History of Elections Podcast

Mathew Nicolson
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  • HISTORY

A podcast exploring past elections and the history of democracy. historyofelections.substack.com

Episodes

  1. FEB 2

    Episode 6: Egypt 2000

    The 2000 Egyptian legislative election was held at the height of President Hosni Mubarak’s rule, and drew a spotlight onto the nature and limitations of his regime’s control over Egypt. Transcript: Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the History of Elections Podcast, where we will be looking back at the 2000 legislative election in Egypt. Held at the height of President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year authoritarian rule, the election drew a spotlight onto the nature and, perhaps, the limitations of Mubarak’s rule over Egypt. November, 2000. The United States is thrown into political chaos after the presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore hinges on a recount in Florida; Alberto Fujimori, the autocratic president of Peru, flees the country over allegations of corruption and crimes against humanity; Jharkand is created as the 28th state of India, having been carved out of Bihar; a horrific funicular fire in the Austrian Alpine mountains kills 155 people; the first long-term expedition is launched to the International Space Station, beginning 25 years and counting of continuous activity; and, in Egypt, voters go to the polls to nominally elect their next parliament. Background By the turn of the millennium, Egypt had been ruled by its president, Hosni Mubarak, for 19 years. Mubarak was the inheritor of the authoritarian regime that had been established by Gamal Abdel Nasser following the 1952 coup, which had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy and brought an end to British imperial influence in Egypt. The coup, part of what has come to be known as the Egyptian Revolution, had a profound effect on the Arab World—as we discussed two episodes ago, the ideas of Pan-Arabism and Nasserism heavily influenced the Ba’athist states that emerged in Syria and Iraq in the 1960s. Nasser ruled Egypt as a presidential one-party state until his death of a heart attack in 1970, at the age of just 52. The sole legal party went through several iterations and, by the time of his death, was known as the Arab Socialist Union. It embodied the core ideas of Nasserism: pan-Arabism, nationalism, socialism, anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism. He was succeeded by his vice president and the former parliamentary speaker, Anwar Sadat, who emerged as a compromise candidate between competing powerbrokers within the regime. Upon consolidating power in his own right, Sadat pursued a programme of relative liberalisation of both the Egyptian economy and political system. The country was opened up to foreign investment and new incentives for private enterprise were introduced, moving away from the strict socialist underpinnings of Nasser’s rule. Sadat purged the government of the most hardline Nasserists and relaxed restrictions on the country’s substantial Islamist movement, which was led by the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, who we last met in Syria in episode 4. The Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in 1928 but had been banned under Nasser. Although Sadat did not formally unban the organisation, he initially showed greater tolerance for its activities, hoping to gain an ally against parts of the political left that opposed him. He implemented a new constitution that, on paper, cemented the rule of law, but also strengthened the powers of the presidency. His most notable political reform was to end the one-party system, with the first multi-party election in 29 years taking place in 1979. The Arab Socialist Union itself was reformulated as the National Democratic Party, or NDP, dropping the titular commitment to Arab socialism and committing, on paper, to democracy—an important ideological move as the party shifted to a more centrist position, though it maintained its secularist orientation. Nevertheless, Sadat and the NDP kept a firm hold on the state, and the new multi-party elections were not genuine contests for political power; rather, the presence of opposition parties was intended to provide a democratic façade to help legitimise the regime, both domestically and internationally—what Eberhard Keinle described as “a mere update of authoritarianism.” Indeed, at around this time, Sadat is alleged to have described Nasser and himself as “the last pharaohs”. Presidential elections remained plebiscites with just one candidate on the ballot, who was nominated by a two-thirds vote of the legislature—similar to the system used by Ba’athist Syria that I described in episode 4. Such a system was clearly designed with the assumption that the regime would always control a two-thirds majority in the legislature. It would be foreign policy that most shaped and determined the fate of Sadat’s presidency. In the context of the Cold War, he moved Egypt away from the Soviet orbit and pursued closer ties with the