Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia: Farewell to the Enduring Party System?

Transcription

1 Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access published November 29, 2011 Parliamentary Affairs (2011) 1 23 doi: /pa/gsr050 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia: Farewell to the Enduring Party System? David Arter * University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland * Correspondence: david.arter@uta.fi This article analyses the performance of the political parties in each of the 103 general elections staged in the five Nordic states between 1944 and It follows the work of Jan Sundberg by initially focusing on the three pole parties that emerged from the struggle between labour and capital (Social Democrats versus Conservatives) on the one hand and between rural and urban economies (Agrarians versus Conservatives) on the other and considers the continuing validity of his conclusion that there has been a remarkable stability among the three pole parties. This leads Sundberg to characterise Scandinavia as an enduring party system. Whilst the evidence continues to point to significant core persistence, there have been a number of big bang elections and a striking rise in support for parties in the Others category (presently over two-fifths of the active electorate in Norway and Finland and over three-fifths in Iceland). The central question therefore is: What does the significant growth in this category indicate about the nature of electoral party system change in Scandinavia? The argument advanced is that significant core persistence (based on the pole-party vote share) should not conceal significant support for new parties, support which has vested the party systems on mainland Scandinavia with increased polarisation and an added dimensionality. When on the election night of 17 April 2011 the True Finn Party leader Timo Soini, addressing the celebrating party faithful, spoke colourfully of the iso jytky or big bang his party had delivered to the old establishment parties, his rhetoric might have been assigned simply to the euphoria of the moment had not the True Finns advanced by an unprecedented 15 percentage points compared with four years earlier and had not the party s success reflected the way both in Finland and across Scandinavia traditionally dominant parties have appeared # The Author [2011]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society; all rights reserved. For permissions, please journals.permissions@oup.com

2 Page 2 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs in trouble. Indeed, the only party to gain votes and seats in April 2011 was the True Finns, formed in 1995, Arter (2010) and whilst the Conservatives became the largest party for the first time since Finnish independence in 1917, they did so with the lowest percentage of any largest party in a post-war West European election. Arter (2011) Finland, however, is only one in a series of big bang elections in Scandinavia recently (the terms Nordic and Scandinavian are used interchangeably in this article). In Iceland in April 2009, the Independence Party, the largest party in each of the 19 Alþingi elections between the achievement of independence in 1944 and 2007, suffered the worst result in its history its vote fell by nearly 19 percentage points and it stumbled in second behind the Social Democratic Alliance (Samfylkingin), a fusion of left-wing groups created in 1999 expressly to challenge the Independence Party s electoral and governmental dominance. 1 Moreover, a Civic Movement (Borgarahreyfingin), with strong roots in the pots and pans revolution, Hardarson and Kristinsson (2010) fuelled by the banking crisis of late autumn 2008, polled 7.2 per cent, much of it at the expense of the Independence Party. In Denmark the Social Democratic Party, the largest party in each of the 22 Folketing elections between 1945 and 1998, has slipped into second place behind the [Agrarian] Liberals (Venstre) in each of the four general elections in the new millennium and in September 2011 polled under one-quarter of the electorate. Even in the social democratic heartlands of Norway and Sweden, where social democratic-labour parties have been the largest party in every post-war election, their dominance appears under threat. At the 2010 Riksdag election, the Swedish Social Democrats polled only fractionally over 30 per cent of the vote their lowest poll since the 1920s and only 0.6 per cent ahead of the second-placed Conservatives whilst the radical rightist Sweden Democrats cleared the 4 per cent barrier and entered the Riksdag for the first time. Electorally, the strongest social democratic party in Scandinavia is currently the Norwegian Labour Party, although in 2001 it dipped under one-quarter of the vote. But do these setbacks to previously dominant electoral parties and more generally the historic parties that established themselves at the time of the completion of mass democracy soon after the First World War represent merely temporary fluctuations or does the evidence suggest longer-term changes in the electoral party system in Scandinavia? This article evaluates the performance of the political parties at each of the 103 general elections held in the five Nordic states between 1944 and September It follows Jan Sundberg s approach, Sundberg (1999) initially focusing on the three pole parties (which Stein Rokkan originally identified) spawned by the 1 The Social Democratic Alliance was a fusion of four left-wing parties: the Social Democrats, People s Alliance, Women s Alliance and National Movement. The parties formally merged in May 2000.

