Professor Jørgen Elklit, August 2, 2011 Department of Political Science
Aarhus University, Denmark
Preferential Voting in Denmark:
How, Why, and to What Effect?[1]
Prepared for delivery at:
1. ECPR General Conference, Reykjavik, Iceland, August 24-27, 2011
(Panel: Electoral Systems and the Personal Vote)
2. APSA Annual Meeting, Seattle, Wash., USA, September 1-4, 2011
(Division 34, Panel: The Determinants of Candidate Choice in Preferential Voting Systems)
Abstract: The paper provides an overview of (1) the Danish system for casting a preferential – or personal – vote in a proportional list system and (2) how seats are subsequently allocated. Denmark differs from most (all?) preferential list PR systems by letting the parties themselves (actually the parties’ multi-member constituency branches) decide which one of four possible preferential list options they want to employ in an upcoming election. The two dominant options are explained in some detail, to allow a full understanding of how they function. The paper then goes on to discuss how this system can be classified if one looks at the classification schemes proposed by in previous works in this field. The way forward is to understand that “Denmark” is not one, but at least two different – but simultaneously used – systems, which belong in different classification categories. The Danish PLPR system is then briefly compared to the Swedish and the Finnish systems before a few empirical results from Danish impact studies are presented. Finally, a model attempts to illustrate how the various explanatory factors interact to produce the parties’ votes in the Danish multi-member constituencies.
Preferential – or personal – voting in proportional list systems can be studied at various levels: Why is there one form in Denmark, another in Sweden, and a third variant in Finland – and what are the effects of these differences on how party groups function in parliament (if any)? One can also analyze preferential voting at the party level – are some forms more conducive to an increase in intra-party rivalry than other forms – or why do some parties prefer one form and not another (if they – as in Denmark – have an option to choose)? Personal voting can also be studied as a phenomenon at the level of the individual voter. Why do some voters cast a personal vote and others do not, even when it is very clear that the personal votes might decide which candidates actually make it into parliament?
This paper aims to document how the Danish sub-system of preferential voting functions. Subsequently, it will situate Denmark in its proper place among those electoral systems allowing at least some degree of preferential voting. The first step in this endeavor is to provide a description of the system, which will – hopefully – also allow other than Danish electoral experts to understand it. The next step will be to discuss the proper categorization of the system, while the final step is a brief comparison of the Danish system with the preferential voting systems in Sweden and Finland as that might provide useful additional insights.
Preferential Voting in Denmark
Denmark has three main electoral regions. Today they only comprise a total of ten multimember constituencies, which are still the central elements in the seat allocation system. The ten multi-member constituencies each consists of a number of so-called nomination districts. The number of such districts range from two on the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which is a multimember constituency of its own, to 13 in the South Jutland multimember constituency.
Every fifth year, 135 so-called constituency seats are allocated proportionally to the ten multi-member constituencies based on the sum of (1) registered population, (2) number of voters in the most recent parliamentary election, and (3) the area in km2 x 20 (in order to improve the level of representation of sparsely populated parts of the country). The previous allocation of seats to electoral units meant that the South Jutland multimember constituency in 2007 had 18 constituency seats ( in addition to this, South Jutland also got six compensatory seats, but this number followed from the actual allocation of the 16 compensatory seats allocated to the electoral region to which South Jutland belongs, see below) to allocate among parties. Most of the parties presented 13 candidates, one in each of the 13 nomination districts, and the pre-election appointment/nomination of these 13 candidates took place within each party’s nomination district branch. Each party’s final list of candidates for the multimember constituency was thus primarily the product of 13 unconnected decision-making processes among party members and local party leadership. [2]
As the nomination of candidates takes place at the nomination district level, and no formally structured party list is produced at the constituency level, there must also be a system in place to ensure that a party’s set of candidates is presented to the voters in a manner that is fair to all the party’s candidates, across nomination districts. The current system – which has developed gradually since this system was introduced in 1920 (Elklit, 1993; 2005/2008) – is the following:
When a party is entitled to run in the elections, it presents its list of candidate names to the constituency’s electoral authorities (indicating the nomination district where each candidate is the party’s nominated candidate) together with the party’s own decision on which system to apply for the eventual post-polling selection of candidates to fill seats. So how candidates are eventually to be elected – which is also reflected in the way their names are printed on the ballot paper – is decided by each individual party (either as part of the national party rules and regulations or as an ad hoc decision in the party’s multimember constituency organization). This complicates the presentation of the system as well as the computations, but that’s the way it is. It also means that the name order on the ballot papers within a multimember constituency differ between nomination districts.
There are two main forms of list organization and presentation, each with two variants. Voters are in all cases entitled to cast one vote, either for the preferred party as such (a so-called party vote) or for one of the candidates running for that party (a so-called personal – or preferential – vote):
1. “Standing by district” (in Danish: Kredsvis opstilling) is the traditional form, with one of the party’s candidates nominated in each nomination district. The name of the nomination district’s own candidate is printed first in the party’s section of the ballot paper (in boldface) followed by his/her fellow candidates in the nomination district in question). He/she receives all the votes cast for the party in the nomination district plus all the preferential votes cast for him/her in all nomination districts in the multimember constituency as all the constituency’s voters can cast such a vote for him/her. Candidates from the other nomination districts appear in alphabetical order after the nomination district’s own candidate. However, 2007 only saw one single occurrence of this form of presenting candidates out of 90 possible occurrences (nine parties x ten multimember constituencies). It shows that this form is no longer so fashionable with the parties as it was when preferential voting in Denmark was first studied (Pedersen, 1966).