United States. After Egypt suffered a third military defeat against Israel in 1973, Sadat took the controversial step of seeking a unilateral peace agreement. This culminated in the Camp David Accords of 1978. Brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, the accords saw Egypt formally recognise Israel and agree to a peace treaty in exchange for regaining the Sinai peninsula—which had been occupied by Israel since 1967—and, further down the line, substantial American military aid. Sadat won the Nobel Peace Prize for the peace treaty but was fiercely condemned across the Arab World for unilaterally recognising Israel, particularly in the absence of a solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League—the body’s headquarters relocating to Tunisia—and Egypt stopped receiving oil subsidies from Gulf states. Egypt’s role as a figurehead for the Pan-Arab movement came to a decisive end, creating a void that the Ba’athist states of Syria and Iraq—and also, to an extent, Saudi Arabia—would attempt to fill. The peace agreement also ended Sadat’s hopes of reconciling with Egypt’s Islamist movement; fiercely condemned by the Muslim Brotherhood, he resorted to renewed persecution of the organisation and other Islamist groups. In particular, the state began to crackdown on jihadist organisations, which had grown in influence throughout the 1970s and explicitly plotted to overthrow Sadat. These developments precipitated Sadat’s downfall. During a military parade in 1981 to mark Egypt’s initial victories against Israel during the 1973 war, Sadat was assassinated during an attack by members of one such jihadist group—the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—who were motivated by the peace treaty with Israel. The assassination was intended to spark a wider uprising that would overthrow the secular state, but the only rebellion to actually take place, in the city of Asyut, was quickly put down by security forces. Mubarak’s Presidency This brings us to Hosni Mubarak. After rising through the ranks of the Egyptian air force, Mubarak had become Sadat’s vice president in 1975. Mubarak had gained national fame for his role in Egypt’s initially successful offensive against Israel in 1973 and began to portray himself as part of a younger generation that had come to prominence in the post-revolutionary era—he was himself ten years younger than both Sadat and Nasser. Mubarak, who was also injured during the attack on Sadat, assumed the presidency on Sadat’s death, becoming Egypt’s fourth president. A presidential election was arranged within a week with Mubarak the sole candidate on the ballot; official figures showed that he “won” the referendum with 98% of the vote. Mubarak went on to “win” uncontested presidential elections in 1986, 1993 and 1999. His vote share in those elections fell to 97%, 96% and then all the way down to 93% in 1999. I suspect he was not unduly concerned by that decline, but it did mark a trend. Again, to draw comparisons with the Syrian system that I described two episodes ago, the regime cast a somewhat less tight net over the political movements that were allowed to contest elections. Egypt was generally perceived to be ruled by a relatively more liberal and constitutional system than its Syrian counterpart, an image that sometimes suited Mubarak’s regime. At various points during his rule, Mubarak’s Egypt was cited as an example of a gradually democratising state. Such assessments veered on the naïve—or, on the part of some American analysts, displayed motivated reasoning to support an allied government. Other commentators and political scientists argued that the Middle East had proved immune to what was sometimes described as the “third wave of democratisation” from the 1970s that occurred across Europe, Latin America and Africa. According to the V-Dem electoral democracy index, which grades countries based on how free and fair their elections are on a scale from 0 to 1, by 2000, Egypt scored just 0.22. That was ahead of the score of 0.15 in Syria—which, in the same year, elected Bashar al-Assad to his first term of office—but it was well below the global average of 0.49, or the African average of 0.36. Egypt’s annual electoral democracy rating had remained pretty steady under Mubarak. However, as president Mubarak expanded the security state and continued to suppress Islamist movements, especially from the 1990s. He himself survived multiple assassination attempts, including an attack in Port Said in 1999, when he was injured by an assassin wielding a knife. Mubarak also oversaw a continuing military campaign against Islamist militants, with an annual death toll in the 1990s rising to the hundreds. The regime made use of a continuous state of emergency that had been enacted after Sadat’s assassination to bypass constitutional protections for human rights. Arbitrary arrests and the use of torture was common and there was widespread detention of opponents of the regime and dissidents, as well as increasing use of military trials. Newspapers were regularly shut down, public demonstrations banned and human rights activist

