Territorial Review Copenhagen - Region Hovedstaden

220
national level. 4 This election system via districts leads to some electoral
malapportionment: the votes of some citizens weigh more than others‘. In a
perfectly apportioned system, no citizen‘s vote would weigh more than
another‘s, as is the case in Israel and the Netherlands, where members are
elected in a single national at-large district. In practice, most OECD
countries‘ electoral systems have some kind of malapportionment, like
Denmark‘s. But compared with other unitary OECD countries, the electoral
malapportionment in Denmark is relatively high (see Table 3.1).
Table 3.1. Electoral malapportionment in selected unitary OECD countries
Malapportionment (%)
Year
Netherlands 0.00 1996
Italy 0.82 1996
Finland 0.88 1991
Sweden 1.10 1998
Slovakia 1.31 1994
Poland 1.74 1997
Ireland 2.55 1992
Czech Republic 2.71 1996
Greece 4.06 1997
UK 4.56 1997
Denmark 5.24 1997
Norway 6.57 1993
France 6.95 1998
Turkey 8.59 1995
Source: Samuels and Snyder (2001)
The under-representation of Copenhagen in the parliamentary system
has been slight but consistent over the last decades, but this problem
increased after the local government reform in 2007. After the reform, the
existing electoral districts and regions were replaced by ten multi-member
constituencies, grouped in three new electoral regions. In addition, the
method of distributing constituency or district seats changed. 5 The result of
this change is that the relative under-representation of Copenhagen in the
national parliament has increased (Figure 3.6). The number of voters
represented by one parliamentary seat was 23 764 for Copenhagen, against
19 768 for Denmark as a whole. Areas that are relatively over-represented in
parliament are the island of Bornholm and North and South Jutland. 6