[EM] Changing the Norwegian election system

[Juho Laatu]

On 4.11.2013, at 18.39, Vidar Wahlberg <canidae at exent.net> wrote:

> I briefly looked into the municipal election system:
> Parties can prioritize some candidates. These candidates will all
> receive 25% of the votes given to the party as "personal votes" (in
> addition to any "personal votes" given by the voters). After that, the
> candidates are ranked by the amount of "personal votes" (in the case of
> tie they are ranked in the order the party supplied the list).
> The amount of candidates a party can prioritize is relative to and
> limited by the size of the city council.

That sounds like in most cases the party preferred candidates would get more “personal votes” than the non-preferred ones. Direct personal votes would determine which ones of the party preferred candidates will not get a seat, or alternatively which non-preferred candidates will get a seat.

> I think the best solution at the current time and this style of
> government is that both the party and the voters have a say in the order
> of the candidates. Giving the prioritized candidates 25% of the party
> votes is too much in my opinion, though.

I wonder what would be a good approach. Would it e.g. be ok if the voters would be allowed to pick directly x% of the representatives, and the rest would be taken from the party list (skipping those that were already elected). There are many options.

>> I mentioned already the possibility of grouping the parties. One can do the same with districts, and actually this also works better. It is for example possible to allocate the seats (biproportionally) so that the nothern half will get exactly as many seats as it had votes for some party. It would not be possible that all seats of a party will go to the southern half, if also the northern voters gave many enough votes to guarantee one seat. Also subdivisions can be used so that there will be a tree of districts. This kind of tree based approach also helps to identify who the intended representative(s) of each voter are.
> 
> This sounds a bit complex, and it's a further enhancement of a
> modification I don't think will be accepted.
> Interesting thought, though.

Some mechanism that would guarantee the northern half a proportional share of the seats would be nice. Voters may however be happy to vote for a minor party X in Finnmark even if all the representatives of that party could be elected from Oslo (and not even from the northern half, even if there were more than "one quota of votes”). Missing this kind of proportionality would thus not be critical. National proportianality is the critical part that eliminates the problem of "lost votes".

> There are split opinions about it in Norway as well.
> Like you I'm a fan of spreading out power and letting the municipals
> handle local matters. The issue in Norway is that a large amount of
> municipals have a very low population. A quick glance on the list* tells
> me about half of them have less than 5,000 inhabitants. This does cause
> some issues as there are cases they won't have the people to handle
> (child services is something that often gets mentioned in this context),
> which leads to such services being handled on a regional/national level,
> which again makes power more centralized.
> But, I digress.

In Finland the government spreads the idea that small municipalities are not viable. If one checks the statistics it however turns out that the most economial municipalities are actually small municipalities. The big ones often waste more money in implementing the basic services. Some municipalities implement their helthcare services together with their neighbors. But also in this situation I like the idea that those municipalities can decide themselves how long they want to be served by the cooperation projects (otherwise they may easily lose all their local services).

In general I believe that power tends to concentrate (just like money does). That means that if the centralized entites are allowed to decide how the system evolves, they will move power to themselves and towards the centre in general. If one wants to keep some appropriate balance between local decision making an centralized decision making, one must actually fight against the (very natural) centralization interests (of all the centralized key figures) all the time. Otherwise all power will soon be in the central entities, and the remote, small and poor places will be governed just as the most remote and uninteresting branches of a very centralized governing structure. (That’s a bit like with democracy. The key idea of democracy is actually to allow the citizens to decide in every election, and thereby not let the power move permanently to the incumbent power structure.)

Juho