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This seems to gloss over the major difference between Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very party-focused. At the end of the day it’s t

This seems to gloss over the major difference between Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very party-focused. At the end of the day it’s the cabals at the top of the major parties that decide who gets to sit in parliament and how they vote. Sometimes it feels like it would be more honest if e.g. Swedish parliament just had 8 members and their voting buttons controlled more / fewer lights on the voting results dashboard. Leads to a very collectivist political culture.

jakobnissen 1y ago
That's up to the voters, ultimately. You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Or MPs who promise not to always tow the party line? I suppose if people choose to vote based on parties, of course you get party focused politics.
- bjornsing 1y ago
  No you can’t really vote for an independent MP in the Swedish voting system. They would have to register a party, it’s very hard to win a seat, and there is no guarantee that they will not win two or more seats – thus perpetuating the collectivism.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd parties in the US have though, right? Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller. If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      It might be hard to convince people to vote for a party made up of random people who might have very contradictory views.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      You're describing direct democracy parties and they exist in other places in non-trolly way. For example the Australian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy
    - bjornsing 1y ago
      > Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? There are thresholds to avoid too many small parties / independents getting elected. You need to win 4% of the vote nationally or 12% regionally to get a single seat, and if you do then you typically get more than one. Congrats, you’re now a collectivist too. > If I were a Swede… I’ve considered it. :)
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  toe the line, as in keep your toes behind the line at the start of the race, not tow the line.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Not if they can’t afford to run a campaign.
- Epa095 1y ago
  Traditionally what a 'independent MP' would do is create a new party. Usually it requires a certain number of signatures, not from people supporting them, just supporting their right to become a party. Then they need to have candidates for the ridings they want to be in. One example is the Norwegian party 'Patient Focus' which was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Alta Municipality in Finnmark county, Norway. In the 2021 parliamentary election, it won one of Finnmark's five seats in the Storting (Parlament). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Focus_(Norway) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Focus_(Norway)
0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
I think you may have an overly rosy view of the US system. Search former rep Justin Amash's tweets for keywords like "house", "speaker", and "deliberation": https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036 https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036 On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia. I understand a big part of the job of party leadership in the US is simply negotiating with / persuading representatives of your own party to vote for upcoming bills. So perhaps that's another sense in which party leadership is weaker in the US. The focus on local representation also creates problems though, since representatives are incentivized to deliver federal projects in the district they represent, even if that's not best for the nation as a whole. I really wish there a method for prototyping new democracy designs. I feel that this area has been very stagnant, and radical improvements could be possible.
- Svip 1y ago
  > On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia. Whilst we do not have primary elections, you can vote for individual candidates on the ballots, moving them up on the party list. This strategy does actually work to get candidates further down on the list over other candidates that would have been selected first.
- rainsford 1y ago
  I'd argue that primaries are a serious bug rather than a feature of the US political system, at least in places where only registered members of a party can vote in that party's primary. By requiring candidates for the general election to first pass through a gauntlet composed of the most die-hard voters from one part of the political spectrum, you frequently end up with candidates who are way more extreme than the electorate in general. This seems to be true even if the party in question is the minority party for a given race. Instead of picking a candidate with crossover appeal from voters in the majority, they end up with some raging partisan who can't possibly win, making it effectively a one horse race. Another major failure mode is that even in pretty evenly split areas it encourages pandering to the extreme fringe of the party and winning by a narrow margin rather than winning with a broad coalition because broad coalitions with crossover appeal don't help you get out of the primary. This has been weaponized in recent years, with moderates being threatened with primary challenges if they don't follow the party line, even though this misrepresents the politics of their actual voter base.
alkonaut 1y ago
I don’t really want to learn hundreds of different individual political platforms. It’s even a stretch to study 7-9 platforms. Instead I tick the party that is closest to my views but the individual that dissents on a specific issue, or who focuses on that particular issue I like. This is how you can, as a non member, try to steer the politics of the parties.
Svip 1y ago