    28 min

  2. 11/10/2025

    Episode 5: French Polynesia 1940

    Transcript: Hello and welcome to episode 5 of the History of Elections podcast, where we will travel back in time to 1940, when a generally less well known referendum was held in the colony of French Polynesia to decide its loyalty during the Second World War. August, 1940. The Second World War raged. Italy conquered British Somalia; Britain endured what came to be known as the “hardest day” in the four-month aerial Battle of Britain, in which both sides lost around 60 fighter planes over the course of a single day; the British Royal Air Force in turn conducted the first air raid of Berlin during the war—it would not be the last; and two British Royal Navy destroyers were sunk in a minefield off the Dutch coast, causing the loss of 300 lives. Elsewhere, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were formally annexed into the Soviet Union, seven weeks after being invaded; the Second Vienna Award saw Romania forced by Germany and Italy to cede parts of Transylvania to Hungary; British film stars Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were married in California; and, in French Polynesia, French citizens prepared to vote on whether to give their support to the Free French Forces led by Charles de Gaulle. The islands that comprise French Polynesia—121 in total, most notably the 14 Society Islands of Tahiti, Mo’orea, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Huahine—have been inhabited for 1,000 to 2,000 years. The islands were first settled by the Polynesian people during their migrations across the Pacific Ocean, and European explorers first made contact with the islanders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At this point, the islands were governed in a decentralised and varied system of chieftains with monarchical and theocratic traditions. In Tahiti, the power of a class of priests appears to have grown over the chieftains throughout the pre-colonial period, and there is evidence of conflict between adherents of different Gods. Spanish, British and French missionaries subsequently spread across the Pacific in the eighteenth century with significant success. At the end of the century, a new state, the Kingdom of Tahiti, unified the island of Tahiti as a Christianised state. Later in the eighteenth century, it developed into a constitutional monarchy based on western liberal constitutions, further indicating the success of the missionaries in achieving European cultural infiltration. Tahiti had a parliament comprised of chiefs, other hereditary members and the elected representatives of landowners. As an aside, I would love to one day do a podcast episode on the elections that were held for this parliament, although sources do not seem easy to come by. The islands were forcibly brought under French imperial control throughout the nineteenth century as part of France’s post-Napoleonic empire building. Denise Fisher has summarised the French motivation as “national prestige, a quest for scientific knowledge, and religious proselytization.” Led by Queen Pomaré IV, who ruled for 50 years, the Kingdom of Tahiti fought a war with France in the 1840s as French imperial influence expanded. Although France suffered some defeats, it ultimately emerged victorious, and Tahiti became a French protectorate in 1842. Later, in the 1880s and 1890s, France also fought a ten-year conflict known as the Leewards war across multiple other islands. France’s imperial expansion took place alongside British, German and American expansion elsewhere in the Pacific. During the first half of the nineteenth century, France and Britain particularly competed for influence and control across the Pacific, including in Polynesia. Notably, France was the earliest of the imperial powers to formally claim territory in the Pacific, if we exclude Australia and New Zealand: the formal establishment of a protectorate in Tahiti and the Marquesas in 1842 predated Britain’s colonial rule of Fiji in 1874, Germany’s rule over New Guinea in 1885 and American rule over Hawaii in 1898. Tahiti was formally annexed in 1881 and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the islands of French Polynesia were brought together as one administrative unit, legally known as the French Establishments in Oceania, also translated as the French Pacific Establishments. This period brought an increase in French settlement in the islands. The islands were administered by a colonial governor with an advisory council elected by the minority of French citizens on the islands. Of the council’s 18 members, 10 were elected from Tahiti and Mo’orea, two from Marquesas, four from Tuamotus, one from Gambiers and one from the Australs and Rapa. The governors were generally recruited from either the French colonial administrative elite or the French naval command. For example, Léonce Jore, the governor of French Polynesia between 1930 and 1932, also served periods as the governor of Niger, Senegal and New Caledonia. I.C. Campbell described the administrative setup of French Polynesia at this time as, essentially, a “dictatorial regime” that provided only basic state functions and which had a difficult relationship with the French minority population, who regularly sought more political rights—an important point to keep in mind as we come to the 1940 referendum. The indigenous Polynesian majority population, most of whom were not French citizens, had even fewer rights. The prevailing colonial ideology remained one of European supremacy, whereby Europeans justified their rule as paternalistic and in the interests of the Polynesian people. The French settler population, even though they themselves felt they lacked appropriate political rights under the colonial system, formed a social and cultural elite in the islands. French Polynesia’s population rose above 40,000 in the 1930s, a large majority of which was ethnically and culturally Polynesian. It should be noted that this was likely still far below the islands’ pre-colonial population, as the indigenous Polynesian population had suffered greatly from diseases brought by Europeans such as tuberculosis and smallpox. Residents of European descent, largely French in background, comprised fewer than one in five people in the islands, although I haven’t been able to find precise statistics for this period. There was also a substantial mixed-race population known locally as “demis”, the product of over a century of intermarriage between European settlers and native Polynesians. The European and mixed-race population formed a social elite who gained an increasing share of land ownership throughout the colonial period. Like much of France’s colonial empire, French Polynesia was thrown into turmoil during the Second World War. The fall of France to Nazi Germany in June 1940 nine months into the war resulted in the establishment of a collaborationist rump state in the south of the country. This state was titled the French State, although it is popularly known as Vichy France after the city it was administered from, and it was led as a dictatorship under its collaborationist leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain. The north fell under direct German occupation. Under the terms of the armistice, the Vichy state was permitted to retain French overseas colonies, although the size of the colonial army was to be reduced. It had also been permitted to retain the French Navy, but the British Royal Navy succeeded in seizing and destroying numerous warships to prevent them from falling into German hands. This restricted the Vichy state’s ability to project power and control across the colonial empire. France’s capitulation to Nazi Germany was not universally accepted. Charles de Gaulle, a French general who was in London at the time of the French surrender, issued his famous appeal of 18 June 1940 calling on French servicemen to continue the fight against Germany. The appeal centred on the role of France’s overseas empire; de Gaulle said, “France is not alone! She has a great empire behind her! Together with the British Empire, she can form a bloc that controls the seas and continues the struggle.” De Gaulle subsequently formed a government in exile, based in London but seeking support across the empire, and he established the Free French forces. Support gathered slowly, in part due to the chaotic situation, in part due to a belief that the Allied cause was now doomed—an invasion of Britain seemed only a matter of time—and in part due to the continuation of a French state that meant joining the Free French Forces might be considered an act of rebellion. However, by 1942, the Free French Forces reported having up to 62,000 combatants, 20,000 of whom came from the colonies. The colonies did not response immediately, many governors choosing to wait and see how events unfolded. However, some soon began to make a choice in the decision that had been forced on them. The first overseas colony to join the Free French Forces was French India. Comprised of a series of small enclaves, the colony announced its decision on 27 June. It had faced the risk of an occupation by British forces in India if it had aligned to Vichy France, so this was perhaps not a surprising decision. Then, on 20 July, one month after de Gaulle’s speech, the New Hebrides—ruled jointly as a condominium with Britain—joined the Free French Forces. New Caledonia also joined the Free French after a brief internal power struggle featuring street protests, competing governors and an assassination attempt on the pro-Vichy governor. The French concession of Guangzhouwan in China also came under Free French control. Vichy France was ultimately unable to project its power at such a distance, despite some ongoing naval presence in the region, and the Australian navy helped the Free French faction assert control. Perhaps more substantially, most of French Equatorial Africa—made up of the modern states of Chad, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo and Gabon

