Participation in Indigenous Democracy: Voter Turnout in Sámi Parliamentary Elections in Norway and Sweden

Abstract

This article compares and analyzes voter turnout in the 2013 elections to the Sámi parliaments in Norway and Sweden, using data from voter surveys. Is voting in these elections motivated by the same factors that explain turnout in national parliamentary elections? First, the study showed that a common election day for national and Sámi elections is an important reason for the higher turnout in Norway. Second, involvement in Sámi society was the most important factor for explaining turnout in both countries. General political resources and motivation had some explanatory power in Norway, but not in Sweden. This possibly reflects a more far‐reaching difference between Sámi politics in Norway and Sweden. In Norway, the Sámi electorate seems to be more politically integrated in the national polity, and the institutional ties between Sámi and national politics are stronger. This may be explained in part by the historical legacy of each state’s policy.

Political Cleavages in Indigenous Representation: The Case of the Norwegian and Swedish Sámediggis

“…Partly due to this, turnout is lower in Sweden. 30 In Swedish S amediggi elections, the entire country constitutes a single constituency (with 31 seats), while Norway's S amediggi (with 39 seats) is elected from seven multi-member constituencies. Moreover, voting for individual candidates has no effect in Norway, whereas personal votes are important for electing candidates in Sweden.…”

“…Using data from the 2009 S ami Election Study in Norway and the 2013 S ami Election Studies in both countries, earlier studies suggested that the cleavages discussed above are also reflected in voter attitudes. 51 In this article, we use data from the 2017 S ami Election Studies that were carried out in Norway and Sweden. Both election studies are based on random samples of registered voters drawn from the electoral roll.…”

Evaluation of the Implementation of the Principles of Law Enforcement, Transparency, and Accountability in the Implementation of Regional Head Elections During the Covid-19 Pandemic in the South Coast

“…Elections are a concept of procedural democracy (Júnior & Salgado, 2021;Saffon & González-Bertomeu, 2017;Saffon & Urbinati, 2013;Simon, 2018) , elections are also the strongest force for the people to participate in modern representative democracy (Bergh et al, 2018;Freitag & Stadelmann-Steffen, 2010;Henn & Foard, 2014) . In Indonesia, the electoral system that is run is useful for filling positions of people's representatives such as President and Vice President, DPR members, DPD members, Provincial DPRD members, Regency DPRD members, and City DPRD members (Gallagher, 2011;Hillman, 2018;Junaidi, 2020 ;Suwitri et al, 2019) .…”