I cannot speak fully to the Swedish situation, but in Denmark, MPs are independent as defined in the constitution. Yes, elections are largely party-based, but once elected, MPs are allowed to vote as they want. Of course, if they chose to defy the party line, they risk "losing the whip" as they'd say in the UK, which basically amounts to being expelled from the party. That being said, it does not take a lot of signatures to get on a ballot as a candidate outside the parties in Denmark (a few hundreds, I believe), though only two candidates have successfully managed to get elected that way. Conversely, Denmark has a high threshold for political parties (requiring signatures amounting to 1% of the vote of the last election, so usually around 21k), but the threshold to get into parliament is only 2% (which I believe is one of the lowest amongst countries that uses similar proportional representative systems). Returning to the towing the line (or rather lack thereof), the Danish parliament have a lot of independent MPs in parliament, because a lot find reason to quit their party after getting elected. Wikipedia has a fine table of MPs who has changed colours since the last election in November 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketing,_2022%E2%80%93present#Party_and_member_changes_after_the_November_2022_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketi...
- luckylion 1y ago
  MPs are independent in Germany as well, but in practice they vote with their parliamentary group almost all the time. "Fraktionsdisziplin" (discipline of the group) is a common term and generally expected - failure to achieve that is considered failure of the leadership and can quickly escalate. And even those who are elected directly wouldn't win their local election without their party, so all of them are very beholden to their party. Continuous defection on votes will see them not get re-elected, even if they don't get thrown out of the party. Theory vs practice makes all the difference.
  - Svip 1y ago
    I don't necessarily think this is a failure of theory in face of practice. Most party members are team members, and are willing to follow party leadership most of the time. Yes, I know the leadership has leverage that ordinary members do not, but I think most of the time, leadership need not exert that leverage. But the list of members who switch party in Denmark between elections suggest that the theory is very much practised, but it needn't be all the time.
Epa095 1y ago
In the Norwegian parlament it's actually quite common that only part of the parlament is gathered for votes when it's clear who would win a complete vote. So in that sense it's actually very close to your 8 members. It still matters who you vote on though, but mostly from the representatives ability to influence what gets discussed. And there is a lot of 'day-to-day' politics where the details gets formed by the representatives, while the 'big lines' are set by the party. Finaly I can't help but notice that the American political culture is significantly less diverse than the Scandinavian one. Yes, you have the odd representative crossing party lines, but in practice it seems like all this possibility for diverse opinions ends up being lost when they get squashed into two big tents.
rainsford 1y ago
In modern times the US is really only different in theory. This wasn't always the case, but currently national party positions totally dominate congressional voting with the individuals who happen to fill those seats being largely interchangeable cogs. There are exceptions, but those people are largely notable because they are so rare. And more importantly, they're slowly being replaced by people who will follow the party line. There have been studies on this that show party line voting becoming more and more common over the years to the point where it's basically the expected norm today. Arguably the US is in an even worse position because it's usually the President who sets the legislative agenda and voting position for their party in Congress, even though the system is set up assuming Congress acts like an independent branch.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Well, not quite. The U.S. house currently has 220 Republicans, and to pass a bill takes 218 votes. If 3 Republicans decide they don't like something, the bill won't pass, and this is happening quite frequently right now. (The Democrats could decide to join the Republicans and pass it anyway, but so far this has not happened.) The current President keeps wanting to pass bills which simply don't pass. Likewise, the Senate realistically needs 60% votes to pass controversial legislation, and that just isn't happening either. You're right that the U.S. congress used to vote far more upon regional lines or other non-party interests than it does now. There is something studied in political science (I can't remember its name) that predicts that well-funded, important elections will eventually converge on being 50/50, with the winner essentially being statistical noise.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    TIL "(convergence to) electoral mean". But also seems to fall apart with more complex issues https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872446/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872446/
  - rainsford 1y ago
    You're right that defections haven't totally gone away, but I think the current Congress actually emphasizes how rare they are now. The only reason things aren't passing is because the house is so close that a tiny percentage of Republicans defecting can sink a bill. But the vast majority of Republicans follow the party line and basically none of the Democrats are willing to cross over either. In a system with realistic local representation you'd expect a lot more crossover in both directions.
qgin 1y ago
At least in the parliamentary system, you are voting for an abstract notion of how things should be run, a worldview, or a list of policies. In the American system, the cult of personality rules above all. The vast majority of Americans disagree with what Donald Trump is implementing right now. That’s clear when you ask people in the abstract. But we don’t choose that way. Personality and celebrity rules the day here.
- Aloisius 1y ago
  Parliamentary systems with proportional party list voting systems are far from immune the cult of personality. See: Hitler. There's a reason why so many governments with such systems one would consider "free" still have to outright ban parties from elections.

