Proportional Western Europe

The Failure of Governance

B. Owen, M. Rodriguez-McKey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137353870
• eBook ISBN: 9781137374370
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is a history of political parties in ten nations (with the sections on France and Germany limited to specific period), and a critique of the existing literature that emphasizes the importance of electoral rules as determinative of political party systems.

PART I

The Countries with a Dominant Party: The Scandinavian Countries and Italy

CHAPTER 1

The Scandinavian Countries

Political Institutions: The Different Degrees of Dominance

We shall try to understand why the three Scandinavian countries have a Social Democratic Party that is in a position of dominance. We will consider their election results (the percentage of the valid votes obtained and the seats). One party overshadows the others since the 1920s. Our study of Scandinavia will analyze the reason for the presence of a one-party dominance, a dominance that is of different degrees. Nevertheless, to obtain a clear picture of the full consequences of the electoral system we also have to look into the levels of instability of the other parties.

In 1880, Norway was divided into districts that elected members of an electoral college by an indirect and plurality vote. In 1906, it became a two-round majority system. Proportional list systems were introduced in 1920, the first method of distribution being the d’Hondt system. In 1953, it was changed to Saint Laguë (first divisor: 1.4). In 1989, 157 seats were attributed to 19 constituencies and 8 seats were apportioned at the national level using the same proportional system to the parties that obtained at least 4 percent of the votes.

As regards Denmark, the voting was public in 1849 and took place in one-member constituencies on a plurality basis. The absolute majority was necessary when there was only one candidate. Proportional representation was first introduced in 1915 in Copenhagen and in 1920 in the rest of the country; the method of distribution was the d’Hondt system. In 1953, the d’Hondt system was replaced by the Lagüe system (first divisor: 1.4). One hundred and thirty-five seats are attributed to 17 constituencies while 40 were attributed to parties having more than 2 percent of the votes in three large constituencies; one constituency was equal to one region.

Lastly, a direct proportional list system was introduced in Sweden in 1907 using the d’Hondt system. In 1970, 310 seats were attributed directly to 28 constituencies while 40 seats were allocated nationwide. The law introduced two levels of seat distributions and a 4 percent threshold for obtaining seats in the first level and in order to participate in the second-level distribution.

In order to study the first degree or the dominance with the relative majority of the votes, we will go back to Denmark. The dominance of one party is continuous but is situated below the absolute majority of the votes and even a bias of the winning tendency in seats does not allow it to reach the absolute majority of seats.

When one considers the percentage of the votes from 1924 to 2007, the Social Democratic Party is constantly dominant with an average of 37.2 percent of the votes including a high level of 46.1 percent in 1935 and a low level of 25.6 percent in 1973 that corresponds to the appearance of the Progress Party as an antitax party. The dominant party rarely gets below 30 percent of the votes.

In 1990, the Social Democratic Party reached a high level of 37.50 percent but four years later it fell to 34.56 percent of the votes. Its score slumped from 35.93 percent in 1998 to 29.08 percent in 2001 and, even worse, to 25.87 percent of the votes in 2005, its voters going to the Danish People’s Party and to the Social Liberal Party. Temporarily (1984, 1987, and 1988 elections), it may also have lost votes to the Socialist People’s Party.

The Social Democratic Party constantly has the relative majority of seats but never reaches the absolute majority. Its three best performances are—1935: 46.1 percent of the votes, 45.9 percent of the seats; 1943: 44.5 percent of the votes, 44.6 percent of the seats; and 1960: 42.1 percent of the votes, 43.4 percent of the seats.

The second party is generally the Liberal Party but sometimes the Conservative Party and twice the Progress Party. The average of the second party is 21.2 percent with a maximum of 28.3 percent in 1929 and a minimum of 12.5 percent in 1979. It is noteworthy that the second party in 1973 and in 1979 was the new Progress Party, which reached 15.9 percent and 14.6 percent of the votes outdistancing the former parties that have sometimes more than a century of existence.

From 1984 until 1994, the second party was the Conservative Party. In 1994, the Liberal Party became the second party. The conservatives had a high score of 23.45 percent in 1984 and a low score of 15.02 percent in 1994. They obtained a maximum score of 31.3 percent in 2001 and a low score of 15.84 percent in 1990. The Danish People’s Party (a split from the Progress Party) appears to be eating away the conservative vote: In 1998, the conservatives lost almost half of their electorate (from 15.02% to 8.92%) to the Danish People’s Party that obtained 7.41 percent in its first election.

