In Denmark, as in about half the member states of the EU, those voting for a particular party can choose among the candidates put forward by their party.
The ballot paper confronting voters looks like this:
Example of Danish ballot paper, 3rd nomination district, Sonderjylland multi-member constituency (7 seats), 2001
|
Source: Michael Gallagher and Paul Mitchell (eds), The Politics of Electoral Systems, paperback edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 459. Chapter 22 of this book - Jorgen Elklit, 'Denmark: simplicity embedded in complexity (or is it the other way round?)' - gives a full account and evaluation of the Danish electoral system: its origins, how it works, its consequences.
Voters place an 'x' beside the name of their favoured candidate within their favoured party. Thus, a supporter of the Social Democrats (party A) whose first choice candidate was Lise von Seelen would place an x beside her name. The seven candidates nominated by the Social Democrats each therefore had an incentive not only to try to maximise the vote for the Social Democrats but also to maximise their own personal support compared with that of their running mates. Candidates of one party are in competition for each other for preference votes. In the event the Social Democrats won 3 seats in the 7-seat constituency, and those seats went to the 3 Social Democrat candidates, across the Sonderjylland constituency, who received the most preference votes; it was the voters, not the party organisation, who decided which individual candidates would fill the party's seats. As in Ireland and many other countries (examples in Europe are Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland), the electoral system provides for both inter-party and inter-party electoral competition. While the details of open-list PR vary slightly from country to country, the principle is the same everywhere: candidates of one party are competing with each other for the support of the voters, and it is the voters who decide which of a party's candidates fill the party's seats in parliament. Thus, MPs know that at the next election they are at risk of losing their seat either to a candidate from another party or to one of their own running mates. 'Multi-seat PR with competition among candidates of the same party' is the norm among the smaller European democracies, not an example of Irish exceptionalism.
Last updated 25 June, 2009 2:50 PM