3 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 3 of 23 struggle between labour and capital (Social Democrats versus Conservatives) on the one hand and between rural and urban economies (Agrarians versus Conservatives) on the other and considers the continuing validity of Sundberg s conclusion that there has been a remarkable stability among the three pole parties. This prompted him to label Scandinavia an enduring party system. Whilst the evidence continues to point to significant core persistence a decade and a half after Sundberg s article in Scandinavian Political Studies there has also been a striking rise in support for parties in the others category (which presently comprises over two-fifths of the active electorate in Norway and Finland and over three-fifths in Iceland). The central question, therefore, is: What, if anything, does the significant growth in the others category indicate about the nature of electoral party system change in Scandinavia? The study is in four parts. The first section sketches the main features of the Scandinavian party system model Berglund and Lindstrom (1978) as it emerged by the end of the 1920s and describes the impact of the earthquake elections of and the subsequent rise of post-materialist or new politics parties. The second section discusses the data and methods and critically reviews Sundberg s approach of dividing the party system into three categories: pole parties, liberals and communists, and others. Section three addresses the question of core persistence and presents the main findings of the electoral analysis on a brief country-by-country basis. Finally, there is a discussion of the implications of the growth in the vote share of the others and the contribution to it of four new party families. 1. The Scandinavian party system model As it emerged subsequent to the achievement of universal suffrage and the introduction of PR list electoral systems by the early 1920s, the Scandinavian party system model involved a fundamental two-plus-three configuration underscored by five basic -isms : communism, democratic socialism, agrarianism, liberalism and conservatism. Re-stated, there was a bifurcated parliamentary left a powerful Social Democratic Party flanked by a smaller but stable radical left and a fragmented non-socialist camp comprising essentially town-based Liberal and Conservative parties and a farm-based Agrarian Party. The characteristic feature was the left right unidimensionality (Bergström, 1991; Arter, 2008) Sweden best illustrates the five-party model. In 1932, in the depths of the economic recession, the Left polled a combined 50 per cent of the poll (Social Democrats, 41.7; Communists, 8.3) and the non-socialists a combined 49.3 per cent (Conservatives, 23.5; Liberals, 11.7; Agrarians, 14.1). 53 years later, the same five parties accounted for 98.0 per cent of the total vote (Left 51.2, non-socialists 46.8). It was not until 1988, and the breakthrough of the Greens, that a new party

4 Page 4 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs negotiated the 4 per cent electoral threshold and entered the Riksdag, although the Agrarians became Centre Party with a capital C in 1957 (its Norwegian and Finnish sister parties followed suit in 1959 and 1965, respectively), the Communists renamed themselves Left-Party Communists in 1967 whilst two years later the Right (Höger) became the Moderate Unity Party (Conservatives). 2 The Danish party system also comprised a two-plus-three formation but differed from the Swedish in so far as division on a defence issue generated two liberal parties. Put another way, the nineteenth-century non-socialist Left split in 1905 into an essentially agrarian Liberal Party (Venstre) and a Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre). Minor deviations from the Nordic party system model in Finland and Norway involved a fourth non-socialist party and a two-plus-four structure. In bilingual Finland the Swedish People s Party, the organ of the national language minority, has been represented in parliament continuously since the first election to the unicameral Eduskunta in In Norway the Christian People s Party was founded in Hordaland in the south-west in 1933 but broke through at the national level in 1945 and has boasted representation in the Storting ever since. The greatest variance from the five-party model has been in Iceland where the basic formula has been two-plus-two two non-socialist parties, the Independence Party (formed from a merger of liberalism and conservatism in 1929) and the farm-based Progressive Party and two left-wing parties, the United Socialist Party (from 1956 the People s Alliance) and Social Democrats. Unlike the Nordic mainland, moreover, the dominant party has not been the Social Democrats but (until 2009) the Independence Party (Table 1). Scandinavia witnessed four decades of relative electoral and party system stability between the late 1920s and the late 1960s. Elections exhibited generally low levels of voter volatility that is, the net change within the electoral party system resulting from individual vote transfers (Pedersen, 1985) was low and what vote switching there was tended to occur within the non-socialist bloc of parties, particularly between Liberals and Conservatives. There were, of course, a few new parties. In Denmark, for example, the Communist leader, Aksel Larsen, no longer willing to kow-tow to democratic centralism and edicts from Moscow, was dismissed and proceeded to form the Socialist People s Party, which contested its first general election in In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Finnish Social Democrats split and two social democratic parties competed at the polls. However, the Scandinavian experience scarcely contradicted Rose and Urwin s (1970) assertion that the electoral strength of most parties in Western nations since the war has changed very little from election to election, from decade to decade... Things, however, were about to change and between 2 Strictly speaking the Swedish Christian Democrats gained a Riksdag seat in 1985, albeit in an electoral alliance with the Centre Party in the Jönköping constituency.