    18 min

  3. 08/25/2025

    Episode 4: Syria 2020

    The 2020 Syrian legislative election was a controlled exercise by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, which had governed Syria for 60 years. However, it provided an insight into the state of the regime and the country after nine years of civil war. Transcript: Hello and welcome to another episode of the History of Elections podcast, delayed somewhat by exciting life events: I got married! This week, to steal a joke from one of former my university lecturers, we will step into the Ba’ath and return close to the present day by exploring the 2020 parliamentary election in Syria. The second last legislative election to be held in Syria under the 55-year rule of the Assad family, this election provided a façade of stability for a regime that, as would soon become clear, was continuing to crumble. July, 2020. Most of the world lived under public health restrictions imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which in this month reached 15 million confirmed cases; a constitutional amendment was passed in Russia that would allow President Vladimir Putin to run for two further six-year terms; Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ordered the Hagia Sophia to be reverted from a museum to be a mosque; former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak was found guilty of abuse of power and corruption and sentenced to 12 years in prison; NASA launched the Mars 2020 mission containing the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, which would land on the red planet seven months later; elections were held in Croatia, Poland and Singapore; and, in Syria, some voters prepared to go to the polls to cast ballots that theoretically determined their next parliament. Background: Ba’athism Syria had been governed by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party since 1963, when it came to power in a bloodless coup that overthrew the partially democratic but unstable system of civilian rule that had emerged, with several interruptions, after independence from France in 1946. The Ba’ath Party assumed totalitarian control of the Syrian state, purging its political opponents and cracking down on civil society. In 1966, a second coup was orchestrated by a different faction in the Ba’ath Party, while a third coup in 1970 brought Defence Minister Hafez al-Assad to power as the country’s third Ba’athist ruler. Assad brought an end to the instability that had characterised Syrian politics since independence in 1946 and would rule as Syria’s president until his death 30 years later, establishing a cult of personality around himself and his family. Ba’athism is a complex and variable political ideology. Meaning ‘renaissance’ or ‘resurrection,’ Ba’athism is a revolutionary socialist, Arab nationalist and pan-Arab ideology that emerged in the 1940s. Ba’ath parties were founded across the Arab world, with branches established in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Jordan, and its ideas influenced many pan-Arab leaders, including Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The movement’s slogan was “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, and it called for a united Arab socialist state free from external imperialist control. The movement was particularly successful in Syria, achieving some success in elections held during the 1950s. Many different variants of Ba’athism emerged in this period—the party was prone to factionalism and different interpretations became predominant in different states. The first Ba’athist Government was briefly formed in 1963 as a result of a coup in Iraq—a development that inspired the Ba’athist coup plotters in Syria, who orchestrated their coup a month later. The 1966 coup in Syria brought to power a faction known as the neo-Ba’athists, a group that focused more overtly on Marxist ideas and pursued stronger relations with the Soviet Union. The neo-Ba’athists had also become disillusioned with pan-Arabism, as embodied by Nasser, and even forced some of the original founding thinkers of the Ba’athist movement into exile. Indeed, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, one of the first Ba’athist leaders of Syria, later said that “I no longer recognise my party”. This, among other things, led to tensions with Iraq, where a more enduring Ba’athist government was established in 1968, which has been described as a more right-wing from of Ba’athism. However, in practice, Assad proved to be more pragmatic than his predecessors, for example by allowing a greater degree of private enterprise from the 1970s onwards. The Ba’athist regime represented a very different social background than Syria’s past Governments, particularly under Assad. Its leading political and military figures, including Assad himself, were from rural and peasant backgrounds, while the former urban elite, including the Ba’ath Party’s founders, was sidelined. Alawites, an ethnoreligious offshoot of Shia Islam concentrated in the coastal north-west of Syria who comprised 10% of the country’s population and who had historically been sidelined from positions of power, were also prominent within the regime, often at the expense of other social groups. The neo-Ba’athists emphasised a central role for the armed forces and ruled Syria as a military dictatorship. Indeed, by the 1980s, Syria spent over 20% of its GDP on the military, justified by the aim of countering Israel’s military strength—by this point, Syria had fought and lost three wars against Israel, and part of the country—the Golan Heights—was under Israeli occupation. The Ba’athist movement was also fervently secular. The first Ba’athist Governments viewed Islam as a reactionary force that was contradictory to socialist revolution. This stance was toned down by Assad from the 1970s who, although maintaining the general secular ideological stance of the movement, sought to co-opt clerics and religious figures to weaken the emerging Islamist opposition movement. The consolidating Assad regime was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that grew increasingly militant throughout the 1970s. Its opposition particularly developed in response to Assad’s decisions to intervene against the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon’s civil war and to back Iran against fellow Ba’athist Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980. The Islamist opposition was also against the regime’s secularist and Alawite character and it gained particular support in urban areas, notably Aleppo, Homs and Hama. A guerilla war emerged in the late 1970 and senior Government and Ba’ath officials, particularly Alawites, were targeted in attacks and assassination attempts. Foreshadowing events 40 years later, the regime responded by implementing sieges against opposition-controlled areas. The uprising culminated in 1982 when the Muslim Brotherhood seized control of large parts of Hama. The regime responded with a brutal crackdown by indiscriminately bombarding rebel-held areas with artillery and tank fire, which is estimated to have killed between 10,000 and 40,000 people and left much of the city in ruins. Shortly afterwards, Assad also, thanks to key support within the military, survived a coup attempt by his younger brother, Rifaat al Assad, who had led the military campaign in Hama. These events further underscored the instability of the regime and the fact that Assad’s power rested solely on the loyalty of the army, rather than stemming from popular support or institutional legitimacy. Political System The Ba’ath regime initially governed under a state of emergency with a provisional constitution that replaced Syria’s 1930 constitution. Assad maintained the state of emergency throughout his rule but a new permanent constitution was adopted in 1973. The constitution declared the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party as the “leading party in the society and the state”. Syria was not strictly a one-party state, as allied satellite parties within the National Progressive Front coalition, which Assad set up in 1972, were permitted to continue operating in subordination to the Ba’ath Party. In line with its socialist orientation, the National Progressive Front coalition operated under the popular front or national front model that was prevalent in Eastern European socialist states during the Cold War and is used to this day in China and North Korea. In this model, a dominant party—the Ba’ath Party, in Syria’s case—leads a group of satellite parties with some degree of ideological variation. These parties would represent different interest groups and provide the regime with a broader social base, creating the illusion of political pluralism and co-opting additional political constituencies into the regime. The Ba’athist state in Syria was a presidential system. However, it maintained a Parliament called the People’s Assembly that was elected in conditions that were designed to ensure the Ba’ath Party’s supremacy. The Parliament in turn nominated a candidate for President, who was to be confirmed in a national referendum. Assad “won” five such votes during his rule, the official figures never showing him falling below 99.2% support. The question of why authoritarian states, particularly in the twentieth century, felt the need to hold such obviously rigged elections is an interesting one, and I may dedicate a full episode to it at some point. As in other such systems, elections and referenda provided the theoretical base of legitimacy for the Ba’ath Party’s rule—this was not, ideologically speaking, a monarchy, as much as it may have acted like one. Elections also served other purposes, including demonstrating the regime’s political power, demoralising the opposition, gathering political information and, sometimes, providing a very controlled opportunity for areas of discontent to be identified so that the regime could act in response. Assad ruled Syra through military strength, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, violent crackdowns on political opponents

