Jørgen Elklit

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Political Science

The norm of ballot secrecy, although widely accepted in principle, is often downplayed and loosely defined in actual practice. As policy makers weigh new electoral options such as postal and internet voting, a better understanding is needed of ballot secrecy's many aspects and requirements.

Since the restoration of multi-party democracy in Kenya in 1991, elections have witnessed intra-party violence during the primaries for selecting parliamentary and civic seats candidates. This article addresses the question of why electoral violence occurs during party primaries in Kenya and argues that violence is an outcome of the organization of...

Candidates listed first on the ballot paper regularly receive more votes than other candidates, but what role does ballot layout play in this connection? Experimental studies from first-past-the-post systems show that the ballot position effect is causal as the order of names functions as a cue to voters. Does this also hold for PR systems where vo...

Artikel om Sydafrika, der ikke er blevet den regnbuenation, man drømte om i 1994.

Choosing the number of seats in a legislature is a balancing act between efficiency and representativeness. This article focuses on representativeness and hypothesises that the larger the assembly, the higher the vote–seat proportionality, the higher the number of parties represented, and the higher the representation of otherwise under-represented...

International organisations play many different roles during election processes in new and emerging democracies (and in countries hoping to be seen as democracies). These roles—and their impact—become particularly interesting during situations that develop into ‘an electoral crisis’. An electoral crisis is some kind of humanitarian or political (or...

The paper provides an overview of (1) the Danish system for casting a preferential – or personal – vote in a proportional list system and (2) how seats are subsequently allocated. Denmark differs from most (all?) preferential list PR systems by letting the parties themselves (actually the parties’ multi-member constituency branches) decide which on...

Local party systems are not necessarily copies of their country's national party system. Some national parties do not field candidates in all municipalities, while in other municipalities there are non-partisan lists/local parties. In this article it is hypothesised that the larger the municipality (in number of inhabitants), the more the local par...

Local government party systems are not necessarily copies of the national party system. In many countries, local party systems have come to resemble the national one more and more – a process Rokkan termed ‘party politicisation’. The traditional expectation has been that the take-over of local politics by political parties, through a gradual proces...

Local government amalgamations may have unintended consequences on electoral behaviour. Using the most recent local elections in Denmark as its case, this article demonstrates that inter-level split-ticket voting between three levels (national, regional and local) decreased slightly from 2001 to 2005 – that is, simultaneously with the implementatio...

Afslutningen på det seneste valg i Kenya kulminerede i et overraskende og deprimerende voldsorgie. Mange mente, at volden især blev udløst af en kombination af åbenlys forvirring omkring opgørelsen af præsidentvalget og bevidst snyd. Men som så ofte før var virkeligheden betydelig mere kompliceret.

The decline in voter participation in many countries has brought about a conspicuous revival of interest in turnout. The downward trend is generally most pronounced among younger voters, making this development even more worrisome; however, the pattern of decline has not been without exceptions. In all three Scandinavian countries, voter turnout re...

On the basis of voting data on total electorates in three polling districts, the main intentions of this article have been: first to describe the voting change patterns in the three districts and second to put forward supported hypotheses for a later, more rigorous testing on a representative sample of voters in the entire political system. Among t...

Lesotho took an innovative step forward in 2001, when the introduction of the MMP electoral system became a central part of the political and consensual solutions to the upheaval following the 1998 elections. MMP combines proportional representation on a national scale with single-member constituencies and the solution was seen by many as a promisi...

The article presents observations from a 2006 township election experiment in Ya'an Municipality, Sichuan Province. Gradual institutionalization of elections to Chinese village committees has for two decades fascinated those interested in social and political development in rural China. Elections at the next level—the townships—were seen by many, i...

Electoral campaigning is studied almost without exception at the national level. This article has chosen another road, claiming that electoral campaigning can also be studied at the local election level. Campaigning before the Danish local elections of 21 November 1989 is studied. The design permits comparisons between the two levels (national/loca...

Local party systems are not necessarily copies of their country's national party system. Some national parties do not run in all municipalities and in some municipalities one also finds non- partisan lists/local parties. It has been hypothesised that the bigger the municipality is (in number of inhabitants) the more the local party system resemble...

The issues related to power, politics and change in weak states are approached by looking at the way in which elections are prepared for and electoral issues handled. The point of departure is a general model of the contextualised electoral process with a number of iterative steps or phases. Afghanistan, Iraq, Lesotho, Nepal and Mauritius are the c...

At first sight, the electoral systems in Denmark, Germany, South Africa and Sweden may seem different and an attempt to categorize them together odd. All four, however, belong to the same category, which Arend Lijphart calls ‘proportional representation two-tier districting systems’, and the effects of these systems on the proportionality of the re...