jakobnissen 1y ago

That's up to the voters, ultimately. You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Or MPs who promise not to always tow the party line? I suppose if people choose to vote based on parties, of course you get party focused politics.

bjornsing 1y ago
No you can’t really vote for an independent MP in the Swedish voting system. They would have to register a party, it’s very hard to win a seat, and there is no guarantee that they will not win two or more seats – thus perpetuating the collectivism.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
  At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd parties in the US have though, right? Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller. If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    It might be hard to convince people to vote for a party made up of random people who might have very contradictory views.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    You're describing direct democracy parties and they exist in other places in non-trolly way. For example the Australian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy
  - bjornsing 1y ago
    > Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? There are thresholds to avoid too many small parties / independents getting elected. You need to win 4% of the vote nationally or 12% regionally to get a single seat, and if you do then you typically get more than one. Congrats, you’re now a collectivist too. > If I were a Swede… I’ve considered it. :)
barry-cotter 1y ago
toe the line, as in keep your toes behind the line at the start of the race, not tow the line.
lurk2 1y ago
> You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Not if they can’t afford to run a campaign.
Epa095 1y ago
Traditionally what a 'independent MP' would do is create a new party. Usually it requires a certain number of signatures, not from people supporting them, just supporting their right to become a party. Then they need to have candidates for the ridings they want to be in. One example is the Norwegian party 'Patient Focus' which was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Alta Municipality in Finnmark county, Norway. In the 2021 parliamentary election, it won one of Finnmark's five seats in the Storting (Parlament). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Focus_(Norway) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Focus_(Norway)

0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago

I think you may have an overly rosy view of the US system. Search former rep Justin Amash's tweets for keywords like "house", "speaker", and "deliberation": https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036 https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036 On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia. I understand a big part of the job of party leadership in the US is simply negotiating with / persuading representatives of your own party to vote for upcoming bills. So perhaps that's another sense in which party leadership is weaker in the US. The focus on local representation also creates problems though, since representatives are incentivized to deliver federal projects in the district they represent, even if that's not best for the nation as a whole. I really wish there a method for prototyping new democracy designs. I feel that this area has been very stagnant, and radical improvements could be possible.

Svip 1y ago
> On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia. Whilst we do not have primary elections, you can vote for individual candidates on the ballots, moving them up on the party list. This strategy does actually work to get candidates further down on the list over other candidates that would have been selected first.
rainsford 1y ago
I'd argue that primaries are a serious bug rather than a feature of the US political system, at least in places where only registered members of a party can vote in that party's primary. By requiring candidates for the general election to first pass through a gauntlet composed of the most die-hard voters from one part of the political spectrum, you frequently end up with candidates who are way more extreme than the electorate in general. This seems to be true even if the party in question is the minority party for a given race. Instead of picking a candidate with crossover appeal from voters in the majority, they end up with some raging partisan who can't possibly win, making it effectively a one horse race. Another major failure mode is that even in pretty evenly split areas it encourages pandering to the extreme fringe of the party and winning by a narrow margin rather than winning with a broad coalition because broad coalitions with crossover appeal don't help you get out of the primary. This has been weaponized in recent years, with moderates being threatened with primary challenges if they don't follow the party line, even though this misrepresents the politics of their actual voter base.

alkonaut 1y ago

I don’t really want to learn hundreds of different individual political platforms. It’s even a stretch to study 7-9 platforms. Instead I tick the party that is closest to my views but the individual that dissents on a specific issue, or who focuses on that particular issue I like. This is how you can, as a non member, try to steer the politics of the parties.

