Leveling seat

Leveling seats (sw. Utjämningsmandat, no. utjevningsmandater.) are a mechanism employed in Norwegian elections to the national legislature, the Storting, and in Swedish elections to national and regional assemblies, to ensure proportional representation both by county and political party. They are more commonly known as "adjustment seats", and can be found in other countries as well as Norway and Sweden where full proportional representation at the highest level (e.g. national) is sought.

Norway

The arrangement has gone through several changes through the years. Its current form is based on the following principles:

• In order to be eligible for leveling seats, a party must get at least 4% (the exclusion threshold) of the national popular vote. A party may attain enough votes in a given county to elect a representative but may fail to be eligible for leveling seats.
• The number of representatives elected per county is a function of the total population in the county and the area of the county. Hence, the county of Finnmark needs fewer votes to elect a representative (7,409 in 2005) than Oslo (18,167 the same election).
• Of 169 representatives, 150 are elected by popular vote within the county. This means that a party that achieves 40% of the popular vote in a county will send about 40% of the total number of representatives from that county.
• The remaining 19 representatives are allocated one to each county but are elected based on nationwide results for a party, as long as the popular vote at the national level for that party exceeds the exclusion threshold of 4%. The result is that each representative represents an approximately equal number of voters.

In the 2005 elections, the average number of votes on a national level was largely similar across party lines. The largest party, the Norwegian Labour Party, required the least number of votes per representative with 14,139; the party that needed the most votes was the Christian Democrats, with 16,262. On a county by county basis, however, there were greater disparities: Sogn og Fjordane needed only 3,503 votes to elect one representative from the Liberal Party, while Akershus needed 22,555 to elect one representative from the Socialist Left Party.

The arrangement has gone through several adjustments through the years and is the result of legislative action. Some argue that regional representation should be abolished.

Sweden

Of the 349 seats in the Swedish Parliament, 310 are fixed seats and 39 are adjustment seats. The 310 fixed seats are distributed among the 29 electoral districts (valkretsar) according to the largest remainder method with the Hare quota. The distribution of seats between the parties then takes place in four stages.

In the first stage, the fixed seats are distributed within each district according to the modified Sainte-Laguë method (jämkade uddatalsmetoden) with the first divisor adjusted to 1.4. Only parties that have received at least 4 percent of the vote nationally or 12 percent of the vote within the district can participate in this distribution of seats.

In the second stage, the 349 seats are distributed through a calculation based on the total amount of votes summed up across the entire country. In this distribution only parties that have received more than 4 percent of the national vote are included. Parties that fall below 4 percent nationally but have been awarded fixed seats in districts where they have had more than 12 percent of the vote are disregarded, and their seats are subtracted from the calculation. If a party has received 2 seats in this fashion, for example, the calculation will be made with 347 seats. Again the modified Sainte-Laguë method is used.

In the third stage, a summary is made of the fixed seats that the parties have achieved, and this is compared to the outcome of the nation-wide distribution above. If a party has received more fixed seats than its share of the total 349-seat distribution, it is disregarded in the distribution of adjustment seats. The parties are then awarded a number of adjustment seats sufficient to cover the gap between their amount of fixed seats and their share in the nation-wide distribution.

Finally, the adjustment seats that each party has received are distributed among the districts. The application of the Sainte-Laguë number gives each party a quotient ('comparison number', jämförelsetal) in each district, which is its number of votes in the district divided by (2n+1), where n is the amount of seats it has been awarded. The district where the party has the highest quotient is awarded an adjustment seat, and a new quotient is then calculated for that district, before the next adjustment seat is distributed. In theory, a district can thus receive more than one adjustment seat. If a party is yet to receive a seat in the district, its quotient simply is the amount of votes it received. When the fixed seats were distributed among the parties in the district, this number was divided by 1.4, which made it harder for a party to achieve its first seat. Now, however, no such division takes place. The method used is thus pure and not modified Sainte-Laguë.

In elections to the county councils, the same principles are followed, with the following differences: only parties that have received more than 3 percent of the vote in the county are able to participate in the distribution of seats. There is no 12 percent clause or other possibility for parties that fall below this threshold to gain seats. Finally, the amount of adjustment seats is one tenth of the number of seats in the county council. If one tenth is a fractional number (which it always is, since the number of seats in a county council is required to be odd), the fraction is always adjusted upwards, so a county council with 51 seats would have 45 fixed seats and 6 adjustment seats.

See also

• Additional Member System
• Mixed member proportional representation