The Swedish party system is the first example of the second degree, which is when the winning tendency can reach an absolute majority of the votes and of the seats. As a result of the bias of the winning tendency, dominance is continuous and reaches at times the absolute majority of the votes and the absolute majority of seats.

By considering the percentage of the votes obtained from 1924 to 2006, it is evident that the Social Democratic Party is constantly dominant with an average of 43.8 percent of the votes that includes a high level of 53.8 percent in 1940 and a low point of 36.2 percent in 1921. From 1932 onward, the dominant party dropped only twice below the level of 40 percent of the votes. It obtained three times an absolute majority of seats: in 1940, 53.8 percent of the votes and 58.3 of seats; in 1944, 46.5 percent of the votes—50 percent of seats; and in 1968, 50.1 percent of the votes—53.6 percent of seats.

This high level was reached for international reasons. The Swedish population felt threatened and gave support to the government that was social democratic. The first two reasons were the war, 1940 and 1944, and the third was the 1968 Prague events.

The Social Democratic Party continued obtaining high-level scores in 1930s and 1940s assuring it the first place during the 1970s until the 2006 election when it obtained only 35.2 percent of the votes, thus allowing the conservatives to form a coalition government.

The second place is shared among the liberals, the conservatives, and the Agrarian Party, which became the Center Party. From 1923 to 1998, the second party obtained only a maximum of 29.4 percent of the votes and a minimum of 15.7 percent.

From 1934 to 1944, the conservatives held the second place by obtaining a high score of 26.1 percent of the votes in 1924 and their lowest in 1944, 15.9 percent. The Liberal Party held the second place from the 1948 to the 1956 elections with a low score of 22.8 percent (1948) and a high score of 24.4 percent (1952). The conservatives had a brief comeback in 1958 by becoming the second party with 19.5 percent of the votes. After that, it was the liberals for two elections, then the Center Party from the 1968 to the 1976 elections with the conservatives again making a comeback from the 1979 to the 2010 elections when they obtained their highest score: 30.1 percent.

Norway is the second example of the second degree. The dominance of the Social Democratic Party was constant from 1927 to 1997 but appears differently if we consider the period from 1933 to 1969 when for the first time it obtained and maintained the level of more than 40 percent of the votes. Nevertheless, its results are uneven with a maximum of 42.3 percent of the votes and a minimum of 34.3 percent from 1973 to 1997. In the 1989, 1993, and 1997 elections, it obtained 34.3 percent, 36.9 percent, and 35 percent of the votes, respectively. The first time it fell below 40 percent of the votes was in 1973 during the appearance of the Progress Party. From 1988 to 2005, its score did not rise higher than 36 percent of the votes with a record low of 24.29 percent in 2001 when the social democratic votes went to the Socialist Left Party (PSG) that doubled its score from 6.01 percent to 12.55 percent of the votes. Nevertheless, the 2005 election was better for the Social Democratic Party than the previous one because it obtained 32.7 percent of the votes and 35.4 percent in 2009.

The Social Democratic Party reached the absolute majority of seats on four occasions: 1945, 41 percent of votes that fetched 50.7 percent of seats; in 1949, 45.7 percent of votes that enabled reaching 56.7 percent of seats; in 1953, 46.7 percent of votes that fetched 51.3 percent of seats (adoption of the Saint Laguë system) that reduced the bias of the wining tendency; and finally in 1957, with 48.3 percent of votes—52 percent of seats.

Apart for the 1997 elections the second place was held by the Conservative Party that had an average of 22 percent of the votes but in 1981 and 1985 it rose to 31.7 percent and 30.4 percent to the detriment of the Liberal Party which fell to 5 percent of the votes. The Conservative Party became the third party in 1997 with 14.3 percent of the votes overtaken by the Progress Party: 15.3 percent. The Conservative Party kept the third place behind the right wing Progress Party. In 2005 and 2009, with 14.1 percent and 17.2 percent of the votes while the new second party (Progress Party) in the second place reached 22.1 percent and 22.9 percent which was just over four times what it obtained in its first appearance in 1973.

The dominance of the Social Democratic Party over the others should be considered with much attention. Why does this party attract voters more than others? Is it ideology? Do associations and other type of organizations play a role? Is it that the party platforms always correspond to the concerns of the majority of voters? This last point seems unlikely because political conditions vary with time. Our work will consist in searching for the elements that are shared by the three Scandinavian Social Democratic parties.

