovak) election 1935



SDP was Heinlein's Nazi Party, the CSDSD was the Czech social democratic party, RSZML was an agrarian party based in big farms and wealthy Bohemian agrarians, KSC were the commies, CSL were the Christiandems, CSNS is the oldest Czech party which was originally Czech nationalist-socialist during the KuK, AB was a Slovak outfit, NarSj I don't know about but seems to be vaguely Czech nationalistic.

CSL was largely Moravian partly because Moravia has always been poorer and more clerical than Bohemia (which also explains why the agrarians didn't do as well in Moravia, and Moravia also has heavy industry).

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Fascinating

I've got 1946 and the three other elections during the First Czech Republic if you're interested. I just figured 1935 was the most interesting.

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Btw, what's with the commie strength around (but evidently not in) Prague? Industrial area back then?

Definitely some industrial areas around back then, mining and manufacturing mostly.

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So the Young Czechs won Prague but nowhere else? Hilarious.

NarSj are not the Young Czechs.

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Here's 1920



and % results for the entire Czechoslovakia:
CSDSD (Czech socialists) 25.65%
CSL (Czech christiandems) 11.29%
DSDAP (Sudeten socialists) 11.12% [Sudetenland was largely working-class / rather poor]
RSZML (Czech agrarians) 9.74%
CSNS (Czech nationalists) 8.08% [largely lower middle-class/intelligentsia]
National Democrats (Czech liberals) 6.25%
DW20 (Sudeten Pan-germanists) 5.3%
Slovaks 3.91% (18.05% in Slovakia)
BdL (German agrarians) 3.9%
DCV (German christian-social party, rooted in Austrian Christian Social Party) 3.43%
(gap)
SMDZRCS (I think it's the Party of Smallholders, Cottiers and Entrepreneurs of Czechoslovakia) 0.69% - won 0 seats but won one district, likely large personal vote)

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Interesting the overlap between the DSDAP in 1920 and the SDP in 1935 (at least in that western rim).

Not that interesting; just the one was the party that most Germans voted for in 1920 and the other the party that most Germans voted for in 1935. Obviously a German nationalist party was not going to do very well in majority Czech districts.

Well, perhaps he meant "interesting" more in the presence of overlap between socialists and Nazis, but that either isn't much surprising given that Sudetenland was poor and working-class, thus hit hard in 1929, thus strongly Nazi in 1935. Of course, Henlein's machine appealed to like 80% of Sudeten Germans by 1935.

In 1920, I *think* all German parties were anti-Czechoslovak State but parties such as the DSDAP, DCVP and BdL made their peace with the state during the Stresemann period.

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1925 now:



RSZML (Czech agrarian) 13.66%
KSC (Communist) 12.86%
CSL (Czech Christiandems) 9.73%
CSDSD (Czech socialists) 8.88%
CSNS (Czech nationalists) 8.58%
BdL (German agrarians) 8.03%
Slovaks (PZLR?) 6.88%
DSDAP (German socialists) 5.78%
DCVP (German Christiandems) 4.43%
Czech Middle-class party 4.02%
CND (Czech liberals) 4.01%
DNP (German nationalists) 3.39%
DNSAP (Nazis) 2.37%

DFSP is the "German Free Social Party" and I can't find what this CSSaKT is.

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Some Spanish maps if anybody cares:

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A similar map for France would be very interesting (on first round results).

Some shapefiles: http://www.laspic.eu/circos-shp
http://www.joelgombin.fr/un-fonds-de-carte-vectoriel-pour-les-circonscriptions-legislatives/

Data: http://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/dataset/elections-legislatives-2012-resultats-572077 (under the tab Circo leg T1)

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Guyana, better known as "that country you didn't know was in South America" or "the country Venezuela wants to wipe off the map", is a country geographically located in South America but with cultural, linguistic, historical and political ties to the English-speaking Caribbean. It is the only South American country with English as its official language. Guyana was a Dutch and, after 1815, British colony; it gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 and became a Commonwealth republic in 1970. Its official name is the "Cooperative Republic of Guyana", relic of a bygone era in its republican history, and its constitution defines it as a state "in the course of transition from capitalism to socialism". Its economy was dominated by sugar and rice plantations during the colonial period; today, sugar and rice are complemented by gold and bauxite mining, which account for most of its export earnings.

