Jacob Christensen

A rare case of political science hitting the political agenda – albeit with some delay: Poul Nødgaard from the Danish People’s Party has read an article by Professor Jørgen Elklit about the system used to distribute seats in Danish local elections..

What separates the systems used in national and local elections are primarily three rules:

1. Parties can agree on sharing votes in the calculation of the distribution of seats without having to share a list.
2. There are no electoral threshold that a party or combination of parties have to pass in order to gain a seat (on the other hand, assemblies are much smaller at the local and regional level)
3. Seats are distributed according to the d’Hondt, not the highest fraction rule.

Generally, the effect is that larger parties are favoured in the distribution of seats and a calculation made by the Ministry of the Interior suggests that there are a number of local councils where a majority of votes does not translate into a majority of seats.

The documents published by the Local Government Committee can be found here:

• Poul Nødgaard’s question with links to answers by the Ministry of the Interior
• The answer by the Ministry of the Interior (pdf-file)
• The calculations for a number of cases made by the Ministry of the Interior (pdf-file)

Even if the Danish People’ Party has the support of the Social Liberal Party in calling for a change of the way seats are distributed, chances of a reform are slim: The system has been in place for a very long time and Liberal Minister of the Interior has rejected calls for a reform.

Even if the Conservatives have declared that they find the discussion “interesting”, the Liberals and the Social Democrats who are the main benefactors of the present system still hold a clear majority in the Folketing.

PS: If you are really curious, Elklit’s article “Er der virkelig ingen argumenter for at ændre det kommunale valgsystem?”can be found in the journal Politica, 2004, vol. 34/3, 333-351.

Correction: I discovered that I for some reason originally filed this under Sweden. Ooops.

The British Liberal Democrats have a new chairman: The 64 year-old Menzies (that’s “Ming” to you, thank you very much) Campbell won a membership ballot with 58% of the vote.According to the BBC, Campbell’s great advantage in the contest was that he was not seen to be too closely associated with any of the party’s two main factions and that he holds considerable authority in the House of Commons.

In an age obsessed with youth – Campbell could easily be the father of Conservative leader David Cameron – electing a leader who is well above 60 is an interesting move. In recent years the Danish Social Democrats and the British Conservatives went for the same solution by electing Mogens Lykketoft and Michael Howard as party leaders – and both parties failed miserably at the next elections, perhaps – but not only – because Lykketoft and Howard were seen as interim solutions.

The next move by both parties was to elect chairmen who hadn’t yet turned 40.

On the other hand Campbell is still 9 years younger than the legendary Konrad Adenauer was when he took office as German Chancellor in 1949 and as we all know, Adenauer turned out to be more than a one-term solution.Correction: As a colleague pointed out, Adenauer was born in 1876 and not 1879. That made him 73 when he took office as Chancellor of the FRG in 1949. In case you don’t believe me, read Adenauer’s official biography at the Deutsches Historisches Museum.