Elections in Norway

Elections in Norway gives information on election and election results in Norway. An election is a process in which a vote is held to elect candidates to an office. It is the mechanism by which a democracy fills elective offices in the legislature, and sometimes the executive and judiciary, and in which electorates choose local government officials.

See election for a more comprehensive discussion and the List of democracy and elections-related topics for an overview on related topics.

Norway elects on national level a legislature. The Great Diet (Stortinget) has 165 members, elected for a four year term (during which it may not be dissolved) by the proportional representation in multi-seat constituencies. From 2005 the Storting will have 169 members. The Storting is for legislative cases divided in the Lagting (41 members) and the Odelsting (124 members). Norway has a multi-party system, with numerous parties in which no one party often has a chance of gaining power alone, and parties must work with each other to form coalition governments.

In Norway, elections are held every second year, alternating between elections for the Parliament and local elections, both of which are held on a 4-yearly basis.

Suffrage is universal from the year a person turns 18 years old, even if the person turns 18 later in the year the election is held. Only Norwegian citizens can vote in the Parliamentary elections, but foreigners who have lived in Norway for three years continuously can vote in the local elections.

Women's suffrage was adopted in 1913.

Contents

1 Local elections

2 Parliamentary elections

Local elections

The local elections are two separate elections held at the same time. The first is the county municipality election, which elects politicians to the County Council . Second is the municipality election, which elects politicians to the municipality council .

Parliamentary elections

Norway is divided into 19 counties, and each county is a constituency in the election. Each county elects a preselected number of seats in the Parliament (Stortinget) based on the population and geographical area of the county. This practice has been criticised because in some larger counties with sparse population a single vote counts more than in other more densely populated counties. Others claim that counties with a scattered and sparse population and who are situated far away from the central administration in Oslo should have a stronger representation in the Parliament. In the more recent elections a vote in Finnmark county has counted twice as much as in Akershus county or Oslo county.

After the votes are counted and the members of the Parliament are designated their respective seats of their county, 19 levelling seats, one in each county, are divided to parties who got fewer seats than their election result percentage would suggest. Only parties with more than 4% of the votes on a national basis are entitled to levelling seats. The practice of levelling seats was adopted in 1989.

For the elections in 2005 and 2009 the distribution of seats is:

Results

Norwegian parliamentary election, 2001, 1997, 1993

Referenda

Norwegian EU referendum, 1994