Are Danes More Inclined to Ticket Splitting than the Swedes and the English?1

Abstract

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) elections; this happened far more often in Denmark in 2001 than in the two other countries. One hypothesis suggests that this owes to party system differences between the three countries, since both the number of parties running in the different elections and the discrepancy between the national and the local party systems are expected to influence the level of inter-level vote splitting. However, elec-tion statistics and survey data based analyses (Denmark in 2001, Sweden in 2002, and England in 2001) give only limited support to the hypothesis. It appears that Danish voters did in fact split their 2001 national and local votes more than Swedish and English voters did and more than party system differences can account for.