Chapter 6: Democracy & MinoritiesGotland and Glasgow; Threshold Rule; Presidents and Popes; British parliamentary deposits; One party states; Polish elections; Performance bonds and the national debt; Truth in Government Party; Sweden’s four percent floor; Screaming Lord Sutch unable to win Swedish parliamentary seat; Threshold rules as discriminating devices; Threshold keeps independent, local, regional and ethnic candidates out of national parliamentary club; Welsh nationalists unable to win a seat in the Swedish parliament; Scotland and the Tories; Scottish monetary freedom as next Tory bribe?; Skåne Party; Stockholm Party; Finns Swedish predicament.
Now notice that only two thirds of Gotland’s voters got themselves represented in the Swedish National Parliament. Votes for the Conservatives (M), the Liberals (Fp), the Socialists (Vpk), the Greens (Mp)and the Christian Democrats (Kds) are ‘wasted’ votes in much the same way as votes for the British Conservative Party are wasted votes in Glasgow Central where Labour slogs it out eyeball to eyeball with the Scottish Nationalists and all the other candidates struggle to save their deposits.But this is only the most visible manifestation thrown out by any representative system, be they PR or less so. There are deeper currents and structural injustices. Specifically, let us consider the effects of the threshold rules.
Thresholds work like this. Below a certain ‘threshold’, you the candidate will find yourself barred form a seat in the parliament. Now this threshold could be set anyhow and anywhere. At thirty percent of the total nationwide popular vote for instance. Some presidential elections work on this type of threshold principle and polling is repeated with the lowest polling candidate dropping out until a winner ‘emerges’. Popes are elected by the cardinals on a variation on this theme.
The threshold could be set by constituency. The British system that leads to low polling candidates losing their deposits works like this. There are many variations on this theme.
Sweden could have decided that a candidate’s party must poll, let us say, at least one thousand votes in twenty of the country’s twenty eight constituencies.
As one part states all over Communist Europe attempt to introduce representative democracy while keeping Communist Party candidates in office, all sorts of clever schemes are being concocted with often bizarre results. Anybody who has been watching the Polish elections will have noticed some of these goings-on.
Even more creatively, Sweden could insist that political parties deposit a percentage of the national debt with the Bank of Sweden before the election as a performance bond. Television franchises are after all moving in this direction, so why not hold political parties accountable for their promises? There are many ways to bribe your way into power and this would be a popular policy for some budding ‘Truth in Government’ Party. But we become exotic.
In Sweden they talk of the four percent floor. This is the national voting hurdle that each party in the Swedish Parliament has clambered over successfully.
Screaming Lord Sutch as an independent candidate might be able to make his way into the British Houses of Parliament, but without a Teddy for Prime Minister Party he would not stand a ghost of a chance in Sweden even if he routed the opposition in his constituency and took every vote cast.
So we begin to see that like all nice little rules of this nature, its effect, and dare we suggest, its purpose, is to stop newcomers from joining the club.
This nice little Swedish threshold rule, rules out independent candidates, local candidates, regional candidates and makes life hard for ethnic candidates ‘distributed’ around the country in the cause of racial harmony. The Swedish National Parliament does not have to deal with the untidiness that compels the British to set up a Welsh Office to placate a Welsh Nationalist Party.
And watch for some rabbits from the British Conservative Party hat before the next British elections to deal them back into the Scottish National Voting Game. Equal rights to the Bank of Scotland while the Bank of England still has rights and privileges left to devolve? Economic Democracy and a Scottish Monetary Policy to counter the Political Democracy seemingly on offer from the Scottish Nationalists and the Scottish subsidiary of the British Labour Party?
But big politics in Sweden has no need for such devices. The Skåne Party strong in the Malmö City Region and the Stockholm Party strong in the Stockholm City Region have been making significant inroads in the local and county council elections, but the threshold keeps them well clear of the Swedish National Parliament.
Similarly, the large Finnish working class constituency amongst Sweden’s industrial company towns finds the threshold to mitigate effectively against their active participation in Swedish National Elections as a political party despite their impressive local strength in pockets throughout Sweden’s industrial heartland.