5 Table 1 The historic five-party Scandinavian party system model and deviations to it (1945) Party type Communists Social Democrats Liberals Agrarians Conservatives Sweden Communist Party Social Democrats People s Party Agrarian Party Right (Höger) Denmark Communist Party Social Democrats Social Liberals (Radikale Agrarian Liberals Conservatives Venstre) (Venstre) Finland SKDL Social Democrats Finnish People s Party Agrarian Party Swedish People s Party National Coalition Party Norway Communist Party Labour Party Liberals (Venstre) Agrarian Party Christian People s Party Right (Høyre) Iceland United Socialist Party Social Democrats Progressive Party Independence Party Note: The United Socialist Party in Iceland (a merger of Communists and left-wing Socialists) became the People s Alliance in 1956 whilst in 1969 hardliners on the left split and formed the Union of Liberals and Leftists. The Finnish People s Party became the Liberal People s Party in The Swedish Communist Party renamed itself Left-Party Communists in The Swedish Right (Höger) became the Moderate Unity Party in The Agrarian Liberals (Venstre) added the suffix Denmark s Liberal Party in Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 5 of 23 Downloaded from at Serials Record on March 5, 2016

6 Page 6 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs 1970 and 1973 the Scandinavian party system model was shaken by a series of earthquake elections. In the first-mentioned year, the populist anti-establishment Finnish Rural Party, created by Veikko Vennamo, broke the mould with 10.5 per cent of the active electorate and it remained in the Eduskunta until its bankruptcy and dissolution in also saw the parliamentary début of the Finnish Christian League which climbed into the Eduskunta on the back of an electoral alliance with the Centre Party. Symptomatically, the Pedersen index of electoral volatility rose from 7.7 to 13.3 per cent in Finland between 1966 and At the 1971 Icelandic general election, all four established parties lost ground, the Union of Liberals and Leftists, a hardline splinter from the People s Alliance founded by Hannibal Valdimarsson, won 8.9 per cent and gained five of the 60 Alþingi seats and the index of electoral volatility rose from 4.0 per cent in 1967 to 9.8 per cent in In Denmark the same index rose from 7.2 per cent in 1971 to 25.8 per cent in 1973 when Mogens Glistrup s anti-tax Progress Party caused a sensation by coming from nowhere to poll almost one-sixth of the vote. The electoral tremors were only slightly less strong in Norway the volatility index rose from 3.4 per cent in 1969 to 22.3 per cent in 1973 and whilst the anti-tax Anders Lange Party did not survive its founder s death in 1974 it was soon replaced by a Norwegian Progress Party, modelled on its Danish counterpart and led (until 2006) by the charismatic Carl I. Hagen. Curiously, in Sweden, these seismic events were conspicuous by their absence. Sweden s earthquake election occurred belatedly in 1991 when there was a breakthrough for the Christian Democrats and short-lived parliamentary representation for the protest party New Democracy. Since the 1970s and 1980s post-materialist or new politics parties parties not based on traditional class cleavage lines (Knutsen, 1990; Inglehart, 2008) have emerged across the region and are discussed in a later section of this article (Aylott, 2011; Heidar, 2004). Parties have also come and gone. The moribund Finnish Rural Party was succeeded by the True Finns in 1995; Glistrup s Progress Party was outflanked in the late 1990s and ultimately supplanted on the radical right by the Danish People s Party. Indeed, as the cases inter alia of the Women s List and Citizens Party in Iceland, the Young Finns, the Norwegian Coastal Party and the New Alliance in Denmark illustrate, there has been a relatively high mortality rate among post-1970 parties. So can we still speak à la Sundberg of an enduring party system in Scandinavia? Does there remain substantial core persistence or has the five-party Nordic party system model changed beyond recognition? 2. Data and methods To investigate these questions this paper analyses the performance of the political parties at each of the 103 general elections staged in the five Nordic states between

