77 years ago today, West Germany held its first federal election. I mapped the 1949 Bundestag vote at the municipal…

77 years ago today, West Germany held its first federal election. I mapped the 1949 Bundestag vote at the municipal level, showing how geographic voting patterns remained strongly shaped by the regional, religious, and social cleavages of the Weimar era. A thread 🧵

While the CDU/CSU emerged as the strongest party clearing 20% across Germany, they were less dominant in rural Germany than by the 60s. Their strongholds were Catholic Swabia & the Rhineland; elsewhere, Catholic and rural Protestant voters still backed rival centre-right parties.

As in Weimar Germany, the SPD drew strong support from centres of the unionized industrial working class, such as Hamburg & the Ruhr. Its already established middle-class base was also more Protestant than Catholic, reflected in stronger support across rural northern Hesse.

The KPD retained much of its support in the old industrial and working-class centres of West Germany. Its vote was especially concentrated in the Ruhr and other mining and manufacturing areas.

While the FDP soon became a smaller force in the West German party system, in the early 1950s it still commanded substantial support among the Protestant upper and self employed middle class, particularly in rural and agrarian areas of Hesse and Württemberg.

The old Catholic Zentrum, a legacy of the Weimar era, still retained strong support in Catholic parts of NRW and Lower Saxony, areas that would soon become CDU/CSU strongholds. In some constituencies, the parties even cooperated electorally to avoid splitting the Catholic vote.

The Deutsche Partei was a conservative/monarchist regionalist party rooted in the old Hanoverian tradition. Its support was heavily concentrated in rural Protestant areas of Lower Saxony, especially in the former Kingdom of Hanover, where it remained a competitor to the CDU.

The DKP-DRP represented the nationalist far right in the first federal election. Its support was heavily concentrated in protestant northwestern Germany, especially Lower Saxony and Schleswig, and allowed the party to enter the Bundestag with five seats.

Lastly, the SSW represented the Danish and Frisian minorities of Schleswig-Holstein. Its support was almost entirely concentrated along the Danish border.

Thanks for reading! Data comes from Julian Voss's amazing German Post-War Election Database. github.com/julian-voss/gp…

I forgot: before the CDU’s Bavarian sister party, the CSU, became dominant in the 1950s, the more regionalist Bayernpartei still commanded substantial support across Bavaria. Its strength was concentrated especially in rural Catholic areas of Upper Bavaria.