    24 min

  4. 05/26/2025

    Episode 3: Costa Rica 1940

    In 1940, Costa Rica held elections for its president and legislature amid a transitional period in the country's history that laid the path to civil war. Hello, and welcome to episode 3 of the History of Elections podcast. This month we will be exploring the 1940 general election in Costa Rica, held during a transformative period in the Central American country’s history that would define its political trajectory for the rest of the century. February, 1940. The Soviet Union begins a massive attack on Finnish forces defending Karelia during the Winter War, two months after the Soviet invasion first began; in Tibet, the 4-year-old Tenzin Gyatso is proclaimed the 13th Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism; the radioactive isotope carbon-14, which would from the basis of radiocarbon dating, is discovered by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley; the Soviet theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold, is executed as part of Joseph Stalin’s purges; and, in Costa Rica, voters go to the polls to elect their next president and parliament. Since gaining independence from Spain in 1821, Costa Rica has developed a reputation as one of the most stable and democratic countries in Latin America. Like many of its neighbours, Costa Rica has experienced blips in that record—notably, a series of coups d’etat in the 1860s—but, by 1870, a sequence of stable if not always democratic liberal administrations governed the country for several decades. Another coup in 1917 led to a short-lived military regime that was overthrown by a popular uprising two years later, after which constitutional government was restored. From 1910, the dominant party in Costa Rican politics was the Republican Party. Founded in 1901, it first came to power under the presidency of Ricardo Jiménez, who served three non-consecutive terms between 1910 and 1936—immediate re-election being forbidden by the constitution, as in many other Latin American countries. Within Costa Rica’s liberal consensus, the party was founded along similarly liberal lines, though appealing to a new social base among local peasant leaders. The Republican Party oversaw the introduction of direct presidential elections in 1913—the president was previously elected via an electoral college—and expanded the franchise. It was also the party in power at the time of the 1917 coup. Following the restoration of constitutional rule in 1919, Costa Rica experienced several competitive elections as power rotated between different parties and presidents. A secret ballot was introduced in the 1920s, although accusations of fraud and ballot stuffing remained a consistent feature of elections. In fact, it has been argued that the secret ballot actually produced more blatant acts of fraud, albeit at a lower rate, as parties resorted to more extreme measures to influence results. In 1932, the Republican Party suffered a split, as Ricardo Jiménez—who had served his second term as president between 1924 and 1928—led a breakaway grouping named the National Republican Party, or PRN. Despite the split, the new PRN won the presidential election held that same year, electing Jimenez to a third non-consecutive term. This initiated a period of electoral dominance for the party, which elected its candidate for president in 1936, León Cortés, by a landslide. Cortés’ presidency was marked by a series of public construction and infrastructure works, including the construction of the country’s first international airport. He also supported new banana plantations, established new ports and introduced banking reforms. Most controversial, however—particularly in subsequent decades—was Cortés affinity with Nazi Germany. At the outset of the Second World War he barred entry to Polish Jews fleeing Nazi authorities, and he even appointed Max Effinger, the German-born leader of Costa Rica’s local Nazi foreign branch, to be his director of migration. The PRN’s popularity continued to surge during its second term in power. The 1938 midterm election for half the seats of the Constitutional Congress, the country’s legislature, saw the party rise to 62% of the vote, the highest vote share it had yet achieved in any election, and a promising portent ahead of the 1940 presidential election. As the 1940 election approached, Cortés began exploring ways to run for a second term, despite the constitutional prohibition on doing so. However, he was eventually persuaded not to make any such attempt, and committed to standing down at the end of his term in 1940. During Cortes’ term, the PRN began to experience another internal division. The influence of its founder, Jiménez, began to wane as he aged—he would be 80 by the time of the 1940 election. At the same time, a young doctor and congressman named Rafael Calderón began to grow in status within the party. Educated in Belgium, where he had been influenced by social Christian ideas, an ideology that fused Christian theology with the political ideals of social welfare, public ownership and egalitarianism, Calderón advocated a shift to the political left. His commitment to these ideas has also been interpreted by some historians as a pragmatic measure to replace the PRN’s declining support among the coffee oligarchs with a new support base in the labour movement. In doing so, he sought to follow in the footsteps of several other Latin American countries, notably Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Bolivia, each of which had established social security programmes by the 1930s. In contrast, such programmes were much rarer in Central America, where the ruling, typically liberal elites resisted such reform. Calderón’s political ascendancy thereby challenged the liberal consensus that had prevailed in Costa Rica since the 1870s. Despite the political stability of the past decade, Calderón’s attitude represented growing discontent with how Costa Rica had handled the Great Depression amid an upsurge of industrial unrest in the 1930s, particularly within banana plantations. Costa Rica’s banana plantations were largely owned by the United Fruit Company, an American company whose presence in central American states directly led to the term ‘banana republic.’ This culminated in the wonderfully named ‘Great Banana Strike’ of 1934, which ended in failure for the workers but contributed to a growing political consciousness among the workers. Growing political attention began to be placed on poverty and economic inequality; communist, socialist and anarchist movements grew in popularity; and immigrant groups began making growing contributions to the labour movement. Calderón secured the PRN’s nomination in 1940, with the reluctant endorsement of President Cortes, in exchange for a commitment—which would later fall apart—to support Cortes’ candidacy in the 1944 election. Calderón did not end up facing substantial opposition in the 1940 election. The old Republican Party had withered away, as had the National Party, a liberal party—or, perhaps more accurately, a brand—that had contested elections in 1928 and 1936. Moreover, Calderón maintained his party’s support among the powerful coffee oligarchs. In an attempt to prevent Calderón from taking power, there was a brief bid to coax Ricardo Jiménez into a fourth presidential campaign, but he ultimately declined. As a result, Calderón faced two opposing parties, neither of which had substantial political or financial backing. One of those parties, the Guanacastecan Brotherhood, did not even seek to represent the entire country, instead focusing on regional interests in the province of Guanacaste in the north-east of Costa Rica since its formation three years earlier. The Brotherhood nominated Virgilio Salazar as its candidate. The other party was the Costa Rican Communist Party. Founded in 1931, the party was, as might be expected, a member of the Communist International, although it retained some independence from Soviet directives, calling instead for a ‘creole communism’ based on Costa Rican traditions and with a greater focus on rural areas . The party’s candidate was its founding leader, Manuel Mora, who had previously contested the 1936 election against Leon Cortés, winning 5% of the vote. According to the constitution, whoever won a majority of the vote would be duly elected president. If no candidate won a majority—which, due to there being three candidates, remained a possibility—it fell to the Constitutional Congress to decide which of the two top-placed candidates would be elected. As the Congress was utterly dominated by the PRN by this point, a run-off would effectively ensure a victory for Calderón. Voting in the election was open to all men over the age of 20, a limit that was lowered to 18 for men who were married or, to quote the constitution, “professors of some science.” Women were denied the vote, a status that would not change until 1949. The campaign was contested over the radio airwaves and in Costa Rica’s newspapers, which often reprinted speeches delivered over radio. Newspapers also contained news of party activities and, presumably to build a sense of momentum, lists of the names of party supporters. Calderón largely avoided discussing social welfare or reforms in the campaign, hoping that his party’s structural advantages and his personal popularity could propel him to victory without having to get dragged into divisive issues. Only on the night before the election did he publicly discuss the extent of his plans for social reform, stating that his “fundamental preoccupation” as president would be with the poor. His assessment was entirely correct. Without facing any great unified opposition, Calderón won the election in a landslide, securing 84.5% of the popular vote. His victory for the PRN was the first time any party had won three successive terms since the 1880s. Calderón’s second closest