7 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 7 of and September It follows Sundberg in concentrating on the three pole parties that emerged at the initial party-building phase from the conflict between labour and capital on the one hand and between rural and urban economies on the other. The party system is divided into three quantifiable components: (1) the combined vote share of the three pole parties, Social Democrats, Agrarian-Centre and Conservatives; (2) the combined vote share of the two remaining parties in the basic five-party model, the Liberals and Communists and (3) the combined vote share of the others. Writing in the mid-1990s, Sundberg (1999, p. 230) acknowledged an increase in the number of parties and that it was not possible to locate all parties on a simple left right continuum. None the less, he pointed to a remarkable stability among the three pole parties in all four countries and their long-term success from one election to another. He concluded that although the Scandinavian five-party model had vanished, the three original pole parties of the societal cleavage structure, originally emphasised by Lipset and Rokkan (1970) remained alive and well (Sundberg, 1999, p. 230). Sundberg s inference that the Communists and Liberals were not cleavagebased parties seems empirically questionable. In Finland the Communist Party, re-legalised after the Second World War and forming the dominant actor in the front organisation the Finnish People s Democratic League (SKDL), drew a higher proportion of the working class in its support than the Social Democrats. In other words, the high social cohesion of the Communist electorate clearly made it part of the left pole. The same could equally be said of the other Scandinavian communist parties, although they were significantly smaller than the Finnish party. The Liberals are admittedly a more problematical case, but it could be argued that the Liberal split in Denmark in 1905 did not follow narrow urban (Social Liberal) rural (Agrarian Liberal) lines. Rather, the rural pole had dual occupancy and the Social Liberals attracted substantial smallfarmer support. It needs emphasis too that Sundberg s approach consigns several historic parties founder members of the party system model to the others category. The Swedish People s Party (since 2010 Finland s Swedish People s Party ) emerged at a time of cameral reform and the introduction of universal suffrage in 1906 to represent the entire Swedish-speaking language minority farmers, fishermen, factory workers, urban professionals and industrialists and was distinctively cross-class in character from the outset. Nonetheless, it managed a double-figure poll in the early elections and, whilst currently running at about half its initial electoral strength (as the size of the Swedish-speaking population has declined), the Swedish People s Party has been an extremely resilient feature of the Finnish party system. In contrast, the Norwegian Christian People s Party was not strictly speaking a product of the initial party-building phase. Instead, it constituted one of a number of post-second World War

8 Page 8 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Christian Democratic parties, most notably those in Italy and [West] Germany. It was, however, a traditional centre-right party which, emerging at the regional level in the early 1930s, served as a model for other Nordic christian parties and has been represented in the Storting continuously since its national breakthrough in In sum, the Others category does not simply comprise post-1970 parties, and it also includes well-established splinter parties such as the Socialist People s Party (considered later), which ultimately displaced the Communists and established itself as a stable and at times a numerically significant element on the radical left of the Danish party system. The case for pole party persistence does not imply the absence of party change. It is implicit in Sundberg s argument that the pole parties have displayed real adaptive capacity; they have changed to survive. Put another way, they have responded to the dictates of a rapidly changing social structure. Thus, the proportion of the economically active population engaged in primary production has fallen dramatically; the number of traditional industrial jobs has declined at the hands of computerisation and robotisation, whilst strategic firms have relocated abroad to cheaper-labour-cost countries. Although a paucity of the high skill levels needed in the export-oriented electro-technical goods sector, in particular, have contributed to structural unemployment especially affecting middle-aged workers made redundant as a result of recession or the relocation of production the expansion of public health care and the service sector have facilitated the feminisation of labour and the growth of a so-called new middle class. Even such an oversimplified picture as this should suffice to emphasise the familiar point that the old class contours that provided the basis for pole-party dominance have become increasingly blurred. But whilst the pole parties have been obliged to adapt to survive, adaptation in itself is no guarantee of electoral stability. 3. Core persistence? 3.1. The pole parties Table 2 presents the pole-party vote share (PPVS) in Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish general elections since the Second World War broken down by decades. In Denmark there was a very sharp drop in the PPVS in the 1970s, levelling out in the 1980s, increasing in the 1990s only to fall sharply again in the new millennium. Over the entire post-war period, however, 7:10 Danes have supported the pole parties. The PPVS in Finland has displayed remarkable stability and, despite the unprecedented gains for the True Finns (with which we started this article) in April 2011, the PPVS in the three Eduskunta elections since 2000 has marginally exceeded the post-war average. Since the Second World

9 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 9 of 23 Table 2 The pole party vote share in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, (%) Denmark Finland Norway Sweden (79.2) (63.6) (72.1) (73.5) (78.3) (59.9) (73.3) (76.9) (59.2) (60.6) (67.0) (80.9) (61.8) (65.6) (71.3) (77.9) (70.3) (66.2) (63.9) (69.3) (63.3) (63.3) (54.4) (66.0) Average: 69.1 Average: 63.1 Average: 67.5 Average: 74.4 War, however, under 2:3 Finns have backed the pole parties, the lowest proportion of the Nordic four. In Norway the PPVS dipped in the 1970s and 1990s and fell to little over half the electorate in the period Yet whilst fewer voters this century have backed the pole parties than elsewhere in the region, over 2:3 Norwegians have done so over the post-war period as a whole. In Sweden the PPVS has fallen continuously since the 1980s. However, in the three Riksdag elections between 2002 and 2010, 2:3 Swedes have supported the pole parties (the highest in the region) and over the entire post-war period the figure has been 3:4. In sum, in Sweden, as in the other three mainland Nordic countries, there is a case for both core persistence and electoral party system change. Space precludes a detailed analysis of changes in the pole-party electorate, but a number of brief observations are in order. 3 Pole-party support in Denmark has reflected three prominent factors. (1) The relative strength, albeit fluctuating fortunes of social democracy. Whilst the largest single party in each of the 22 general elections between 1945 and 1998 (see Table 3), Danish social democracy has not commanded the level of support of its Swedish and Norwegian sister parties, averaging just over one-third of the vote over the entire post-war period. Its best years were in the 1950s and 1960s and in 1960 it gained a post-1945 record of 42.1 per cent. This plummeted to barely one-quarter of the vote in 1973, picked up in the 1990s but the Danish Social Democrats have not been the largest party in any of the last four Folketing elections and in September 2011 recorded their lowest post-war poll of 24.9 per cent. (2) The remarkable adaptive capacity of the Agrarian Liberals (Venstre). Venstre was initially a party of middle-sized commercial farmers with particular electoral strength on the island of Jutland; its vote never fell below one-fifth of the active electorate 3 Despite the extensive literature on voting and parties in Scandinavia, studies focusing expressly on the pole parties are relatively few. The more recent would include Lindström (2005); Widfeldt (2005); Allern et al. (2007); Lindbom (2008); Arter (2009, 2000); Dahle and Larsson (2010).