The defining feature of its politics is race. Guyana is a multi-ethnic country made up of Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, mixed race and indigenous (Amerindian) communities. The Afro-Guyanese, who have accounted for about 30-32% of the population since the 1960s, are the descendants of African slaves imported by the Dutch and the British until the nineteenth century to work in the sugar and rice plantations. After the abolition of slavery, many former slaves moved to the cities and an Afro-Guyanese middle-class (English-speaking, Protestant and seeking higher social status) grew, but a poorer and more radical black working-class worked in plantations, mining or dockyards. The Indo-Guyanese, who made up nearly half of the population (47-51%) between the 1960s and 1990s, but now make up a declining share of the population (43% in 2002, 40% in 2012), are the descendants of indentured workers brought from India by the British between 1838 and 1917 to work on sugar and rice fields, after the abolition of slavery and the failure of schemes to attract Portuguese and Chinese workers. Indentured contracts were legally abolished in 1917, but many East Indians chose to remain in Guyana after their contracts ended. Many continued to work in sugar and rice plantations, but others moved to the cities as merchants or labourers. The mixed race population has grown from about 10-12% of the population to 17% in 2002 and 20% in 2012. The indigenous (Amerindian) population, concentrated in the remote regions of the country, has grown in numbers and proportion to 10.5% of the population in 2012. There are tiny remnants of a declining Portuguese and Chinese population (about 2,300 Portuguese and 1,300 Chinese, the Portuguese made up 2% - over 8,500 - in 1946).



The Afro-Guyanese became politically active in the early 1900s, forming the first trade unions and pushing for political representation to dislodge the old white colonial plantocracy. The Indo-Guyanese only became politically active in the 1940s, which is also when Guyana's current political system took form and when the seeds of later racially polarized politics were sown under the strong personal influences of two men, Cheddi Jagan and Linden Forbes Burnham. The former (b. 1917) was a second-generation Indo-Guyanese from a modest lower middle-class background, although he attended Guyana's elite college and studied dentistry in Illinois, which is also where he met his wife, Janet Chagan, née Rosenberg, a white Jewish woman from Chicago. Cheddi Jagan was a Marxist anti-colonialist who scared the British colonial authorities, who saw him as a dangerous communist. Forbes Burnham (b. 1923) was the son of an Afro-Guyanese headmaster, so he came from a relatively privileged background and obtained a law degree in London. Burnham was also a socialist, albeit more pragmatic than Jagan. Jagan and Burnham co-founded the left-wing, multi-ethnic and anti-colonialist People's Progressive Party (PPP) in 1950, which went on to win the 1953 elections in a landslide, backed by a primarily working/lower-class but multi-ethnic base. Led by Jagan, the first PPP government was not allowed to govern for even a year before the British suspended democracy, instinctively suspicious of Jagan's radicalism and balking at a labour relations bill which would have allegedly strengthened the hand of the PPP's union ally (GIWU). It is also during this time that conflicts over civil service appointments between Jagan and Burnham split the PPP along (primarily) racial lines, with Burnham eventually founding the People's National Congress (PNC).

On a more exclusivist and racially-oriented platform (for example, rejecting the West Indies Federation), the predominantly Indo-Guyanese Jagan PPP won the 1957 elections. After his defeat in 1957, Burnham shifted from class to racial politics as well, attracting the Afro-Guyanese middle classes which had supported moderate parties in the 1950s, and bringing them under the PNC fold using racial politics. The 1957, 1961 and 1964 elections - the first two won by the Jagan PPP - were turbulent affairs fraught with racial tensions and rioting. Although more radical ideas (nationalization) were held in check by the British, Jagan's PPP government was friendly with the Eastern Bloc states and revolutionary Cuba, while at home it again tried to push a labour relations bill favourable to its union ally (GIWU/GAWU), sparking riots and two declarations of states of emergency by the British. In 1964, the PPP won the most seats, but the PNC formed a majority coalition with the small (4 seats) United Front, a conservative party tied to the Catholic Church and representing indigenous, Chinese, and Portuguese voters.

The PNC would rule Guyana until 1992. Initially moderate and conciliatory, Burnham led the country towards independence in 1966. In control of government machinery, the increasingly authoritarian PNC used fraud and coercion to win ever-larger supermajorities in the rigged 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 elections. After 1968, Burnham governed alone and shifted hard left, announcing that he would move Guyana to socialism and declaring the country a republic in 1970, with a program of 'cooperative socialism' emphasizing self-reliance, state ownership of the economy. It supported national liberation movements in southern Africa and was friendly with Cuba; at home, the PNC intimidated opponents and effectively merged party and state, particularly after the PNC was declared the paramount party in 1974 -- although opposition parties, including the marginalized PPP, were tolerated and ran in elections. For a while, Jagan cooperated with his rival's regime. Burnham's idea of 'cooperative socialism' apparently included fanatical murderous cults, as his government at the least tolerated the presence of the Jonestown cult (and looked pretty bad after the massacre). Burnham's 'socialism' also bankrupted the country - public services, infrastructure, living standards, electricity supply and running water all turned to garbage, the country was forced to import rice and sugar, the illegal parallel economy thrived as the formal economy sank; for a period in the 1980s, Guyana was as poor as Haiti by continental standards, and the country's population decreased with emigration (from 760,000 to 723,000). After Burnham's death in 1985, he was succeeded by vice president Desmond Hoyte, who won another rigged election in 1985. He shifted away from Burnham's disastrous socialism, embracing the private sector, renouncing nationalization (a moot point by then) and strengthened ties with the United States.