    23 min

  5. 02/03/2025

    Episode 2: Taiwan 1989

    In 1989, Taiwan held its last supplementary election under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui. Transcript: Hello, and welcome to the second episode of the History of Elections podcast, where we will be exploring the 1989 supplementary election in Taiwan. The election was the last to be held under a somewhat strange constitutional system that still operated as if it controlled the entirety of China, and the election marked a step towards the island’s gradual democratisation under President Lee Teng-hui. December, 1989. Revolutions topple communist governments across eastern Europe: the Romanian Revolution overthrows long-term dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who is executed within weeks of the first protests; the East German parliament votes to abolish the Socialist Unity Party’s monopoly on power, paving the way for liberal Manfred Gerlach to be elected the first non-communist Chairman of the State Council; Lithuania becomes the first Soviet republic to end the Communist Party’s monopoly on power; and Václav Havel is elected the first non-Communist President of Czechoslovakia since 1948. Elsewhere, rebel forces led by Charles Taylor cross the border into Liberia from Ivory Coast, triggering the First Liberian Civil War; the United States launches an invasion of Panama—a sentence that gave me less anxiety when I first wrote it a month ago—to overthrow the country’s dictator, Manuel Noriega, who had clung on to power after losing an election; the Japanese Nikkei 225 stock market index reaches a record high, continuing a remarkable trend of what seemed to be endless growth; and, in Taiwan, voters went to the polls in a supplementary election to the Republic of China’s parliament. Background The modern polity of Taiwan emerged out of the Chinese Civil War, when the defeated nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, fled to the island in 1949 in what was intended to be a temporary retreat until—it was hoped—they could launch a renewed invasion of the mainland and the people of mainland China would rise up to overthrew the Communist Party. Taiwan had previously been occupied by Japan for 50 years between 1895 and 1945, reverting to Chinese administration upon Japan’s defeat in the Second World War. Taiwan’s history prior to that lies at the heart of the modern debate over its constitutional status: the island has been inhabited by an indigenous Austronesian people for about 15,000 years but, from 1684, the island was annexed and colonised by the Qing Dynasty of China. Today, indigenous Taiwanese make up just 2 per cent of the island’s population, but this constitutional history contributed to a broader political tendency in postwar Taiwan that rejects, either in part or in full, Chinese claims to the island. Following the civil war, Taiwan has been administered as a continuation of the Republic of China, with control only over the island of Taiwan itself and some nearby smaller islands. The victorious communist forces of Mao Zedong, which ruled mainland China as the People’s Republic of China, or PRC, from 1949, lacked the military capability to invade the island and, as the United States adopted a policy of containment against communist states, it was later deterred by the threat of American intervention from making any attempt to do so. Thus, Taiwan existed as a de facto state, although it claimed to be the continuation of the legitimate Chinese Government – and indeed, the administration in Taiwan represented the entirety of China at the United Nations until 1971, a status that, in the early 1960s, US President John Kennedy commented, ‘really doesn’t make any sense.’ The island was governed by Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang Party, or KMT, under a dominant-party system, Chiang serving as the ‘President of the Republic of China’ until his death in 1975. For some Taiwanese, this government represented rule by a class of ‘mainlanders’ who had previously governed mainland China and comprised 10 to 20% of the island’s population. Viewing itself as the legitimate government of China at a time of crisis, Chiang’s KMT government ruled the island under martial law – or, officially, the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion. This was considered necessary in light of the ongoing threat of invasion from the mainland. This marked a continuation of how the island had been governed even before the conclusion of the civil war. In 1947, an uprising in Taiwan was violently suppressed by government forces—then representing nationalist forces based in the mainland. Information on this event, which has come to be known as the ‘February 28 incident,’ was effectively suppressed, but tens of thousands of people are believed to have been killed during the uprising and in the subsequent crackdown. This violent repression, referred to as the ‘White Terror,’ continued after KMT forces retreated to the island in 1949. Notably, in the aftermath of this uprising, discussions within the United States government on resolving the situation in Taiwan took it for granted that the island’s population would opt for independence if given a free vote. In accordance with the Republic of China’s constitution, although orchestrated under martial law and the KMT’s grip on power, Chiang Kai-shek was re-elected President through indirect votes in parliament held every six years, using emergency measures to bypass the constitutional term limit. The system was not entirely a one-party state and had two legally-permitted opposition parties—the China Democratic Socialist Party and the Young China Party—but the KMT maintained absolute control over state institutions. After one theoretically contested vote in 1954, when Chiang won 96.9% of parliamentary ballots, he was elected unopposed in 1960, 1966 and 1972. Competitive elections were tolerated at the district level, although the ban on opposition parties meant that critics of the regime had to run as independents in an uneven political landscape where pro-Government candidates received financial and campaign support from the KMT. Moreover, local politicians who were deemed to pose a substantial threat to the KMT continued to be persecuted, encouraging genuine opposition politicians to remain focused on local issues. This autocratic system continued upon Chiang’s death. After a three-year interlude in which Chiang’s Vice President, Yen Chia-kan, fulfilled the remainder of his term, Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, the former head of the island’s secret police and the incumbent Premier, was elected unopposed by parliamentarians in 1978 and again in 1984. At the legislative level, Taiwan continued to be governed by the Republic of China’s parliament, which also decamped to the island in 1949. The parliament operated under a tricameral structure, with the lower house Legislative Yuan, upper house Control Yuan, and the National Assembly, which was charged with electing the President and Vice President and amending the constitution. As a representative body for the entirety of China, these three houses could not be re-elected or replenished by mainland territories under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Thus, their members—an overwhelming majority of whom represented mainland districts—held their seats until the day that an election could be conducted on the mainland. It became increasingly clear that this meant holding their seats for life in a structure known as the ‘non-re-elected congress.’ Upon the death of a sitting member, mainland exiles from the same region of China were appointed to take their place. Supplementary Elections and Gradual Reform As time passed and it became apparent that the KMT would not sweep back to power in the mainland, this system slowly began to adapt to the reality that it solely represented Taiwan. Mainland members who died off were not replaced at the same rate and new elected seats for the island of Taiwan gradually began to be created. These seats were predominantly filled by supplementary elections, the first of which was held in 1969, but some seats to represent overseas nationals were appointed by the president. The new representatives initially comprised less than 3% of the total parliament, but this proportion grew over time. The elections began to be held every three years for the Legislative Yuan and every six years for the National Assembly. The electoral process remained dominated by the KMT, which won the vast majority of seats in every election held under Chiang dynastic rule, alongside a small number of government-friendly independents and representatives from the Young China Party. The majority of representatives elected in these elections tended to be native-born Taiwanese, and the elections ensured that Taiwan was more heavily represented in the parliament—which continued to claim to represent the entirety of China—than its population alone could justify. These elections can thereby be viewed as marking the early foundations of a distinctly Taiwanese legislature. Despite Chiang Ching-kuo’s former role as director of the island’s secret police, having overseen arbitrary arrests, torture and execution of political opponents, as President, he began to loosen some of the political restrictions that had been imposed by his father. The early years of his presidency were not promising in that regard. The Tangwai movement, meaning ‘outside the party,’ had emerged in the 1970s demanding political reform and a greater emphasis on Taiwanese identity. The movement exploded onto the political scene amid riots in 1977 triggered by a blatant act of vote rigging in a local election. Such demands were fuelled by Taiwan’s

