Putting Party First? Constituency Service in Denmark

Abstract

The electoral system chosen by Danish parties and politicians appears to create strong incentives for parliamentarians to undertake activities that can be labelled constituency service. In offering parties the option of running open lists—which most do—the MPs are encouraged to cultivate a personal vote to get elected. High party unity, moreover, might also be thought to be conducive towards a strong constituency focus, in that MPs will feel less party-constrained on their ‘home patch’. This article explores whether this is the case, using both survey data and interviews with MPs. Danish legislators do not neglect their constituency, promoting and protecting its interests in a variety of ways. Yet, in light of the voting system incentives, it is surprising perhaps that they do not do more in the way of constituency service. There is some care but little surgery. It seems ‘party service’ and the attendant career gains take precedence over constituency service although the equation varies from one MP to the next.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Asbjørn Skjæveland http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5284-2566

Flemming Juul Christiansen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3257-9323

Notes

1 We thank the two editors, David Arter and Tapio Raunio, our two reviewers, our sections in Aarhus and Roskilde, and the other contributors to this special issue for their comments and inspiration.

2 There are two other ways to pass the electoral threshold, but these are of little importance. See Elklit (2016) for further details.

3 Except for Bornholm with 2, there are between 6 (Northern Zealand) and 13 (Southern Jutland) nomination districts for each multi-member district.

4 The share was only slightly higher in Mid- and Northern Jutland (50.8) than in Copenhagen (48.8) in 2015. There is more difference between the parties where the personal vote is highest for the four old parties: Liberals (62.5); Conservatives (61.5); Social Democrats (56.6), and Social Liberals (52.3) and lowest for the newer parties: The Alternative (33.2), Liberal Alliance (38.4), Red-Green Alliance (39.4), and the Danish People’s Party (40.1) (www.dst.dk).

5 The electoral law also allows parties to let party votes in each nomination district go to its nominated candidate, but as of 2015, no party uses this possibility (without also using the party list system). We may speculate that this could have motivated more constituency focus on the nomination district rather than the entire multi-member district.

6 In rare cases, the total number of personal votes in the multi-member district does not completely determine which candidates are elected. This is due not to the list order but to the fact that the nomination district has been the basic counting unit (cf. Elklit 2011). This might have led MPs to spread their efforts more evenly in the entire multi-member district.

7 The election system was modified in 2017. Now parties can decide to let personal votes in the multi-member district completely decide which candidates are elected. Also, parties running on open lists can choose to decide the order of candidates in each nomination district.

8 Folketinget 2011: 9 and Elklit 2016: 47–48 describe how to calculate this number.

9 Bille (1997) systematically collected data on the nomination rules in eight of the parties that were represented in parliament at the time. Three of the parties are no longer represented, and there are four new parties. Furthermore, the electoral reform of 2006 replaced counties as the level of multi-member constituencies, which also affected local party structure and its nomination rules. For the Danish People’s Party, there is a ‘screening’ of candidates by a national sub-committee that could deselect prospective candidates but the selection between those who pass this procedure takes place locally.

10 In principle, a candidate could run in one nomination district only.

11 The average Rice index was 99.7 if no corrections are made for reported voting errors (Skjæveland 2011).

12 In 1990–1996, the main exception to the general picture of extremely high party unity was not local matters but ethics, where one or more MPs quite frequently deviated from the rest of the party group (Skjæveland 2001).

13 We thank Peter Munk Christiansen for giving us access to the data set collected by him and his collaborators. The values have not been used in other studies yet, but see a description of a former data set in Christiansen and Nørgaard (2003: 238f).

14 As shown in Figure 1, the most frequent answer was to represent personal opinions (78%). We agree with Esaiasson (2000: 57) that ‘Burkean representation’, i.e., MPs trust their own judgement or personal opinions, has more to do with representational ‘style’ than ‘focus’ since they then ‘represent themselves’.

15 Problems from private citizens can come from both inside and outside the constituencies. Our interviews indicate that they mostly come from the constituency unless they concern those topics where the MPs are spokespersons.

16 We interviewed Henning Hyllested (Red-Green Alliance); Jan Johansen (Social Democrats); Morten Marinus (Danish People’s Party); Finn Sørensen (Red-Green Alliance); Villum Christensen (Liberal Alliance); Peter Juel Jensen (Liberal Party); Andreas Steenberg (Social Liberal Party); Benny Engelbrecht (Social Democrats); Anonymous (Danish People’s Party); Henrik Dahl (Liberal Alliance); and Lise Bech (Danish People’s Party). We contacted 22 MPs and five of them were women. In the process of finding a female interviewee, we were made aware that a male MP might be interested in giving an interview. His inclusion compensated for the fact that our interview with the other MP from his party was our shortest at only 22 minutes while the longest interviews were over an hour. The Liberal Party was in government during all interviews. A government enlargement with The Conservatives and the Liberal Alliance took place while we did the interviews and a few days before one with Henrik Dahl. We did not contact MPs from the Faroe Islands or Greenland. Our interview guide is available on request. All interviews were transcribed and analysed in NVivo 11.

17 We mostly report descriptive variation. With 11 interviews, we cannot conduct statistical control for other explanations. Yet, we have attempted to select our cases to allow for comparisons to evaluate possible explanations.

18 It should be noted that there is variation: some respondents do more constituency service than others.

19 When measuring and reporting variation in levels of constituency service, we rely on the four dimensions of constituency service. When asked about the time they spend in their district, the respondents generally note that it is hard to estimate. Hence, we think that the four dimensions of ‘how’ provide a more reliable estimate of the level of constituency service performed.

20 This pattern is upheld when we take variation on other variables into account: We make an additional comparison that only includes MPs who are male, elected outside Copenhagen, backbenchers and living in the district. District size does not seem to impact either, except for Bornholm, as described in the text.

21 This pattern is upheld in comparisons that eliminate other factors.

22 The number of votes for an elected MP includes personal votes and the added list votes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Asbjørn Skjæveland

Asbjørn Skjæveland (1971) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests include party unity, party behaviour, and government formation. He has published (with co-authors or alone) in journals including European Journal of Political Research, Legislative Studies, Party Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, and Local Government Studies. E-mail: [email protected]

Flemming Juul Christiansen

Flemming Juul Christiansen (1975) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. He has primarily worked with political parties and parliaments. With co-authors or alone, he has published in journals including American Journal of Political Science, European Journal of Political Research, Party Politics, Scandinavian Political Studies, and West European Politics. E-mail: [email protected]