University of Southern Denmark The 2017 Danish regional elections and the victorious parliamentary parties Kjaer, Ulrik Published in: Regional and Federal Studies DOI: 10.1080/13597566.2019.1689492 Publication date: 2020 Document version: Accepted manuscript Citation for pulished version (APA): Kjaer, U. (2020). The 2017 Danish regional elections and the victorious parliamentary parties. Regional and Federal Studies, 30(3), 461-473. https://doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2019.1689492 Go to publication entry in University of Southern Denmark's Research Portal Terms of use This work is brought to you by the University of Southern Denmark. Unless otherwise specified it has been shared according to the terms for self-archiving. If no other license is stated, these terms apply: • You may download this work for personal use only. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying this open access version If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details and we will investigate your claim. Please direct all enquiries to [email protected] Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 The 2017 Danish regional elections and the victorious parliamentary parties Ulrik Kjaer, Dept of Political Studies, University of Southern Denmark ([email protected]) Manuscript accepted for publication in Regional & Federal Studies (vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 461-473. DOI: 10.1080/13597566.2019.1689492) ABSTRACT Regional politics is not at the center of most Danes’ political attention, but at the 2017 regional elections more than seven in ten Danes showed up at the polls to vote in the five Danish regions. Although several regional lists and smaller nationwide parties ran at the elections, the established parties already represented in the national parliament conquered all but two of the 205 seats. This is not to say that the voters simply copied their national vote – almost three in ten voted for a different party at the regional elections than the one they would have preferred had they been voting at a general election. KEYWORDS regional elections; local party systems; inter-level split-ticket voting; Denmark The 2017 Danish regional elections On November 21, 2017, local elections were held simultaneously in the five Danish regions and in the 98 Danish municipalities. According to the Local Election Act (2019), elections are to be held in regions as well as municipalities on the third Tuesday of November every fourth year. This means that the voters are handed two ballots when they come to the polls: one for the regional election and one for the municipal election. However, it is not a triple election, since the vertical simultaneity does not include the general election, i.e. the election for the Danish parliament Folketinget, which has its own four-year circle (see also Bhatti and Hansen 2013).1 There are at least two consequences of the simultaneity of regional and local elections: 1) candidates running regional electoral campaigns have to fight for media and voter attention with their municipal counterparts – a battle they in most cases lose; and 2) although regional elections therefore often turn into low-information elections, the turnout for regional elections is quite high since many voters can vote twice for the cost of one visit to the polling station. Even though general elections are not held on the same day, the nationwide political parties are indeed present at the regional elections, and although the electoral system is very open to newcomers, the parliamentary parties are massively represented on the regional ballots and in the regional councils. At the 2017 regional elections, healthcare was once again the dominating issue in the campaign, which should not come as a surprise since healthcare makes up 97 pct. of the regions’ budgets. Since the major parties running did not have very different standings on healthcare policy, the campaigns kind of turned into a question of political leadership and which party could offer the best candidate for the regional mayoralty to be elected indirectly by and among the regional councilors after the election. At the 2017 elections, the question of leadership was taken to a new level. The long-sitting chairman of Danish Regions (the interest organization of the five Danish regions) did not seek re-election, and since this position is filled by one of the regional mayors, it was even more important to conquer one of the regional mayoralties to be in the pool for this – in a Danish context – very powerful position. The leadership question drew special attention in the Region of Southern Denmark where the regional mayor (from the Liberal Party) left office in the middle of the term to join the government, leaving a huge scandal concerning contracting out of ambulance services in his wake. His replacement, Stephanie Lose, also from the Liberal Party was running again – not only in the shadow of this scandal but also in a field of candidates that quite exceptionally for regional elections included one of the most renowned politicians in Denmark, former minister of foreign affairs and former leader of the Socialist People’s Party, Villy Søvndal. It was a minor surprise that the incumbent Stephanie Lose easily beat the new competition in this intensively media-covered electoral battle, but it was a major surprise that she, as the only regional mayor from the Liberal Party, was elected chairman of Danish Regions rather than one of the other four Social Democratic mayors. The selection of the chairman of Danish Regions marked the very end of the regional election process of 2017. The remainder of the article will focus on the main features of the regional elections. After introducing the electoral system of the Danish regions, the results of the 2017 regional elections in terms of turnout, seat distribution and who was elected will be presented. After these descriptions, the degree of nationalization of regional elections will be analyzed in terms of the congruence between the regional and the national party system and in terms of patterns of vote switching between regional and general elections. Elections in the five Danish regions The five Danish regions were established as part of a major structural reform decided by the parliament in 2005 and implemented in 2007 (Ministry of the Interior and Health 2005; Vrangbæk 2010; Bhatti and Hansen 2013). The number of municipalities was reduced from 271 to 98, but the regional level was even more fundamentally changed as 14 counties (amter) were replaced by five regions (regioner). Unlike the counties, the regions cannot impose taxes (their revenue comes from state and municipal subsidies), and their task portfolio ‘only’ covers health care.2 The reason only is put in quotation marks is that the regions’ budget is quite large – close to a quarter of all public expenditures in Denmark. On average, the five regions – Capital Region of Denmark (Region Hovedstaden), Region Zealand (Region Sjælland), Region of Southern Denmark (Region Syddanmark), Central Denmark Region (Region Midtjylland) and North Denmark Region (Region Nordjylland) – have more than 1.1 million inhabitants, see Table 1. To prepare the new regions, the first elections for the five regions were held already in November 2005, so the 2017 elections were the fourth round of elections under the present structure (also including the regional elections of 2009 and 2013). The regional electoral system is built on proportional representation with each region forming a single multi-member district where the 41 regional councilors to be elected for each of the five Regional Boards are elected at large. Candidates must form lists to run, but only 50 signatures from eligible voters in the region are needed for the list to get on the ballot, and only one candidate is needed to form a list. Political parties as well as non-partisan lists can run and will be assigned a letter on the ballot. Parties qualified to run for the national parliament are assigned one letter for all regions, municipalities and national elections, which is often a part of their party logo. The voters can cast a vote for a list or a preferential vote for a candidate on the list (a little more than half the voters go for the second option, cf. Table 1). After the votes are cast, the seats are first distributed among the lists, including votes for the list and preferential votes for one of its candidates (apparantement is allowed) using D’Hondt’s formula. In the second round of seat allocation, the seats won by the list are distributed among the candidates on the list according to the preferential votes. However, it is possible for the lists beforehand to announce that they do not run on an open but on a semi-closed list where the rank-order of the candidates on the list also plays a role (less than a fifth of the lists opt for the semi-closed format and only in a very few cases does it have an effect on who is elected). After the distribution of the 41 seats in each of the regions, the elected regional councilors elect their chair – the regional mayor – among them. Danes turn out at regional elections In short, Danes are great regional voters. As reported in Table 1, the turnout rate was 70.7 in 2017 (lowest in the Capital Region), which is not rare. Ever since the amalgamation reform in 1970, as a rule of thumb, seven out of ten Danes vote in local elections, whether municipal or regional. *** Table 1 goes here *** As Table 1 also shows, the turnout rate is approximately 15 percentage points below the turnout rate at the national election but equals the turnout rate at municipal elections (this pattern is consistent over time).3 This is somewhat paradoxical because a survey study conducted right after the elections shows that regional policy is not at all at the center of citizens’ political interest.