Denmark has a very inclusive electoral system, combining high proportionality, low thresholds, and meaningful voter choice among candidates. Its multi-party system results in coalition governments, many of them minority governments. Parliament is more representative socio-demographically of the population than most of its counterparts in other coun...

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)...

This article offers the beginnings of a methodology for assessing the quality of a national election, its freeness, fairness and administrative efficacy. The historical lack of a comprehensive framework of analysis has compelled election observers to make pronouncements on the basis of incomplete evidence, usually gathered on the day of the vote an...

Some proportional representation (PR) rules can also be used to specify the sequence in which each party in a parliament or each member in a multiparty governing coalition is given its choice about (unique) desired resources, e.g., “indivisible goods” such as cabinet ministries or executive positions, thus providing an algorithmic method for determ...

Journal of Democracy 16.4 (2005) 172-175 Eric Bjornlund opens his study of international and domestic election monitoring with a brief assessment of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Applying international norms for democratic elections, he finds that international election observers, had they been present, would have concluded that the election...

In this paper, we propose and test a framework for analysing how ‘free and fair’ electoral processes are. We start from the assumption that a rational process must be capable of being reproduced by others according to a given standard of practice. The framework for analysis is based on eleven constituent parts of an electoral process, each of which...

Some proportional representation (PR) rules can also be used to specify the sequence in which each party in a parliament or each member in a multiparty governing coalition is given its choice about (unique) desired resources, e.g., "indivisible goods" such as cabinet ministries or executive positions, thus providing an algorithmic method for determ...

The article is based on a newly conducted survey of Danish party members. It shows that Danish party members enrol because of the ideology and national policies of the preferred party, and because they want to support the party. A significant number of members leave their party every year, and as many as one-fifth consider leaving, but new members...

This article seeks to push the development of a new sub-field of research in the field of democratisation and institutional design, namely the relationship between the institutionalisation of electoral politics - including the administration of elections - and the development of political legitimacy and democratic consolidation in new democracies....

Drawing on evidence from first and second elections in emerging democracies, this article addresses issues pertinent to understanding the interplay between institutional design and change on the one hand and on the other hand the course of the democratization process, its background and concomitants. Because the electoral system (understood broadly...

The parliamentary election in Singapore in January 1997 is examined, as is the particular electoral system (`the party block vote') which is found to be a central element in the electoral strategy of the ruling party, PAP. The functioning of this rare electoral system is, however, only one element in explaining how PAP has been able to win comforta...

Journal of Democracy 8.3 (1997) 32-46 It was late in the afternoon in Kampala on 31 March 1994. Journalists were waiting impatiently for an announcement from international election observers. United Nations officials stated for the third time their argument that the observers should declare the March 28 elections for Uganda's Constituent Assembly "...

Studies of electoral systems sometimes have difficulties in puzzling out the intricacies of the Danish Folketing electoral system. This paper aims at demonstrating that this particular electoral system is less complicated than it seems. It will also be demonstrated that the system has been remarkably stable in its basic structure, not having been s...

The Danish 1915–1920 Lower House electoral system combined a traditional plurality system and a PR system with multi-stage compensatory seats in two provincial regions, and closed party list PR in the third, metropolitan, region. This complex system is presented and its effects on the distribution of seats in the Folketing are analysed. It was an e...

In November 1990 Prime Minister Poul Schlüter (Conservative), head of a minority coalition government of Conservatives, Social Liberals, and Liberals, called a general election to the Folketing, the Danish unicameral parliament. The Danes could thus look forward to their tenth general election in less than two decades! The election took place on 12...

Niels Thomsen og Jette D. Søllinge, De danske aviser 1634-1991., Bind 1-3 (Bind 1-2 dog med titlen De danske aviser 1634-1989 og forfatterangivelsen Jette D. Søllinge og Niels Thomsen), Odense: Dagspressens Fond, i kommission hos Odense Universitetsforlag, 1988-1991, 356 + 727 + 836 s., 328,00 kr. pr. bind i abonnement; 328,00-498,00 kr. i løssalg.

Michael Nydén, Kris i massupplaga? En studie i hållbarhet, relevans och neutral presentation i fyra svenska dagstidningars rapportering om de internationella oljebolagens til oljekrisen 1973-74,, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Skrifter utgivna av Statsvetenskapliga foreningen i Uppsala, Uppsala/Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1988, 263 s., Skr. 175...

One of the themes which occupied the late Stein Rokkan in a number of his writings was the impact of institutional changes on political development, especially on the introduction of full-fledged democracy . In the late fifties Stein Rokkan realized that the functions of va- rious institutions, e .g. the safeguarding of the privacy of the electoral...

In recent articles Bourke and DeBats (1978, 1980) have made a number of interesting points, which are of immediate concern to the study of electoral mobilization and participation over time. They have pointed to the existence of a number of poll lists recording individual votes after 1820 in what they term viva voce states (1980:232ff). These lists...