    25 min

  6. 11/24/2024

    Episode 1: West Germany 1969

    In 1969, West Germany held its sixth federal election since the end of the Allied occupation. The election produced Germany's first social democratic Chancellor in 40 years. Transcript:Hello and welcome to the first full episode of the History of Elections podcast, where we will be exploring the 1969 federal election in West Germany. The sixth election held in West Germany since the end of the Allied occupation, it brought an end to 20 years of Christian Democratic rule and brought in Germany’s first Social Democratic government since 1930, leading to significant change in the country’s domestic and, especially, foreign policy. September, 1969. A coup in Libya overthrows King Idris and installs Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as the country’s leader, who would rule for the next 42 years. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded in Morocco, bringing together leaders and representatives of 24 Muslim-majority states. The People’s Republic of China conducts its first underground nuclear test and ninth nuclear test in total, solidifying the country’s status as the world’s fifth nuclear power. Ho Chi Minh, President of North Vietnam and founding Chairman of the Workers’ Party of Vietnam, dies at the age of 79. And in West Germany, a federal election is held, as Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger faces the electorate for the first time. Background In the decades following the end of the Allied occupation in 1949, the politics of West Germany – known formally as the Federal Republic of Germany – was dominated by the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. Between 1949 and 1969, the CDU governed West Germany in an alliance the Bavarian Christian Social Union, or CSU, a slightly more conservative party that operated, as one would expect, in the state of Bavaria. Referred to together as the Union Parties, the CDU and CSU existed – and continue to exist – as independent parties. However, they caucus together in the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and they do not compete against each other in elections, the CDU choosing not to contest elections in Bavaria in favour of its sister party. The Union parties were the local German proponents of Christian Democracy, an ideological tendency that flourished across much of Western Europe in the postwar years. Characterised by moderation, pragmatism and emphasising the virtues of family life and national stability, Christian Democrats sought to bridge the divisions between the political left and right that had dominated European politics in the first half of the twentieth century. This left Christian Democratic parties well placed to seize the postwar zeitgeist of security and renewal. They typically endorsed liberal democratic forms of government and accepted the creation of moderate welfare states within a liberal, mixed economy framework. This enabled significant scope for collaboration and sometimes formal coalitions with social democrats, the other major political tendency in postwar Europe. Christian Democrats also championed the European integration process that would eventually culminate in the creation of the European Union. In Germany, the CDU strove to overcome historical divisions between the largely protestant north and catholic south that had riven German politics for the past century. By advocating for a unified, moderate Christian political identity, the CDU hoped to build an electoral coalition that could overcome the legacies of both the Weimar and Nazi periods. This approach proved very successful in West Germany. The Union parties won between 45% and 50% of the vote in every federal election between 1953 and 1969. They led every government in this period, including under the CDU’s founding leader, Konrad Adenauer, who served as Chancellor for 14 years between 1949 and 1963. In the 1950s, the Union parties appeared, in the words of Mary Fulbrook, to be on an ‘unbeatable ascendancy.’ Such ascendancy began to gradually reverse in the 1960s as the Union Parties became embroiled in policy disagreements and scandals – most notably, in 1962, controversy surrounding the raiding of a newspaper office ultimately precipitated Adenauer’s resignation. The Union parties’ political success was fuelled by a period of remarkable postwar economic recovery in West Germany known as the Wirtschaftswunder, or ‘economic miracle,’ aided by European integration, the US Marshall Plan of financial aid, global economic conditions and effective policies implemented by Adenauer’s governments. By the 1960s, West Germany’s GDP per capita and industrial output had both more than doubled while unemployment had fallen below 1%. Nevertheless, West Germany’s proportional voting system prevented the Union parties from governing alone and they spent the postwar decades leading successive coalitions, usually with the liberal Free Democratic Party. Only once, in 1957, did the Union Parties win an outright majority, although on that occasion they chose to retain a coalition with one other party. These Christian Democrat-led governments did not, of course, govern all of Germany. The regions of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War gained independence in 1949 as the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, controlled by the authoritarian Socialist Unity Party under Soviet influence. Both states initially claimed   to be the sole legitimate representative of the German people. Attempts to reunify the two German states were scuppered by heightening tensions between east and west at the outset of the Cold War, and the Iron Curtain between NATO and the Warsaw Pact came to divide Germany in half. Although indisputably one of West Germany’s two major parties in this period, the centre-left Social Democratic Party remained in opposition for the first 17 years of West German independence. The party had been strengthened by its resistance to the Nazi regime and increased support for social democratic policies in the aftermath of the Second World War, gaining votes from about a third of the West German electorate. The Social Democrats grew their support base during this period in political opposition, rising from 29% in 1949 to 39% in 1965. The Social Democrats’ time in opposition came to an end in 1966. The coalition between the Union parties and the    Free Democratic Party, which had been in power since 1961, collapsed due to the FDP’s opposition to raising taxes to balance the federal budget. Ludwig Erhard, Adenauer’s successor, tendered his resignation and a new government was formed by Kurt Georg Kiesinger, the sitting Minister-President – head of government - of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg. With just three factions represented in the Bundestag, Kiesinger’s only alternative to governing with the Free Democrats was to bring the Social Democrats into government. Both factions were motivated by a strong desire to avoid a return to the political instability that had undermined the Weimar Republic and that risked strengthening the extraparliamentary left and right. Meanwhile, the SPD was keen to demonstrate that it was capable of governing, although many members were sceptical of the idea of governing with the Union parties.  Thus, Germany’s first ‘grand coalition’ of the two major factions was formed, representing 90% of the Bundestag. It continued to govern until the next scheduled election in 1969. Kiesinger’s grand coalition implemented several domestic reforms which subtly expanded the West German welfare state and embraced neo-Keynesian policies. The government gained new powers of economic intervention; student grants and support for vocational training were introduced; and sick leave and pension coverage were both extended. Internationally, Kiesinger largely kept to the status quo, maintaining West Germany’s place within the western alliance. However, he made some moves to reduce Cold War tensions, establishing formal diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia. State elections held between 1965 and 1969 produced strong results for the CDU, suggesting that the senior partner in the grand coalition might claim the greatest electoral dividends. The 1969 election also took place in the aftermath of the 1968 student protests that swept much of the western world and proved especially vociferous in West Germany, where young Germans protested against the country’s incomplete denazification process and the continued presence of former Nazi officials within state institutions. This notably included Kiesinger himself, who had occupied a senior role within the Nazi propaganda apparatus during the Second World War. Famously, in 1968, Kiesinger was slapped at a party conference by Beate Klarsfeld, a Nazi-hunter who accused Kiesinger of knowledge of the Holocaust and the production of antisemitic propaganda – both charges that Kiesinger denied. This polarised the country, bringing out multiple public figures both in defence and condemnation of Klarsfeld’s actions. By the time of the 1969 federal election, the three-year-old grand coalition was on the verge of collapse. Once again, the point of contention was economic policy. The economic boom had come to an end, a fact exemplified by a recession in 1966, which drove unemployment up to 750,000 people. The Social Democrats proposed revaluing the Deutsche Mark, West Germany’s currency, to respond to these economic difficulties. However, this was opposed by the CSU, in part due to the detrimental effect the policy would have on Bavarian farming interests.   Additionally, West Germany’s presidential election, held six months previously, produced further splits in the grand coalition. Elected by members of the federal and state parliaments, the presidential election led to a close contest between Gustav Heinemann, supported by the Social Democratic Party and Free Democratic Party, and Gerhard Schröder – no, not tha

