Danielle Orrock
Blog 7
Duverger’s Law
Duverger’s law states that SMDP electoral rules will produce
a two party system, whereas PR electoral rules produce a multiparty
system. In the case of Sweden this law
is mostly true.
Effective Number of
Parties
In order to compare Duverger’s Law to Sweden’s electoral
system the effective number of parties must be calculated. Using the formula
given by Professor Hawkins, Neff=1/å
(p^2) (October 29, 2012) and the percentage of seats won by each party, the
equation equals 2.8. The two main parties that won the most seats were the
Moderate Party and the Social Democrats, with the remaining .8 of the parties
spread out between 6 other parties (Wikipedia, 2012).
Electoral Rules
The first aspect of Sweden’s electoral rules is its district magnitude. According to Parline on the Inter-Parliamentary Union, Sweden has a
total of 349 seats and of those seats 310 are distributed between 29
constituencies based on the number of voters in each constituency. The remaining 39 seats are awarded based off
of the national vote (Parline, 2012).
The second aspect of Sweden’s electoral rules is the formula
they use to pick which members should hold the seats. Sweden uses a variation
of proportional representation formatted after the modified Sainte-Laguë method
(Parline, 2012).
The list structure and thresholds are the third and fourth
aspects of Sweden’s electoral rules. Sweden has a slightly hybrid system with
the way it elects the first 310 seats. For the first 310 seats the members are
elected by a closed-party list, at which the votes only count if the party
received 4 percent of the vote throughout the country or 12 percent of
the vote throughout a constituency. There is, however, an option to have
preferential voting among the 310 seats, but the candidate is required to
have at least 8 percent of the vote for their votes to count. For the remaining 39 seats the candidate is determined
by proportional representation with the party needing 4 percent of the vote for
their votes to count (Praline, 2012).
So according to Duverger’s Law with Sweden’s system being
proportional representation, Sweden should have multiple parties, but as we saw
earlier it only has 2.8. It is more than
two parties, however, it isn’t exactly three yet. In the case of Sweden,
Duverger’s Law is mostly true.
Parline. 2012. Inter-Parliamentary Union. Retrieved from
http://www.ipu.org/parline-e/reports/2303_B.htm
Professor Hawkins. 2012, October 29. Parties and party systems.
Wikipedia. 2012. Swedish general election, 2010. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_general_election,_2010
Nice blog. You are fair in saying it is mostly true. It's hard to tell how accurate it is when there are 2.8 parties.
ReplyDelete