The Voter Influence Structure

Scandinavian Social Democratic parties reach a level that is close to half of the valid votes while the right-wing or “bourgeois” parties are split into three or four parties of generally comparable force. Denmark gives the example of the biggest division of the parties while Norway’s Conservative Party is constantly in the position of the second party except for the 1997 election when it came in first. This situation appeared at the beginning of the 1920s and in the history of the party system it represents the third stage—the first stage: a two-party system until 1900; the second stage: unity of the bourgeois vote and division of the left in two or three currents: liberal, social democrat, and socialist radical. The rise of the Social democratic Party brings about the fall of the Liberal Party that keeps only its most conservative voters. The third stage involves a dominant Social Democratic Party and the division of the other parties.

It is important to note that the three countries in question adopted proportional list systems at the beginning of the third stage—Norway in 1919, Denmark in 1920, and Sweden in 1921.

One fact that stands out when one compares the first two stages with the third is the difference of electoral systems. The plurality or two-round majority systems applied before 1920 tended to create a two-party system and there could be alliances or nonopposition of candidates of two similar parties at the level of one-member constituencies. Nevertheless, this argument does not explain why the introduction of proportional representation broke up the parties qualified as “bourgeois” but not the Social Democratic parties.

Our first observation is that the three Social Democratic parties are in a position of dominance. It will thus be interesting to look at the nature of these parties and their common ground or privileged relations, if any, with a large category of voters. It soon appears that they all share close links with the trade unions.

According to recent publications of the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) of trade unions, the origins of trade unions lie in the appearance of the Social Democratic Party. Only the older texts mention the existence of the liberal union movements. As Sigfrid Hansson writes “before 1880, one could find, here and there, union movements but these were not real unions in the modern sense of the term.”¹

In fact, the trade unions were organized well before this date as the first was the printers union in 1846; it was followed by other unions that took charge of the health and the general training of its members. The bakers union was formed in 1852 and organized a resounding strike in 1873 as a result of which the work week was reduced. The fifth inter-Scandinavian trade union congress of 1897 introduced a system by which the unions and the Social Democratic Party would collaborate. The trade unions would be present in the working place and the Social Democratic Party in the political arena.

Until 1888, the Swedish Liberal Party led by Dr. Nyström dominated the organization of unions. Ten years later, the socialists created the National Trade Union Center of Sweden. The presence of nonsocialist unions made it difficult for the Social Democratic Party to introduce automatic party membership for all union members; so the union–party membership battle between liberals and socialists continued until 1922. Hansson indicates that in 1925, two-thirds of the Social Democratic Party membership had been “automatic”; because of the difficulty of obtaining this information, he speaks “about estimations.”

Automatic membership remained a problem raised time and again by the socialists because although the party became the prominent labor party, the liberals were still in control of a number of unions. It was obtained in Sweden in 1898 but it provoked such reactions from the liberal trade unions that it was transformed into a simple recommendation in 1900. As the liberal hold on unions lessened over time, the automatic membership question was reintroduced in 1908 but with the possibility for the worker to contract out; only between 2 percent and 3 percent of all union members chose that option.² Much later when the Communist Party took control of the Stockholm metal industry union from 1945 to 1949, the automatic membership was cancelled.

In Norway, the liberals were more involved in unions than in Sweden and the majority of unions were liberal. When the confederation of trade unions was created on March 30, 1899, the question of joint membership with the choice of contracting in or out was raised but not resolved but was continued within the socialist unions. In 1984, automatic membership of the union and the Social Democratic Party had to be made upon the express demand of the union member. The end of the collective membership was decided at the congress of the Social Democratic Party in 1987 and put in place in 1990. At present, trade union municipal branches can join the local organizations of the Social Democratic Party but individual trade union members have to request them to become party members.

Even though socialist leadership of the leading unions was easily admitted at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not the same for the closed shop system. In 1898, the vice president of the Danish confederation of unions was a socialist. The same year, Sweden had two socialists at the head of their union confederation and so did Norway a year later. This was made possible by putting aside the liberal leadership of unions. In Norway and in Sweden, a committee of union and Social Democratic Party members was put in place to work out mutual problems. This type of committee became the norm at local level in Norway and in Sweden but much less in Denmark.³ In 1909, the Social Democratic Party opened a school for workers in Oslo that was financed by unions.

Collective affiliation still exists in a number of unions b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I   The Countries with a Dominant Party: The Scandinavian Countries and Italy
• Part II   A Quasi Two-Party System
• Part III   Fragmented Multiparty System
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index