The PPP won the first democratic elections in 1992, with Cheddi Jagan, by now a tamer septuagenarian, becoming president, until his death in 1997. His widow, Janet Jagan, became president following the PPP's reelection in 1997, but she died in 1999. She was succeeded by Bharrat Jagdeo, who led the PPP to breezy reelections in 2001 and 2006. He appears to have been mildly competent and somewhat successful in his presidency, taking advantage of generally strong economic growth and high gold prices to make investments in infrastructure and social spending, achieving an improvement in living conditions, although Guyana remains a very poor country with something like 20% unemployment. The PPP claims to have inherited a catastrophic situation and bankrupt country under IMF supervision in 1992, and credits itself with restoring the country's economy. On the other hand, drug trafficking has proliferated, criminality increased and the PPP developed autocratic tendencies, one flagrant example being its failure to organize local elections since 1994. The PPP did little to ease racial tensions (neither did the opposition, led until the 2000s by former president Hoyte), and elections continue to be tense periods. In 1997, for example, the PNC cried foul and rioted for weeks after its defeat.

Jagdeo did not seek reelection in 2011, and the PPP's presidential candidate was Donald Ramotar, who had been groomed for the job by his predecessor. The PNC allied with four small irrelevant parties in the 'A Partnership for National Unity' (APNU) coalition, led by retired military officer David Granger. The multiracial Alliance for Change (AFC) was a third force. The PPP's manifesto's cover was this wonderful psychedelic montage:

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The PPP won 32 seats but the opposition had a majority between APNU (26) and AFC (7). However, under Guyana's constitution only states that the presidential candidate of the party which won the most votes is automatically deemed elected, which is ridiculous. Between a president who didn't have a parliamentary majority, and a parliamentary majority which didn't control the executive, nothing got done between 2011 and 2014, as everybody kept blocking each other's bills. In November 2014, Ramotar prorogued Parliament to escape a confidence vote he would have lost (hello Stephen Harper), and finally called early elections in February 2015 (the election was held in May).

The opposition APNU and AFC didn't make the same mistake twice, and ran a single list. The governing PPP, with the truly original slogan of "GUYANA VERSION 2.0", said that everything was going well and laid out of laundry list of meaningless fluff (united country can reach new heights in peace and harmony! beacon of environmental stewardship for the rest of the world! poverty is eliminated! a gateway to South America and a hub for markets to the North and South! world class healthcare and education! Guyana can into space!). It's worth noting that, despite sending somebody to the "International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties" as recently as 2012, the PPP isn't even trying to appear socialist/communist anymore. Sadly, their manifesto's cover was far less exciting than in 2011, and appears to have been the product of some pretty sweet Microsoft Word 1997 WordArt:



In stark contrast, the opposition APNU+AFC alliance basically said that Guyana is a complete shithole, basically a narco-state with lawlessness, authoritarianism, corruption, inequalities, drug lords, political death squads, murder, suicide, domestic violence and school dropouts. David Granger, the presidential candidate, said Guyana was an "unhappy country". It is true that Guyana has the world's highest suicide rate. Its platform was a mix of populistic measures (tax cuts, higher pensions), local grievances and valence issues.

The APNU+AFC won 50.3% of the vote and 33 seats, a one-seat majority over the PPP (49.2%, 32 seats). The PPP's vote share increased by a sliver (from 48.6%) and held all its seats; the opposition's victory was only the result of uniting their existing vote base. The third largest party, The United Force, the remnants of that old conservative party of years past (adding an article to its name, because Guyanese parties love articles), won only 0.27%. It appears to be led by some Muslim guy and/or some hot girl and their slogan was the truly inspiring GUYANA NEEDS YOUTH.

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Why does Venezuela want to wipe Guyana off the map?

I am exaggerating some, but Venezuela claims about three-quarters of Guyanese territory -- all of it west of the Essequibo river. It is one of those still unresolved South American territorial disputes dating back to the colonial period, which successive rounds of foreign arbitration or treaties have failed to resolve. Chávez and Maduro turned the usual sabre-rattling/irredentist trolling up a notch, although they haven't acted on it (besides adding an eight star to the flag in 2006), while Guyana has irked Venezuela by awarding licenses for offshore oil exploration in the disputed territorial waters. This is also like the one issue where both Venezuelan opposition and government agree with one another.

Suriname also claims about 7% of Guyanese territory, out in the boonies, so it definitely appears as if nobody likes poor Guyana (besides Brazil).

edit: Let's also add that, if this was to happen, Venezuela would look weird and Guyana would look like some gerrymandered American congressional district.

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Racial map of Cuba