Are Danes More Inclined to Ticket Splitting than the Swedes and the English?

The first ever simultaneous general and local elections in Denmark (November 2001) allow for a comparison of Danish voters' inclination towards inter-level ticket splitting with similar phenomena in Sweden and England. Inter-level split-ticket voting occurs when voters cast their vote on two di...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scandinavian political studies 2005, Vol.28 (2), p.125-139
Main Authors: Elklit, Jørgen, Kjær, Ulrik
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Britons
Comparative analysis
Denmark
Elections
Electoral Systems
England
Hypothesis
Local elections
Parliamentary elections
Political Parties
Political science
Statistics
Surveys
Sweden
Swedes
Ticket splitting
United Kingdom
Voting Behavior
Voting behaviour
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Summary:The first ever simultaneous general and local elections in Denmark (November 2001) allow for a comparison of Danish voters' inclination towards inter-level ticket splitting with similar phenomena in Sweden and England. Inter-level split-ticket voting occurs when voters cast their vote on two different parties in the two different (but simultaneous) elections; this happened far more often in Denmark in 2001 than in the two other countries. One hypothesis suggests that this owes to party system differences between the three countries, since both the number of parties running in the different elections and the discrepancy between the national and the local party systems are expected to influence the level of inter-level vote splitting. However, election statistics and survey data based analyses (Denmark in 2001, Sweden in 2002, and England in 2001) give only limited support to the hypothesis. It appears that Danish voters did in fact split their 2001 national and local votes more than Swedish and English voters did and more than party system differences can account for. Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishers
ISSN:0080-6757
1467-9477
DOI:10.1111/j.0080-6757.2005.00124.x