    28 min

  7. 08/16/2024

    Episode 0.5: United States of America 1822-3

    The 1822-3 United States House of Representatives election has hardly been remembered as the most exciting election in the country’s history. However, it represented an important moment in the transition between the first and second US party systems at the tail-end of the ‘Era of Good Feelings,’ and the representatives elected in these years would assume unexpected importance as kingmakers in the 1824 presidential election. Transcript: Mid-1822.  Brazil formally declared independence from Portugal, which would itself in September adopt its first constitution; Greece won a number of victories on land and at sea in its independence war against the Ottoman Empire; King George IV became the first British King to visit Scotland for 171 years; Jean-François Champollion announced his success in using the Rosetta Stone to translate ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics; Charles Babbage published a proposal for creating a ‘difference engine,’ a predecessor to modern computers; and voters in the United States of America began the year-long process of electing the next House of Representatives. Despite the wishes of several of the United States’ founding fathers, it did not take long for political partisanship to enter the new constitutional structures established after the American Revolution.  From the very beginning the House of Representatives divided itself into pro- and anti-administration groupings, which by the middle of the 1790s began to coalesce into more formal political factions.  The Democratic-Republican Party – no direct relation to either the modern Democratic or Republican Party, although often known contemporaneously as simply the Republican Party – was initially led by Thomas Jefferson and grew out of the opposition to inaugural president George Washington.  The Democratic-Republicans advocated a decentralised form of agrarian democracy held up by ongoing western expansion. In opposition to the Democratic-Republicans was the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton (of hit musical fame), which campaigned for a centralised banking system and closer relations with former colonial power Great Britain.  With most support in the north-east, the Federalist Party tended towards a more anti-slavery position than their Democratic-Republican opponents. During the United States’ first decades these two factions traded control of the Presidency, House of Representatives and the Senate – the legislature’s upper house.   However, after Thomas Jefferson’s election victory in 1800, defeating incumbent Federalist President John Adams, the Federalist Party entered into a period of sustained decline.  The Federalist Party would never win another election from this point onward, and while its decline was not a linear downward slope – it enjoyed brief recoveries in the 1808-09 and 1812-13 House elections – the party remained a marginalised opposition force for the rest of its existence, holding on to power only in its Massachusetts base.  It contested its last presidential election in 1816 and allowed Democratic-Republican President James Monroe to win re-election effectively unopposed in 1820. This period of political dominance by the Democratic-Republican Party, only strengthened after the War of 1812 against Britain, has become known as the ‘Era of Good Feelings.’  The Federalist Party became further discredited in public opinion across much of the US for its opposition to the war.  James Monroe’s presidency between 1817 and 1825 was also marked by attempts to bridge the past partisan divides and promote national unity, although he refused appeals to appoint Federalist members to his cabinet.  Monroe openly called for an end to partisan politics, including his own party, and so actively strove to weaken the Federalist Party’s remaining areas of influence.  However it would be naïve to view this ‘Era of Good Feelings’ as devoid of political conflict: questions over the extent of federal government power, an economic crisis in 1819 precipitated by a collapse in cotton prices and the expansion of slavery in new western states all continued to draw out political divisions.  The latter issue in particular, brought to the fore by the question of Missouri’s admission to the union, exacerbated sectional conflict between the north and south, a warning sign of the republic’s key faultline that would result in civil war 40 years later.  The question was temporarily resolved by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which maintained an equal balance between free and slave states and drew a horizontal line down the western frontier to divide future states between those permitted to practice slavery and those required to be kept free. Former President Thomas Jefferson accused the Federalist Party of using the issue of slavery as a means of dividing the Democratic-Republican Party, but the division remained more strongly between northern and southern politicians than between the two parties.  This coincided with a general demographic and political loss of power for southern states, which had played a dominant role in US politics from independence; by 1820 New York had surpassed Virginia as the state with the largest population.  As the ‘Era of Good Feelings’ culminated in the early 1820s, these political cleavages therefore remained distinctly non-partisan, as the midterm elections to the House of Representatives in 1822 and 1823 demonstrated.  The elections took place across a period of over 13 months, with each state determining its own electoral calendar.  Louisiana went first, electing its three representatives in July 1822, while voters in Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina had to wait until August 1823, with all other states falling inbetween.  Six states would not even hold their elections until after the beginning of the congressional term in March 1823. The 1822-23 election was also the first to be held after the 1820 census, which led to a substantial increase in the House of Representatives’ size, growing from 187 members to 213, an increase of 26, much of which came from the western states.  Northern states also benefitted, New York alone gaining an additional 7 representatives.  The new state of Missouri also participated in an election for the first time since its admission to the union the previous year, electing one member of the House. While less autocratic than many of its European counterparts, United States could not be described as a fully democratic state in the early 19th century.  The majority of residents did not have the right to vote, most notably women and enslaved people.  Specific suffrage rules were decided state by state and, although there had been some expansion to the franchise since American independence, by 1822 many states still based voter eligibility on property or taxation requirements. This focus on wealth or property meant that upon independence a small number of free African American men held the right to vote, although an increasing number of states began introducing explicit racial as well as gender bars on the right to vote by the beginning of the 19th century.  As Native Americans were considered citizens of their tribes rather than the United States, none had the right to vote in US elections in this period.  In this regard the United States fell behind many of the newly-independent Latin American states, which were less inclined to implement racialised voting restrictions. The result was entirely unsurprising: another landslide victory for the Democratic-Republicans, who secured their twelfth successive majority in the House of Representatives, picking up 34 additional seats to win 189 in total.  The Federalists dropped by eight seats, falling to 24, or just over ten percent of the chamber.  The Democratic-Republicans gained additional seats across the entire country and asserted particular control over the new western seats, winning every district west of North Carolina.  Federalist support, such as it was, remained confined to isolated pockets concentrated in the north-eastern states of Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.  Though unsurprising, the scale of the Federalist defeat was nevertheless remarkable.  With almost 90% control over the House of Representatives, the Democratic-Republican Party enjoyed a political dominance unprecedented for any party or faction at any other point in American history.  The party’s net gain of 34 seats remains a record for any governing party during a midterm election.  The Democratic-Republican leader in the House, Henry Clay, was easily elected as the House Speaker, a position he had previously held on two past occasions. 1822-3 was also the last midterm election held during a President’s sixth year in office before the advent of a phenomenon referred to by political scientists as the ‘six-year itch.’  From 1834, the President’s sixth-year midterms consistently produced a net loss of seats in the House for the governing party, a trend subsequently only broken once in 1998, when Bill Clinton was able to avoid a midterm setback in his sixth year as President.  This trend was repeated in the Senate, at this time elected indirectly by state legislatures.  The chamber had grown from 46 seats to 48 with the addition of two senators from Missouri.  As in the House, this addition benefitted the Democratic-Republicans, who grew their delegation from 38 seats in 1821 to 44 seats by the end of the electoral cycle in 1823.  The Federalists were reduced to just three Senators, all from the north-east.  Among the incoming Democratic-Republican Senators was Andrew Jackson, a renowned general who had previously held Tennessee’s Senate seat for a brief period in the late 18th century and who intended to use the federal office as a springboard to campaign for the presidency. The Federalist Party would never contest another election at the federal le

    15 min
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A podcast exploring past elections and the history of democracy. historyofelections.substack.com

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