10 Page 10 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Table 3 Post-war election results in Denmark SD Venstre Cons PP total DKP RV Total Others April September Change Mean SD, Social Democracy; Venstre, Agrarian Liberals; Cons, Conservative People s Party; DKP, Danish Communist Party; RV, Radikale Venstre (Social Liberals). until 1966 and it averaged 21.6 per cent in the period before the 1973 earthquake election. Thereafter it appeared in slow, terminal decline until, faced by a growing Conservative People s Party in the 1980s, it adopted the suffix Denmark s Liberal Party and began to pursue neo-liberal policies directed at the urban middle class. Venstre (literally Left ) occupied a position to the right of the Conservatives. The recovery began in the 1990s, culminating in a gain of over 7 percentage points at the 2001 general election which made Venstre the largest single party. Subsequently, it has become the only non-socialist party on mainland Scandinavia to emerge as the largest party in four consecutive general elections ( ). (3) The generally modest performance of the Conservatives which have been the junior of the two non-socialist parties, averaging nearly 5 percentage points less over the post-war period than Venstre. As in Norway there was

11 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 11 of 23 Table 4 Post-war election results in Finland SDP KESK KOK PP total SKDL LKP Total Others Change Mean SDP, Social Democratic Party; KESK, Agrarian-Centre Party; KOK, National Coalition (Conservative) Party; LKP, Liberal People s Party. something of a Right wave in Denmark in the 1980s and the Conservatives recorded their best post-war result of 23.4 per cent in Their post-war average, however, has been 14.5 per cent and in September 2011 they fared 10 percentage points worse than that, polling a dismal 4.9 per cent. The Finnish pole-party electorate has also exhibited three main characteristics. (1) The relative strength and notable stability of social democracy. Although attracting a significantly smaller poll than its Danish, Norwegian and Swedish sister parties, the Finnish Social Democrats, despite the challenge of a substantial radical left (SKDL) and divisions in its own ranks in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was the largest party in all but two post-war elections between 1945 and 1998 (Table 4). (2) The durability and size of the Agrarian-Centre which at the 1991, 2003 and 2007 general elections emerged as the largest party. (3) The increased electoral appeal of the National Coalition (Conservative) Party which has not experienced the fluctuating fortunes of its Danish sister party in particular. Strikingly, support for the Finnish Conservatives has risen significantly over the post-war period. It was the largest non-socialist party over the six general elections between 1970 and 1987 and in 2011 the Conservatives became the

12 Page 12 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Table 5 Post-war election results in Norway Labour Sp Høyre PP total NKP Venstre Total Others Change Mean Sp, Agrarian-Centre Party; Høyre, Right (Conservatives); NKP, Norwegian Communist Party; Venstre, Liberals. largest party for the first time in their history albeit, ironically, with a vote share (20.4 per cent) they have exceeded on no less than five previous occasions since the late 1970s. Exceptionally, at the 2011 Eduskunta election all three pole parties lost ground. The Social Democrats have not been the largest party in any of the last three general elections and recorded their lowest ever poll of 19.1 per cent in At the same election, the Centre plunged to 15.8 per cent, its lowest level since before Finnish independence in The salient factors in understanding the changing PPVS in Norway have been (1) the decline in the previously dominant Labour Party. As in Sweden Labour has been the largest party in Norway throughout the post-war period and in its heyday during the first two decades after the Second World War it attracted as large a vote as its more celebrated Swedish counterpart (Table 5). However, it declined from being a 45 per cent party before the 1973 earthquake election to become a 35 per cent party thereafter. Labour has not surpassed its average post-war vote share of 39.5 per cent since 1985 and in 2001 it sank below onequarter of the active electorate. It is a measure of the travails of social democracy in its Nordic heartlands that Norwegian Labour is currently the strongest of its party type in the region, polling 35.4 per cent at the 2009 Storting election. (2) The PPVS has reflected the fact that in Norway one of the pole parties has

