Jacob Christensen

Okay, one last one for today: How well have Danish governments performed in elections since the introduction of proportional representation in 1918 (this means that 1920 is the first point of reference).

I have taken the (combined) share of the vote of the parties that were in office at the time of the election – this means that in 1953, 1979, 1981, 1994 and 1998 I compare the parties in the outgoing government, not the government which was formed immediately after the elections in 1950, 1977, 1979, 1990 and 1994, respectively. Given that Denmark was governed by a national coalition 1940-1943/1945 and 1945, I have left those elections out of the calculations. I have also left out supporting parties from the calculation.¹

Anyway, here goes:

As we can see, the government’s performance in the 2011 election was far from stellar but not unusually bad. Being in government can seriously damage your share of the vote.

1. And technically: I leave out the first election in 1953 and use the third and not the first election in 1920 which is wrong [↩]

Some more nerdery. First, the relative strength of the left wing in elections since the introduction of proportional representation in 1918:

The weakness of the Social Democrats shows – the party’s performance in the 2005, 2007 and now 2011 elections is historically bad. Interestingly, the parties to the left also have problems picking up the left wing vote: In a historical comparison, 2011 is still worse than anything since 1926. On the other hand, the left wing viewed in isolation had a fairly good election with 2011 ranking with the elections of the 1980s.

Next, fractionalisation. There are endless ways of measuring the fractionalisation of a party system (I will point you to Claus Dahl for a matematician’s take). Using the distribution of seats in the Folketing – excluding the North Atlantic MPs so the denominator is 175 – I get this with the Rein-Taagepera formula:

For the record: Claus and I reach the same conclusion – the present Folketing is the most fractionalised since 1981-1984.

The Danish electoral system can be vary fascinating but essentially voters vote by party and then choose candidates from within the party lists. This also means that individual candidates have a motivation to promote themselves and two days before the election, I came across this set of posters in central Odense:

Vivi Kier was the incumbent Conservative MP while Mai Henriksen was competing for a seat in parliament.

As we all know, the Conservatives were massacred in the 2011 election but it appears that the party may still take a seat in Funen – and that in that case Henriksen will oust Kier.

Sonce Leoparddrengen reminded us about election night 1998, I thought I would write some words about what happened back then and why I still do not trust Danish TV when it comes to election coverage in general and opinion polls and forecasts in particular.

Now, 1998 was a very special election because it was one of the tightest elections in many years. In the end a couple of hundred votes decided that the government of Social Democrats and Social Liberals could continue for another term. But the margin of error was an issue right to the end when pollsters were making forecasts.

Not that this bothered any of the Danish TV stations covering the election. If you watched DR, the left wing had won and if you watched TV2 the right wing had won. No mentioning that there were problems in making forecasts and definitively no mentioning that the two broadcasters were making different predictions.

This went so far that the TV stations instructed politicians not to refer to competing forecasts – any glimpse of doubt would obviously ruin the framing performed by the respective stations. That the left wing eventually won is of less importance here – DR was just as guilty in misrepresenting the proceedings as TV2. The entire thing left me with the feeling that whatever the broadcasters were doing, it had nothing to do with reporting the counting of votes, and since then I have basically distrusted Danish TV when it came to covering election results.

The TV stations have done their best to live up to my lack of trust. Since 1998, the early prognoses have been supplemented with “exit polls” which are published increasingly early on election day. Today we had forecasts coming out during the afternoon. Not that either DR or TV2 had learnt anything from the 2009 fiasco when one of the stations during the afternoon confidently predicted that revision of the Succession Act was close to being rejected.

So, to make things clear: Anything published before 2100 CEST is pure and utter guesswork. We should have a picture of where the election is going at around 2200 CEST and a result between 2230 and 0000 CEST.

The Department of History at Aarhus University has launched a site covering elections to the Folketing from 1953 to 2007. Only in Danish but it looks very comprehensive and useful:

Folketingsvalg 1953-2007

While the votes are still being counted, the prognosis is fairly stable and the result is quite a stunner: The True Finns Party stand to win 19,1 percent of the vote, making it the second-largest party in terms of votes and the third-largest in terms of seats in the Eduskunta. The Centre Party was the big loser going from 23,1 to 15,8 percent of the vote. Centre Party leader and prime minister Mari Kiviniemi has hinted that the CP could go into opposition while Social Democratic leader Jutta Urpilainen apparently has stated that the True Finns should be taken into account in the coming negotiations over a new government.

In policy terms, a government including the True Finns (PS) would be more Euro-skeptic than the Finnish governments of the 1990s and 2000s. The next question is how the next Finnish government will be constituted: If the SDP wants to tap into the anti-establishment sentiment with PS, the two parties still lack 20 seats to win a majority. Obviously, you could add the Conservatives to the mix – this is Finland, after all, and oversized coalitions are frequent – but having a coalition of two establishment and one populist party sounds a bit uneasy. Still, Wolfgang Schüssel performed a similar act in Austria between 2000 and 2007, and the True Finns’ predecessor party, the Finnish Rural Party, participated in the government between 1983 and 1991. The Swedish People’s Party has been included in every government since the early 1970s but linking PS’s strident Fenno-Finnish brand of nationalism with the minority interests of the Fenno-Swedes will not be easy. At the same time, the SFP may well prefer being inside and able to block the worst of the PS’s anti-Swedish initiatives.

Interesting times indeed.

Update 2001-04-18: (In Swedish) Professor Göran Djupsund considers the problems facing the Conservative leader Jyrki Katainen who will probably be the next Finnish prime minister (he would be only the second Conservative to hold that position since 1946), while (in Norwegian) Anders Ravik Juspkås discusses the forces behind the True Finns as well as the prospects of the coalition negotiations.

