The Icelandic Voting System (2024)

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.

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.

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_Folketi...

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

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.

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.

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.

It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality.

[1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119

> It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously.

That would be interesting, but it's not even possible to achieve one of those things by itself.

Maybe democracy just has to be a bit complicated to work?

As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all?

The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically representative system. But if we can't have all, I think dropping simple is better.

There's an intermediate solution - MMP (used in various guises in AoNZ, Germany, Mexico, Scotland, Bolivia, .....) where we have a fixed number of regional seats much like FPP (house seats in the US) and some nationwide extra seats - people get 2 votes one for their local seat and one nationally for a party, after local seat votes are counted extra seats are allocated from parties' lists.

Essentially it's the same as Iceland but party votes are done nationally, this avoids some of the weird stuff mentioned in the article that allows some parties to have more votes but fewer seats - here in AoNZ we brought in MMP after a couple of elections under FPP where one party got more votes and the other more seats. It's not perfect, but better than what we had before.

On the other hand, the whole nation is fewer than 400,000 people on a very compact land mass, so the divergent interests out of district are not all that large.

> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.

> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?

As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.

In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.

As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.

> Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts.

True, but...

> A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.

No, it can't because Congress itself is given the overriding power in the Constitution to regulate the "time, place, and manner" of elections to the House, and has exercised it to prohibit at-large districts (many times, with lax enforcement, but the most recent mandate, adopted in 1967, has not had the compliance problems the earlier ones often did.) The 1967 mandate was adopted under the dual specter of a some states failing to resolve districting controversies and potentially facing judicially-imposed at-large districts and several states having used at-large districts for non-federal elections to effectively disenfranchise Black voters and concerns that the same might be done to Congressional delegations as a way of blunting the impacts of new rules like the Voting Rights Act.

Additional detail at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739929

The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they hate more than each other it's another party.

Or just use a sane system like STV with multi member districts.

There was a time when senators were not elected by popular vote. The constitution leaves a lot of this up to the states and just by convention they mostly do the same thing.

There is a federal law.

There has been numerous proposals in the Congress to get rid of it, but they don't get ratified because two parties like the status quo.

People will have to make it an issue.

The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the US.

Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.

I have voted my entire adult life in a similar system but never knew how the sausage was made. I have complete confidence in it despite not knowing exactly how it works.

You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters from the standard alphabet.

The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.

If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant that they were one of the parties in the government coalition. They have had to compromise with other parties through all of that time, and so it was not the case that those governments were only representative of a very small party of the electorate, as that article makes it sound.

(In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)

this analysis of (mostly European) democracies is not based on some metric of how well the population is faring, oecd has some of those, but based on handpicked anecdata and peak examples.

the most massive political injustices, poor housing, health care, education, elderly care, affordable transportation, queer human rights, all of them despite high GDP, just to name a few quantifiable properties of a state... the worst digressions happen in FPTP systems currently.

also the article throws both hands in the air as if no mechanisms exist to further improve democracies. it doesn't mention popular vote, or some mechanisms for balance of freedom of speech vs freedom to slander and distort and lie ("hate speech", the word polemics has 'polemos', war, as root), or press codex, or application thereof on all media, including "social" media, ad engines made of letters to the editor largely left alone and unmoderated... nor does it mention panachage and cumulating of votes on lists, the right to adjust the party list proposals in the voting booth.

the article does mention the brazen influence of financial power as a problem though.

but really, proportional representation is part of the solution.

That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties instead of governing unilaterally.

Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.