13 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 13 of 23 been a small party. The Norwegian Agrarian-Centre s support has been comfortably the smallest of this party genus in the region and only at the 1993 general election has it contrived a double-digit poll. Then the Centre chair led the party to a record 16.7 per cent on a No to the EU platform. The Centre, however, proved unable to retain this Eurosceptic surge in support the negative majority at the second EC/EU membership referendum in 1994 took the matter off the political agenda and at the Storting election in 1997 its vote was halved. (3) The relative strength of conservatism which has been comfortably the largest of the non-socialist parties in Norway since the Second World War, averaging the support of 1:5 voters. The beneficiaries of the so-called Right wave (the Conservatives have retained their original designation Right (Høyre) which coincided with the effective collapse of the Liberal vote the Conservatives averaged 29 per cent in the three general elections between 1977 and Since then they have faced a stiff challenge from the radical right. Whilst the evidence of core persistence appears most persuasive in Sweden prima facie a clear case of an enduring party system the declining PPVS in the new millennium has affected the pole parties in different ways. (1) Social democracy has lost significant electoral appeal. The Swedish Social Democrats have been the largest party in every post-war Riksdag election. However, its vote share has fallen markedly, although the decline occurred later and has been less dramatic than in Norway. In the eight elections to the Second Chamber of the bicameral Riksdag between 1944 and 1968, the Social Democrats polled an average of 46.9 per cent of the active electorate and in the last-mentioned year it claimed a narrow absolute majority. The Social Democrats still gained an impressive average of 44 per cent of the vote in the seven general elections between 1970 and 1988; however, this fell to 37.5 per cent between 1991 and 2010 and in this last year it plunged to 30.7 per cent, its worst performance on record. (2) The decline of the Agrarian-Centre vote has been more precipitous than that of the Social Democrats. The Swedish Agrarian Party was the first of the Nordic farmers parties to change its name in 1957 and in the 1970s this catchall strategy appeared an undoubted success. In 1973 the Swedish Centre gained over onequarter of the vote. These electoral advances were tied in no small measure to a single issue a commitment to wind down nuclear power and when, leading a series of non-socialist coalitions in , the Centre failed to deliver on this, it support began to crumble. As in the Social Democrats case, however, the 1991 general election marked the start of a period of accentuated decline. (3) As in Finland support for the Moderate Unity Party (Conservatives) has witnessed an upward trajectory when viewed across the whole post-war period. The Conservatives have been the largest non-socialist party at every Swedish general election since 1979 and they have exceeded one-fifth of the poll in all but two of the ten general elections since then. At the 2010 Riksdag

14 Page 14 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Table 6 Post-war election results in Sweden SAP Sp M PP total SKP Fp Total Others Change Mean SAP, Social Democratic Party; Sp, Agrarian-Centre; M, Moderate Unity Party (Conservatives); SKP, Swedish Communist Party; Fp, Liberals. election, the Swedish Conservatives came within a whisker (0.6 percentage points) of emulating their Finnish sister party and becoming the largest party. In short, whilst the pole parties based on labour and the farmers have declined at the polls particularly over the last two decades the pole party drawing predominantly on the urban bourgeoisie has expanded its electorate. Assessing the extent of core persistence on the basis of the PPVS is problematic in the Icelandic case since the party system has deviated significantly from the Scandinavian party system model in its structure, namely the absence of three pole parties (Table 7). As noted earlier, the formula has been 2 + 2, that is two non-socialist parties (the Independence Party and Progressive Party) and two left-wing parties (until 1999 the Social Democrats and United Socialist Party/People s Alliance and thereafter the Social Democratic Alliance and Left-Greens). The Progressive Party emerged as a class-based farmers party in all but name and the Social Democrats represented labour but the electorally dominant Independence Party has not been cleavage-based. Rather, it derived its historic identity from

15 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 15 of 23 Table 7 Post-war general elections in Iceland PA SD Progs IP Others Turnout June October PA, People s Alliance; SD, Social Democrats; Progs, Progressive Party; IP, Independence Party. championing the cause of national sovereignty and, accordingly, its support has been cross-class in character. Really only in Iceland, among the Scandinavian states, has it been possible to speak of working class conservatism in that the Independence Party succeeded in appealing to farmers, fishermen, workers in the fish-processing factories as well as middle class professionals. Consequently, whilst the Independence Party has at times been weakened by factionalisation and fragmentation a breakaway Citizens Party reduced it to 27.2 per cent in 1987 the party has been electorally dominant in all but the 2009 election. The realignment on the political left prior to the 1999 Alþingi election was primarily designed to challenge that dominance. Though not possible meaningfully to apply Sundberg s counting method to Iceland, the post-war election results are set out in Table 7 for reference purposes, with the poll for the Social Democratic Alliance and Left-Greens between 1999 and 2009 included in the others Liberals and communists We have noted that nothwithstanding the common denominator of a decline in the PPVS across the Nordic mainland in the first decade of the present century, an average of well over 3:5 Danes, Finns and Norwegians and nearly 3:4 Swedes