Svip 1y ago

I cannot speak fully to the Swedish situation, but in Denmark, MPs are independent as defined in the constitution. Yes, elections are largely party-based, but once elected, MPs are allowed to vote as they want. Of course, if they chose to defy the party line, they risk "losing the whip" as they'd say in the UK, which basically amounts to being expelled from the party. That being said, it does not take a lot of signatures to get on a ballot as a candidate outside the parties in Denmark (a few hundreds, I believe), though only two candidates have successfully managed to get elected that way. Conversely, Denmark has a high threshold for political parties (requiring signatures amounting to 1% of the vote of the last election, so usually around 21k), but the threshold to get into parliament is only 2% (which I believe is one of the lowest amongst countries that uses similar proportional representative systems). Returning to the towing the line (or rather lack thereof), the Danish parliament have a lot of independent MPs in parliament, because a lot find reason to quit their party after getting elected. Wikipedia has a fine table of MPs who has changed colours since the last election in November 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketing,_2022%E2%80%93present#Party_and_member_changes_after_the_November_2022_elections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketi...

luckylion 1y ago
MPs are independent in Germany as well, but in practice they vote with their parliamentary group almost all the time. "Fraktionsdisziplin" (discipline of the group) is a common term and generally expected - failure to achieve that is considered failure of the leadership and can quickly escalate. And even those who are elected directly wouldn't win their local election without their party, so all of them are very beholden to their party. Continuous defection on votes will see them not get re-elected, even if they don't get thrown out of the party. Theory vs practice makes all the difference.
- Svip 1y ago
  I don't necessarily think this is a failure of theory in face of practice. Most party members are team members, and are willing to follow party leadership most of the time. Yes, I know the leadership has leverage that ordinary members do not, but I think most of the time, leadership need not exert that leverage. But the list of members who switch party in Denmark between elections suggest that the theory is very much practised, but it needn't be all the time.

Epa095 1y ago

In the Norwegian parlament it's actually quite common that only part of the parlament is gathered for votes when it's clear who would win a complete vote. So in that sense it's actually very close to your 8 members. It still matters who you vote on though, but mostly from the representatives ability to influence what gets discussed. And there is a lot of 'day-to-day' politics where the details gets formed by the representatives, while the 'big lines' are set by the party. Finaly I can't help but notice that the American political culture is significantly less diverse than the Scandinavian one. Yes, you have the odd representative crossing party lines, but in practice it seems like all this possibility for diverse opinions ends up being lost when they get squashed into two big tents.

rainsford 1y ago

In modern times the US is really only different in theory. This wasn't always the case, but currently national party positions totally dominate congressional voting with the individuals who happen to fill those seats being largely interchangeable cogs. There are exceptions, but those people are largely notable because they are so rare. And more importantly, they're slowly being replaced by people who will follow the party line. There have been studies on this that show party line voting becoming more and more common over the years to the point where it's basically the expected norm today. Arguably the US is in an even worse position because it's usually the President who sets the legislative agenda and voting position for their party in Congress, even though the system is set up assuming Congress acts like an independent branch.

trollbridge 1y ago
Well, not quite. The U.S. house currently has 220 Republicans, and to pass a bill takes 218 votes. If 3 Republicans decide they don't like something, the bill won't pass, and this is happening quite frequently right now. (The Democrats could decide to join the Republicans and pass it anyway, but so far this has not happened.) The current President keeps wanting to pass bills which simply don't pass. Likewise, the Senate realistically needs 60% votes to pass controversial legislation, and that just isn't happening either. You're right that the U.S. congress used to vote far more upon regional lines or other non-party interests than it does now. There is something studied in political science (I can't remember its name) that predicts that well-funded, important elections will eventually converge on being 50/50, with the winner essentially being statistical noise.
- viraptor 1y ago
  TIL "(convergence to) electoral mean". But also seems to fall apart with more complex issues https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872446/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872446/
- rainsford 1y ago
  You're right that defections haven't totally gone away, but I think the current Congress actually emphasizes how rare they are now. The only reason things aren't passing is because the house is so close that a tiny percentage of Republicans defecting can sink a bill. But the vast majority of Republicans follow the party line and basically none of the Democrats are willing to cross over either. In a system with realistic local representation you'd expect a lot more crossover in both directions.

qgin 1y ago

At least in the parliamentary system, you are voting for an abstract notion of how things should be run, a worldview, or a list of policies. In the American system, the cult of personality rules above all. The vast majority of Americans disagree with what Donald Trump is implementing right now. That’s clear when you ask people in the abstract. But we don’t choose that way. Personality and celebrity rules the day here.

Aloisius 1y ago
Parliamentary systems with proportional party list voting systems are far from immune the cult of personality. See: Hitler. There's a reason why so many governments with such systems one would consider "free" still have to outright ban parties from elections.