Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Constitution and Administration. Introd. by E. Hildebrand - 1. Constitution. By E. Hildebrand - Composition and Procedure of the Riksdag. By [J. P. Velander] T. Hedrén - System of Proportional Representation. By E. von Heidenstam
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■2-20
III. CONSTITUTION AND ADMINISTRATION.
various reasons, such as the growth of industrialism, the introduction of
universal suffrage for the Second Chamber, and the extension of the
local franchise — on which rests the composition of the county-councils
and the town-councils which serve as electoral bodies in the election to
the First Chamber — the number of Labour representatives tends to
increase at the cost of the number of the representatives of the landowning
agricultural class (including the peasants) of Sweden. Moreover it is
manifest that, especially through the extension to the First Chamber of the
practice of payment of members, that chamber also will be more and more
"democratized", in that the formerly predominant representatives of
large-scale industry, the landed gentry, and the official class will more and more
have to give way before representatives of the ranks of "the common
people" — a change in the composition of this chamber which was surely
not comtemplated by the men who carried through the great reform of
the representation system in the sixties of the nineteenth century.
System of Proportional Representation.
The question of proportional representation in Sweden, though carried
to a solution only some few years since, is nevertheless of comparatively
ancient date. As early as the national assembly of 1867 proposals were
brought forward in favour of proportional representation, and at several
subsequent riksdags there appeared new proposals on the subject; but none
of these succeeded in attracting any considerable amount of attention, either
inside or outside the Riksdag. It was not until the session of 1902, when
the question of method of election was coupled with the extension of the
political franchise, that it became a matter of practical politics; and during
the next few years the question of "proportional v. majority
representation" was talked about and written about with a keenness and interest
which is devoted only to the most burning question of the day. The
settlement of the question was reached in the session of 1907 and confirmed
by the decision of the Riksdag in 1909: it was then determined that
the elections to both Chambers and to their committees, to the oounty
councils, and to the town councils, should be proportional.
The Swedish method of proportional representation, brought forward by Professor
E. Phragmén, is a free method, not a list method: the elector has a right to
vote for whatever candidates he pleases, and there are no official lists of
candidates. It is distinctive of the method that it assures to the elector the right
to place on his voting paper a party-indication (a party-name or some other
verbal indication of a certain group of electors or of a certain political object).
The voting papers that have the same party-indication, whether they include the
same candidates or not, are regarded as belonging to one group (a party group).
All voting-papers without party-indication are regarded as forming a common
group (the free group). The number of seats affected by the election is divided
among the groups according to D’Hondt’s rules; and the seats that each group
has-received are distributed within that group in accordance with proportional
principles, in which special attention in assigned to the order of the names in the
voting-paper.
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