16 Page 16 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Table 8 The liberal communist vote share in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, (%) Denmark Finland Norway Sweden (13.9) (27.7) (18.3) (26.3) (9.4) (28.0) (9.9) (20.5) (11.3) (22.4) (2.4) (15.8) (6.5) (12.0) (3.2) (16.4) (4.0) (0.5) (4.1) (14.6) (6.5) (0.1) (4.6) (16.0) Post-war average: 7.2 Post-war average: 16.3 Post-war average: 8.2 Post-war average: 19.1 have backed one of the three pole parties over the period since the Second World War. The evidence in short points to significant core persistence. In contrast, the Liberals and Communists have witnessed a sharp fall in their vote both severally and collectively despite periods when they have boasted short-lived increases in support. Over the entire post-war period the average support for the Liberals and Communists has been 7.2 per cent in Denmark, 8.2 per cent in Norway, 16.3 per cent in Finland and 19.1 per cent in Sweden. Table 8 sets out the average post-war poll for the Liberals and Communists in the four mainland Scandinavian states broken down into decades. It can be seen that since the 1980s the combined Liberal-Communist vote in Denmark has not exceeded half its total in the 1950s. In Norway the Liberal-Communist total slumped in the 1970s and in the three Storting elections in the new millennium has averaged only one-quarter of its level in the late 1940s and 1950s. In Finland the combined Liberal Communist vote ranged from over one-quarter to over one-fifth until the late 1970s and collapsed in the 1990s, although it is important to note that the neo-stalinist Democratic Alternative s poll and, after 1991, that of the post-communist Left Alliance are included in the others category. Finally in Sweden, as in Finland, the Liberal Communist vote averaged over one-quarter of the electorate in the 1950s, just over one-fifth in the 1960s and has held steady at per cent thereafter (the inclusion of the Left Party is considered shortly) Others Viewed over the entire post-war period, Sweden has clearly been a deviant case in terms of support for parties in the others category. An average of only 6.5 per cent of the Swedish electorate has supported others parties since the Second World War compared with just over one-fifth in Denmark and Finland and almost one-quarter in Norway. Overall across the Nordic mainland, the trend

17 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 17 of 23 Table 9 The vote share for other parties in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, (%) Denmark Finland Norway Sweden (6.8) (8.7) (9.6) (0.2) (12.3) (12.2) (16.8) (2.6) (29.4) (16.5) (30.8) (2.1) (31.9) (22.1) (25.4) (3.2) (25.6) (33.3) (31.9) (16.2) (29.5) (36.6) (40.8) (18.1) Post-war average: 21.5 Post-war average: 20.4 Post-war average: 24.3 Post-war average: 6.5 has been for an increase in support for others. In Finland there has been a continuous growth in support for parties outside the historic party model and the same has been true in Sweden since the 1970s. Whilst the pattern has been more mixed in Denmark and Norway, there was a sharp increase in the others category in the 1970s and no substantial decline thereafter. Over the first decade of the new millennium, the proportion of voters in the others grouping in the four mainland Nordic countries has ranged from under 1:5 in Sweden to over 2:5 in Norway (Table 9). A word on the counting method is in order. First, by applying Sundberg s tripartite categorisation pole parties, Liberals Communists and Others historic parties such as the Swedish People s Party in Finland and the Norwegian Christian People s Party appear in the others column. So, too, do parties that have enjoyed a relatively short-lived legislative existence. Thus, whilst the number of parliamentary parties has grown well over 20 new parties entered the Nordic parliaments for the first time between 1970 and 2011 there has been a relatively high mortality rate among the new parties. The Civic Movement in Iceland represented an extreme case. Internal conflict prompted all four of the parliamentarians elected in April 2009 to abandon the party after only a few months in the Alþingi. One declared himself an Independent and the others formed a new parliamentary group (Hardarson and Kristinsson, 2010, p. 1015). Next, the others include non-parliamentary parties Red (Rødt) for instance in Norway, a merger in 2007 between the Red Electoral Alliance and the maoist-leninist Communist Party, which polled 1.4 per cent in 2009 (Allern, 2010). Finally, what might loosely be called new left parties in the 1960s and 1970s, the Socialist People s Parties in Denmark and Norway (Socialist Left from 1975), the post-communist Left Alliance in Finland, along with another realignment party on the radical left, the Icelandic Left-Greens all of which I shall shortly describe as eco-socialist are counted as new parties in the Others category.

