Emma Evans
October 16, 2007
Math Applications
Voting in Norway
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Elections in Norway are very different from what we are used to here. Norway
has Parliamentary elections for their 169-member parliament, called Storting, located in
Oslo, Norway. They use a version of the Sainte-Laguë method with open lists, which are
variants of “party-list proportional representation,” meaning that voters are influential on
the order in which a party's candidates are elected. Additionally, an open list system can
permit a voter to vote for a particular party as a whole in lieu of expressing a preference
between individuals who are in the running. However, the same effect occurs when
voting for the most popular candidate or simply the first candidate on the list. The SainteLaguë method is in many ways similar to Webster's method as it uses standard rounding.
It is named after French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë.
The Sainte-Laguë method is a divisor method, often compared to both the d'Hondt
method and the Webster method, but uses a different divisor.
In the election, once all of the votes have been added up, successive quotients are
calculated for each party list.
To calculate the quotient, the formula used is:
Qu ic kTi me™ a nd a
TIFF (Unc om pres se d) de co mp re ss or
are n ee de d to s ee th is pi ctu re .
Here, V represents the total number of votes that a list received, and s equals the
number of seats that party had been allocated at that point. The list with the highest
quotient receives the next seat, and that quotient is recalculated, given the new seat total.
This process is repeated until all of the seats have been allocated. Some countries using
the Sainte-Laguë method, like Norway, Sweden and Denmark, actually replace the first
divisor with 1.4 in order to give a bit of a larger preference to the bigger parties over
parties that would hardly earn a single seat if the Sainte-Laguë method were used
unmodified. By using the modified version of the method, said small parties do not
actually get a seat; rather, the seats are awarded to a larger party. Though this sounds
unfair to smaller parties, the modification does not actually have much effect anyway
because when the seats are actually distributed, every party earns at least one seat. The
Sainte-Laguë method and the Webster method are similar given that they always yield
the same results, but the method for calculating the apportionment is different,
considering that the Webster method was invented for legislative purposes instead of
elections and uses a quota that is adjusted as necessary so that after rounding, the
quotients end up totaling the number of seats.
In the parliamentary elections, Norway is divided into 19 constituencies, which
correspond to the counties and include Oslo, the municipal authority, which is a county of
its own. The number of seats in the Storting, or members thereof, is 169 at present,
recently up from 165. Members of the Storting are allocated to the constituencies
according to the location of the county and the size of its population. Nineteen seats are
allocated as seats at large: one for each county. For all elections, the term to be served is
four years. The King chooses when the Election Day will be; it is typically held on one of
the first two Mondays in September.
The Norwegian Labor Party won the most seats during the Parliamentary election
in 2005. After four years of a non-socialist rule, a “red-green alliance” is taking over,
after winning a dramatic 87 of 169 seats in Parliament, due to the fact that the Norwegian
Labor Party formed a government coalition with both the Socialist Left Party and also the
Center Party (meaning that they formed an alliance). The Labor Party alone received
about one third of all voted cast in advance. The Progress Party was awarded one fifth of
the votes cast in advance, and is now the second largest party represented in the Storting,
as well has having representatives from every county. The Liberals had their best general
election overall since 1969, and got 8 more representatives in the Storting this term. The
Center Party had a slight increase of 0.9% and is now back on the level it was on in the
1980s. The voter turnout for the election was 76.6 percent, up from 75.1 percent in 2001.
The specific election results were as follows:
The Norwegian Labor Party (AP): 32.8 percent
The Progress Party (FRP): 22 percent
The Conservatives (H): 14.1 percent
Socialist Left (SV): 8.8 percent
Christian Democrats (KRF): 6.8 percent
Center Party (SP): 6.5 percent
The Liberals (V): 5.9 percent
Red Electoral Alliance: 1.2 percent
The Coastal Party: 0.8 percent
Others: 1.9 percent
This chart shows the percentage of votes for each party in the 2005 Storting
election.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
From 1898 and onward, Norwegian men were allowed to vote. In 1913,
Norwegian women won the right to vote and stand for election, making Norway one of
the first countries in Europe to give women the right to vote. To be eligible to vote in
Parliamentary elections in Norway, one must be a Norwegian national of at least 18 years
of age by the end of the election year and be registered in the National Population
Register as a resident of Norway. Also, people who are Norwegian public servants
employed in the diplomatic corps or the consular services, as well as members of their
household, are entitled to vote regardless of whether or not they satisfy the criterion of
being a Norwegian resident.
Resources:
http://dodgson.ucsd.edu/lij/lijmatrix/norwaymatrix.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Laguë_method
http://www.barnsdle.demon.co.uk/vote/appor.html
http://www.norway.org/News/archive/2005/election.htm
http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/00/01/10/stortingsvalg_en/