A Guide to the Scandinavian Political System for Americans
How are elections and the political system in Scandinavia different from the American one?
As a Norwegian I have on numerous occasions been baffled and confused by the American political system. So many concepts are different from what we are used to in Scandinavia. Political parties hold primaries. Instead of a Parliament there is a Congress with a Senate and a House of Representatives. Then there is the oddball Electoral College, which Americans always seem get worked up about in the aftermath of every election.
Yet, I realize that to Americans and Canadians many of the European political systems such as the Scandinavian ones are equally if not more puzzling. I was first made aware of this fact when trying to explain Norwegian elections to my American family and relatives. This story is an attempt to enlighten my American friends across the pond. I intend to cover the following topics in this story:
Relation between election districts and selected representatives
Anecdote explaining why contacting your representative works very different in Scandinavia
How representatives get selected
Implications of voting using proportional representation
How proportional representation arose in Norwegian political history
Party vs. person focus under different political systems
Difference between a president and a prime minister
Election Districts and Representatives
A major difference here in Scandinavia is that we don't elect a single representative to represent our voting district. For instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is a House representative for New York's 14th Congressional District. That means AOC represents the roughly 700,000 people who live in this part of New York. She represents these citizens in the US House of Representatives, located in Washington, DC.
We can contrast how AOC represents her constituents with how I am represented in my city Oslo, the capital of Norway. Interestingly, Oslo also contains around 700,000 inhabitants and constitutes a voting district for election purposes. More specifically, Oslo is one of the 11 counties ("Fylke" in Norwegian) that make up Norway. You can see a map over all the Norwegian counties below. Oslo is the tiny orange area. The choice is made because Oslo has more inhabitants than most of the other counties in Norway.
Instead of electing a single representative to represent all the inhabitants of Oslo in the Norwegian Parliament, we select 20 representatives from different political parties. Every county has multiple representatives. You have a similar situation in Sweden. Sweden is made up of 21 counties ("Län" in Swedish). Please note that the election districts and the counties are not exactly the same. In Norway, they used to be the same, but today both Norway and Sweden have slightly more election districts than counties.
The big difference between Oslo and the 14th Congressional District in New York is that Oslo is represented by 20 members of parliament, while the 14th is represented by just a single person, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Below you can see the 20 politicians representing me in Oslo.
In the US, if you want to contact a representative, it is pretty obvious who you contact. Your voting district has only one representative. In Norway and Sweden in contrast there are multiple choices, so who do you pick? Typically, you would contact a representative for the party you voted on. Say I voted for the Green environmentalist party, Miljøpartiet De Grønne(MDG), then I would select either Rasmus Hansson or Lan Marie Nguyen Berg who are the two MDG representatives in Oslo. If I click in on Lan Marie Nguyen, I will find her contact info and details about what committees she is on in parliament along with other information.
By contacting a representative for the party you voted on, you are more likely to find somebody more conducive to your concerns. Imagine in the US that you have an issue with abortion clinics in your state, and you try to contact your representative, only he is a born-again evangelical Christian from the Republican party. Do you think he will be very conducive to your concerns? Probably not.
Anecdote About Contacting Your Representative in Norway
There is no requirement to contact a representative from the party you voted on in Norway. Years ago, I had a colleague with a son who had significant disability and needed a lot of aid. My friend was from what we in Norway might call a bourgeois family: Well spoken, well-educated with a pleasant financial situation. Often such families would own a small business, be lawyers or doctors. There is no precise definition. Historically, you could more easily tell from clothing style, mannerisms and sociolect spoken. They would be the kind of people who typically vote for the conservative party, Høyre. Today in modern egalitarian Norway these differences are harder to spot.
Anyway, my friend out of old family tradition voted on the Conservatives and naturally contacted one of the Conservative representatives to get help for his strongly disabled child. Here is the problem: They simply didn't care much about such as issue. The interests of the Conservative party tend to be centered around helping business, privatize, tax cuts, deregulation and so on. Desperate, my friend contacted a Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) representative instead. Luckily, the representative really embraced him and put in a lot of time and effort to help. Unless I misremember the story, my friend was even visiting the representative at home eating waffles with strawberry jam.
The Labour Party secured a new voter and member who became a strong believer and champion of their values, especially their human values. Although to nuance this story a bit, I believe my old colleague years later switched back to the Conservatives, although I was never in a position to hear the whole story of how that happened.
The bottom line is that you can contact any representative for your county. Often, the nature of your concern may dictate which candidate you contact. A green party candidate will likely care more about environmental issues than say a low-tax libertarian candidate.
How Are Representatives Selected?
The US like Canada, the UK, and many other Anglo-sphere countries elect candidates based on what we call first-past-the-post voting, formally called single-member plurality voting (SMP). You can see from the map that such a voting system is actually quite rare:
Most countries, including the Scandinavian ones, have what we call proportional representation. Proportional representation means that each election district selects multiple representatives. The number of seats (mandates) each party gets is proportional to the number of votes they got. The bar plots on the left show the percentage of votes each party got in Oslo. On the right, you can see how man seats (mandates) in parliament they got.
How do individual representatives get selected then? In the US, each party runs primaries where voters for each party select their preferred candidate. AOC, for instance, had to gather a number of signatures to run against Joe Crowley which had been the dominant Democratic candidate since 2004. Netflix actually has a great documentary called Knock Down The Housewhich gives a peek into the process behind the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many other Justice Democrats. Another great documentary, Street Fight tells the story of how Cory Booker took on the powerful political machine in Newark, New Jersey. Then there is the documentary of the campaign of former Major in the U.S. Army Richard Ojeda in West Virginia.
All these documentaries give an intriguing look at how politics work on the ground in the US. The political machine. The influence of money. The dirty tricks. For instance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez needed only 1200 signatures to run in theory. In practice, over 10,000 signatures were needed because incumbents do anything to hinder challengers, and they control a lot of the apparatus managing elections.
In Norway the political game is a lot more innocent, but it also works in an entirely different fashion. Focus is far more on the party than the candidates. Most people when they go to vote think primarily about the party they want to vote on. Candidates don't run independent campaigns like in the US. I have walked from door to door with a member of parliament in Oslo, and she never emphasized her candidacy when we talking to voters. Nor do you see that when different political parties have stands in the town square or speeches. The focus is on the party and the party platform (party program).
Thus, US politics feels more like an individual sport such as running, while Scandinavian politics is much more like a team sport like soccer. You are trying to fight for your team.
One common misconception about proportional voting systems, is that you cannot select the candidates you want to represent you. Many Americans think that parties stuff the list with whomever they want and voters have no say whatsoever, but you do. When I vote, I pick a sheet for the party I would like to vote on. I drew an example below with a made-up party, the Liberals, where you can see that we write numbers in boxes next to the candidate names. In the example, I am voting to have Joe moved down to third spot and Jane up to second spot.
You can even write in names of candidates from other lists. It only requires 300 signatures to be allowed to put a list of candidates on the ballot, but to actually get a party you need 5000 signatures. Interestingly, this is still less than the number of signatures Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had to collect to be allowed to run against Joe Crowley.
Sometimes candidates far down the list which would normally not have had any chance of getting elected shoot up to the top of the list.
Implications of Proportional Representation
The most obvious effect of proportional representation is that you can have numerous parties to choose from. Below, you can see the party logos of the nine parties currently represented in the Norwegian parliament.
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