18 Page 18 of 23 Parliamentary Affairs Table 10 Support for the Scandinavian others, (%) Denmark 2011 Finland 2011 Iceland 2009 Norway 2009 Sweden 2010 Danish People s Party (12.3) Socialist People s Party (9.2) Liberal Alliance (2.8) True Finns (19.1) Social Democratic Alliance (29.8) Progress Party (22.9) Greens (7.3) Left Alliance (8.1) Left-Greens (21.7) Socialist Left Sweden Democrats (6.2) (5.7) Greens (7.3) Liberals (2.2) Christian Christian Democrats People s Party (5.6) (5.5) Swedish People s Civic Movement Others (1.5) Others (1.4) Party (4.3) (7.2) Christian Democrats Others (0.6) Red (1.4) (4.0) Red-Green Alliance (6.7) Christian Democrats (0.8) Others (2.0) Total: 34.0 Total: 44.8 Total: 61.5 Total: 37.5 Total: 20.0 The one exception here is the Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) which is best considered a renominated party. Renominated parties adopt a new name, but the existing organisational structure and parliamentary party group simply operate unchanged under the new name. Thus, the Swedish Left-Party Communists simply dropped the appellation Communists from their title at the May 1990 party congress. In contrast, whilst sometimes described as a successor party, the Finnish Left Alliance (Vasemmistoliittto) is best viewed as a fusion party a new party formed by a merger between two independent competitor organisations, the Communist-dominated SKDL and its neo-stalinist splinter, the so-called Democratic Alternative (DEVA). Clearly, if the Swedish Left Party had been regarded as a new party and included among the others, Sweden would appear a less deviant case. In any event, whilst plainly a heterogeneous grouping, support for other parties has equally plainly grown (Table 10) in the most recent general elections ( ) to one-fifth of the active electorate in Sweden, just over one-third in Denmark, nearly two-fifths and over two-fifths in Norway and Finland, respectively, and over three-fifths in Iceland (where the Social Democratic Alliance is now the largest party). What, then, does the growth in the others category indicate about the nature of electoral party system change in Scandinavia? 4. New party families The argument here is that significant core persistence (based on the PPVS) should not disguise significant support for new parties, support which has vested the electoral party systems on mainland Scandinavia with increased polarisation and an added dimensionality. The space on the traditional left right continuum

19 Big Bang Elections and Party System Change in Scandinavia Page 19 of 23 Table 11 The new party families in Scandinavia Eco-socialists Greens Christian Democrats Radical right-wing populists Denmark Socialist People s Party (9.2%, 2011) Finland Left Alliance (8.1%, 2011) Iceland Left-Greens (21.7%, 2009) Norway Socialist Left (6.2%, 2009) Sweden Left Party (5.6%, 2010) Christian Democrats (0.8%, 2011) Greens Christian Democrats (7.3%, (4.0%, 2011) 2011) Danish People s Party (12.3%, 2011) True Finns (19.1%, 2011) Christian People s Party (5.5%, 2009) Progress Party (22.9%, 2009) Greens Christian Democrats Sweden Democrats (7.3%, (5.6%, 2010) (5.7%, 2010) 2010) has been extended by the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties whilst parties with a strong environmental appeal and those with a firm moral compass cannot readily be located on a conventional left right spectrum. Four new party families may be identified and warrant a brief note (Table 11) Eco-socialist parties Until 1975, when the Socialist Left was formed from a merger of those groups to the left of the Labour Party that had successfully opposed Norwegian EEC membership in a referendum in September 1972, there was a Socialist People s Party in both Denmark and Norway. They were formed in 1959 and 1961, respectively. Both parties were anti-nato, anti-eec, anti-military spending and antiimperialist, whether of the American or Soviet variety. Whereas in Norway opposition to EEC membership prompted a re-alignment of the parties to the left of Labour and the creation of the Socialist Left, in Denmark opposition to the EEC attracted a younger generation to the Socialist People s Party (it was the only Folketing party to oppose Danish membership) and this infused the party with red-green values. Indeed, all the eco-socialist parties and in addition to the Danish Socialist People s Party and Norwegian Socialist Left they number the post-communist Left parties in Finland and Sweden and the Icelandic Left- Greens have striven in varying degrees to combine socialism, environmentalism and elements of feminism. Crucial to their ephemeral success and their support has been relatively fluid has been an effective leader and a measure of popular disaffection with the social democratic-labour parties in government. In 2004, the eco-socialist parties founded the Nordic Green Left Alliance.