Italy Election Maps

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Puritans are at the gates!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Map shows DC lead over FDP (and vice versa). Slightly daft, experimental colour scheme based around the fact that the DC's colour was white. Outline map rather obviously taken from this thread. Constituencies rather than provinces have been used because the online source for the latter isn't working.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's up again now. So enjoy:



I will, of course, end up doing normal maps as well, but this idea fascinated me.

Anyway, there were issues with data breakdowns in a couple of places (not hard to tell which), but, meh.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, that province is Foggia. Radical agricultural labourers, maybe?

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take that insomnia!

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So the Catholic Church was stronger there than the rest of Tuscany? That would explain most of it I think.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The US was basically what later became the PSDI, and was a right-wing splinter of the Socialists opposed to the FDP coalition. It went on to become a corrupt machine party allied with the DC.

Eventually things got to the point that, in some respects, the PSDI became the most conservative of the Pentapartito. Though IIRC the only thing they actually stood for (eventually) was maintaining huge pensions for the civil service.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

No, I think that was always the PLI.

Yeah, probably. I was just parroting what I'd read in a couple of academic works on the subject

I think they may have been thinking most of their position wrt the PCI, or perhaps the irony was too tempting.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, percentage of parliamentarians by party under investigation in the summer of 1993:

PSDI: 47
PSI: 34
DC: 23
PRI: 20
PLI: 18
PDS: 3
RC: 2
LN: 1

So... yeah. DC had the most in raw terms at 74.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How can a minor party have 1% of its legislators under investigation - or is that including provincial and municipal councils?

It's a rounding issue I think; Lega Nord had 80 deputies and senators after the 1992 elections and one of these was under investigation, so the actual figure is 1.2.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

1963. This was an important election because of its aftermath; for the first time in the history of the Republic the leader of the DC's (Aldo Moro) chose not to become Prime Minister. Of course he ended up as Prime Minister a few months later (Italian politics at the time being what it was), but the principle was important. It was also Togliatti's last election as PCI leader; he died in 1964.

Anyway. Watch the magical, moving PLI vote!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A question to the Italian posters here. Are there any maps of the single member constituencies used in the 1994, 1996 and 2001 elections anywhere? Were any ever published/printed?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A question to the Italian posters here. Are there any maps of the single member constituencies used in the 1994, 1996 and 2001 elections anywhere? Were any ever published/printed?

there's not, I fear. In Italy there's not this electoral maps culture :-( There was a  site, akab.it, but expired.

Yeah, thought not. I might try to make some highly inaccurate maps based on the names of constituencies and just drawing lines around them. Not very good but better than nothing.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Perhaps there's some kind of law somewhere defining boundaries which might be on the interwebs (I don't know if Italy puts its laws on the interwebs like France does).

I think I have just discovered a partial solution. What to do about large urban areas though? Guesswork and random lines with an admittance of certain error, I suppose.

I might post examples soon. At some point maps (at PR constituency level) of the delightfully fycked up 1994 election also.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bizarre, messy election. The magic of right-click creates a larger version. A lot of parties didn't run everywhere; including Forza Italia.

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It might make a bit more sense if the map was white for places that the parties didn't contest.

The only one where it might cause confusion is Forza Italia; in all other cases it's either very obvious or the places were the sort of places that they'd have polled extremely poorly in anyway. There's not much difference in practice between being on the ballot and polling 0.5% and not being on the ballot at all.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

This is a ghastly rough map but it illustrates the breakthrough and that's the point:



Grosseto province. The northern division is Massa Marittima, the southern is Grosseto. Composition of the single member divisions is actually on Interior Ministry's elections archive as they break down results by comune.

The only problem is that there's no such useful information for divisions that split municipalities; like those in the larger cities. Still, I think it might be possible to make approximate maps for those as it's likely that they followed internal administrative boundaries to a reasonable extent. Besides, if it's a national map that's made such districts will be so small that it won't matter that much.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Who was AD?

Some centrist outfit that hoovered up people from the lay parties, briefly seemed to threaten doing alright, but then faded. Its policies seem to have been roughly those that the PRI used to stand for in theory, so I've used their colours.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I kind of like the PSI/PSDI maps. More ordinary southern folk who thought the north and the media had their knickers in a twist.

I enjoyed making them; actually had to adjust the keys when I saw that the PSI managed 8% in Basilicata and the PSDI 4% in Molise (which is... um... actually an increase on 1992). After laughing, of course.

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1976; the PCI's best ever showing, though not actually the closet they came to finishing ahead of the DC's. Actually I think that 34% might be the highest ever polled by a Communist party in a General Election in 'Western' Europe, though someone will now come along and prove me wrong. Either way, an extraordinary result that led to the unusual political arrangements of the late 1970s in which the PCI actually propped up DC governments.

Couple of minor notes; there might be some small rounding inconsistencies in a couple of places for the minor parties because I've mostly been making this set while unable to sleep, and the deputy elected in Val d'Aosta ran on a joint PCI-PSI slate.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It was part of Berlinguer's attempt to move the PCI out of the political ghetto; the so-called 'Historic Compromise'. It made a degree of sense, but it was based on a misinterpretation of the nature and structures of the DC regime (regrettably).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ghetto is the natural place for a communist party.

Is that a statement of fact or an opinion of the way things ought to have been? (past tense important; there are no communist parties now. At least not in the sense that there was before the fall of the wall). I suspect you probably meant both, but the first is what's actually interesting, mostly because the leadership of the PCI were acutely aware of that and (unlike the leadership of, for example, the PCF) attempted to do something about it. Of course they got stuck and eventually split because it turned out that the gap between being a social democratic party and a Marxist-Leninist organisation was actually a wall. Interesting experiment, though it's difficult to see how it could have ever turned out differently.

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Well there's no doubt that they always topped the poll in general elections, so at that level, yeah. Beyond that things are at best debatable.

But I routinely use 'regime' to describe governments that I don't especially care for, even when elected so I'm not making those aspersions, anyway.