A party running in this “standing by district”-way can further indicate that it wants to present its candidates in a particular order decided within the party. This form of list organization is termed “party list”, and the ranking of candidates is normally decided by a ballot taken among the party’s members in the multimember constituency (of course prior to the registration dead line). This system reduces the voters’ influence on the selection of candidates considerably, as is also the intention (see Elklit, 2010 for details). This option is not easy to identify on the ballot paper, but if the first candidate’s name is in boldface and the following candidates are not in alphabetical order, we have the party list form of list organization (as an example see party F on the copy of a ballot paper on page 7). As it is difficult for the voters to change this list order, it comes close to being a “closed list”, but without formally being so. It has happened, however, that voters have changed the list order. There were only 12 occurrences of the party list organization out of the above-mentioned possible 90 in 2007, all among the two leftist parties, so it is probably more relevant to say out of 20 occurrences. In seven of these 12 cases seats were won without changing the list order.[3]
Table 1 illustrates this way of doing things: Mr Frank Aaen, elected for Enhedslisten (the Unity List) on a compensatory seat (T), received a total of 3,176 votes, which is the sum of all his preferential votes across the eight nomination districts (348 + 267 + … + 254). However, in his “own” nomination district (# 3), the figure printed in boldface (1,145) is the sum of his 559 preferential votes (see the bottom row, disregarding two independent candidates with very few votes) and the 586 non-preferentialvotes cast for the party as such (“partistemmer”).
Since Mr Aaen’s vote total was less than a (Droop or Hagenbach-Bischoff) quota calculated for this particular form of list organization (3,917, see “Fordelingstal”in the lower left corner), the party list order is followed and the party’s one seat in this multimember constituency goes to no. 1 on the list, while the other candidates become substitutes in the order of the list (the right-most column). Candidates with more votes than the quota are elected irrespective of their position on the party list, but this only happens rarely.
Table 1. Copy of a result table for the Unity List from a multimember constituency in Metropolitan Copenhagen (Suburbs of Copenhagen) (disregard the two last rows)
2. “Standing in parallel” (in Danish: Sideordnet opstilling) is what Katz (1986: 89, following Pedersen, 1966) calls “simultaneous list ordering”. Over recent decades, this form of list organization has become increasingly popular, and in 2007 it accounted for 77 of the 90 possible cases). The basic idea is that all the party’s candidates in a multimember constituency formally stand in all the nomination districts, but the candidate from the party branch in the nomination districts is “nominated” and therefore has his/her name printed first on the party’s section of the ballot paper in the nomination district in question, while the other names come in alphabetical order. They all have their names printed in boldface, which signifies that they all stand in the nomination district in question (see parties A, B, C, D on the ballot paper copy on page 7). All candidates get all their individual preferential votes from the entire constituency, but the key point is how the party votes in the nomination districts are distributed among them. As they all stand in all nomination districts, party votes in each and every nomination district is allocated to each and every candidate in proportion to his/her preferential votes cast in that particular nomination district. So each candidate’s total vote under this form of list organization is the sum of (up to) 13 piles of preferential votes – one from each nomination district – and (up to) 13 piles of party votes, namely his/her shares of the party votes in each and every nomination district in the constituency.
Under this form of list organization, it is also possible not to have nominated a top candidate in the individual nomination districts, but this option is only rarely used and did not occur in 2007.[4]
Table 2 is from the same multimember constituency as the one above and shows the votes for the Social Democrats, who here won four constituency seats (marked with a K). The Social Democrats have decided nationally to use the most usual form of list organization, i.e. the standing in parallel, in all the country’s multimember constituencies.
This constituency has eight nomination districts, and the party has eight candidates, one nominated in each district. In the upper half of the table, the numbers in italics indicate in which district the candidates are nominated. The table’s lower half gives the preferential votes (“personlige stemmer”) for all candidates across all nomination districts, while the row above that (“partistemmer”) gives the total number of votes cast for the party in each nomination district.
Table 2. Copy of result table for the Social Democrats in a multimember constituency in Metropolitan Copenhagen (Suburbs of Copenhagen)
The Social Democrats here had four relatively high profile candidates and four relatively low profile candidates. Ms Mette Frederiksen is a highly respected young politician, who was the party’s nominated candidate in nomination district # 8 (Ballerup), as can be seen by her vote total (13,632) in italics. In the lower half of the table, one can see that she obtained a total of 27,077 personal votes across the eight nomination districts (1,772 + 1,994 … + 9,165), i.e. most in her “own” nomination district, where she really took the lion’s share of the 10,040 personal votes.
Her share of the personal votes in the other seven nomination districts was also very high, so her share of the party votes across nomination districts became 20,757 (e.g. 4,467 in her own nomination district, calculated as 9,165/10,040 x 4,893). Consequently, Ms Frederiksen filled the first of the party’s four constituency seats in this constituency as her vote total was higher than any of her party comrades’ vote totals. The other seven Social Democrats became either MPs or substitutes in declining order of their total vote.
It has not been possible to obtain a copy of a ballot paper from the 2007 election. Therefore, one finds below is a ballot paper from the 2001 elections (the upper half of it) which shows how the two currently important forms of list organization is presented to the voters in a nomination district. In this case, it is the 3rd nomination district in the (then) Southern Jutland multimember constituency (see upper right corner). The text above has already clarified what one (and the voters) should look for: What names are printed in boldface and whether the names after the top name are printed in alphabetical order or not?