Actually, the present Danish Folketing hasn’t passed the 3,5 year-mark yet (that would happen in late May) and just about everybody are seeing it as a dying dinosaur. But just how many parliaments have lasted 3,5 years or longer since the 4-year election term was introduced in 1918?

More than many people think:

September 1920-April 1924
April 1929-November 1932
April 1939-March 1943 (the longest term ever served by a Folketing due to the German occupation)
September 1953-May 1957
May 1957-November 1960
November 1960-September 1964 (note that we had three long parliaments between 1953 and 1964)
January 1984-September 1987
December 1990-September 1994
March 1998-November 2001
November 2007-(post-March 2011)

If we add Folketings serving for more than three years:
October 1935-April 1939 (a couple of weeks short of 3,5 years)
September 1994-March 1998 (again a couple of weeks short of 3,5 years).

At the other end, some parliaments never made it past two years. If we exclude the first two elections in 1920 and the first one in 1953, they are:

October 1945-October 1947 (missed two years by a matter of days)
November 1966-January 1968
December 1973-January 1975
September 1987-May 1988

Even if Hamburg in many ways is a bourgeois city, it has never been CDU country. That the party managed to hold power in Hamburg since 2001 had as much to do with protest politics (the now defunct Partei Rechtsstaatlicher Offensive) and the ability of Ole von Beust to navigate the upheavals of the early 2000s as with more fundamental changes in the political mood in the city-state. Still, the CDU miraculously managed to win a majority in the 2004 election and after the 2008 election formed a surprising coalition with the Green Party. Von Beust was nothing if not versatile. He was also helped by the fact that the Hamburg SPD was a mess during much of the last decade.

The SPD victory at Sunday’s early election was a massive one. CDU lost half of its share of the vote while SPD almost won 50% of the vote. Thanks to the 5% threshold, SPD will be able to form a one-party government in the new Bürgerschaft. A good reason to party.

At the same time, SPD was also able to benefit from a number of mistakes made by von Beust and his successor Christoph Ahlhaus. The CDU-GAL coalition made sense as von Beust appealed to culturally liberal Hamburgers, but support did not go so far as to cover a reform of Hamburg’s school system. Germany basically is a society organised along class lines and the bourgeoisie does not like the idea of its children attending the same schools (and school system) as working-class children. The school reform – which was very modest in Scandinavian eyes – suffered a clear defeat at a referendum last year.

The choice of Christoph Ahlhaus as von Beust’s successor made some sense as CDU was trying to rebuild its conservative credentials following the schools debacle – Ahlhaus is everything von Beust wasn’t. Unfortunately, this also meant that he wasn’t from Hamburg or even Northern Germany. It might have worked, had he been from Lübeck, Bremen or even Rostock. Similarly, even if the Hamburger bourgeoisie may be conservative, it is not Conservative. The best SPD leaders have realised this and presented themselves as realist Social Democrats – even if Helmut Schmidt never served as Erster Bürgermeister, he always fitted the bill perfectly. Olaf Scholz may not be the next Helmut Schmidt but his Schröderite credentials and experience as Labour and Social Affairs Minister during the later part of the 2005-2009 Grand Coalition haven’t exactly hurt him.

(Click to view large)

Just out of curiosity, I calculated the vote share won by the largest two parties in the elections for the Danish Folketing from 1918 (when proportional representation was introduced) to 2007. For most of the time, the Social Democrats and the Liberals have been the two largest parties with 1935, 1943, 1968, 1971 (Conservatives), 1973, 1977 (Progress Party) and 1981-1990 (Conservatives) as the exceptions.

From 1918 to 1960 the share varied between 60 to 65 percent of the vote, but from then on the share has declined and hovered between 50 and 55 percent. The resurgence of, first, the Social Democrats and then the Liberals put the share back to the 60 percent level but in 2005 and 2007 we have been back to the levels of the 1970s and 1980s. Recent opinion polls suggest that the combined share of the Social Democrats and the Liberals is around 50 percent.

As you have probably noted, I have a serious grudge against the indiscriminate use by journalists of the term “presidential election” with regard to Danish election campaigns and I would like (again) to point out that focusing solely on the leaders of the two main parties does lead to reporting losing some important aspects of the election campaign and the political process.

While we are at it: There are many ways of calculating the fractionalisation in a parliament. Here is a graph with the effective number of parties at the start of the parliamentary terms from 1953 to 2007.

Oh, well: One of my readers tricked me into making a prediction.

We still have no indication about when the next election to the Folketing will be called. The ball is on the prime minister’s part of the pitch and he can call an election with three week’s notice. The best guesses would probably be some time in January (provided Lars Løkke Rasmussen makes a splash in his new year’s speech), April (this has to do with the coming round of collective bargaining in the public sector) or September (before the opening of the 2011-2012 parliamentary year), but short-term movements in the public opinion will no doubt be followed extremely closely by Lars Løkke Rasmussen and Lene Espersen.

The electoral agenda seems to have moved from immigration to “classic” themes like the economy and public services. I have also seen figures which imply that the government has lost the advantage that the bourgeois bloc has enjoyed with regard to health services since the late 1990s.

Still, the likely outcome is a much more complicated Folketing than the ones we have known since 2001 where the government has been able to govern with the support of DF. If the government manages to survive, it will depend on DF and LA whose political agendas are very different. Similarly, an S-SF government (in itself a novum in Danish politics) will rely on either DF or the Red-Greens and the Social Liberals to pass its policies.

As it is, the next Danish prime minister (Lars Løkke Rasmussen or Helle Thorning-Schmidt) will need the flexibility of a Poul Schlüter to survive. The next Folketing will be interesting.