How Denmark governs itself with a constitution it never rewrote

What the constitution is and how it survived

The text of the Danish constitution dates back to 1849, when Denmark peacefully became a constitutional monarchy on 5 June of that year following the European revolutions of 1848. A country that had been an absolute monarchy acquired a parliamentary one without a revolution of its own.

That text has not been replaced. It has been interpreted by jurists to suit modern conditions, which is a very different method of constitutional development from the periodic rewriting practised elsewhere, and it means the document governing Denmark is older than most European states.

The reform of 1953 is the substantial exception and it did three things at once. It abolished the Landsting, the elected upper house, converting parliament from two chambers into one. It ended colonial status for Greenland. And it allowed female rights of succession to the throne.

Formally the monarch retains the ability to refuse royal assent to a bill, and for a bill to become law it requires both a royal signature and a ministerial countersignature. Those are real provisions in the text and they are not exercised, which is the standard condition of a European constitutional monarchy and the reason the 1849 document still works. A constitution that grants powers nobody uses can survive changes it would otherwise have to accommodate, because the practice moves while the text stays where it is.

How the Folketing is elected

The Folketing is composed of 179 seats, of which two are reserved for the Faroe Islands and two for Greenland, with the remaining 175 filled by members elected in Denmark. All 179 are contested at elections held at least every four years.

The system is proportional and the threshold is low. A party must clear 2% of the national vote to share in the distribution of seats, which is a low barrier and produces a parliament with a large number of parties in it. A threshold that low is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: it admits small parties to the chamber and makes a single-party majority almost unreachable, which is why the governing arrangement is nearly always a negotiation. There is also a route into parliament by winning a seat directly in a constituency, and the margins can be very tight: at one recent election the Christian Democrats came within about two hundred votes of a direct seat in western Jutland while falling below the national threshold.

The effect of a low threshold is a fragmented chamber, and the effect of a fragmented chamber in Denmark has not been instability. Parties are numerous, coalitions are common, and the country has been governed for long periods by minority administrations that legislate through agreements with parties outside government.

That is the distinctive feature of Danish parliamentary practice. A minority government is normal rather than provisional, it negotiates support proposal by proposal or through standing agreements with named parties, and the arrangement is stable because everyone involved treats it as the way the system works.

Why a minority government is not a crisis

The mechanism that makes minority government workable is negative parliamentarism, the same principle Sweden uses. A government takes office and stays in it so long as no majority forms against it, which means a cabinet can govern while most of the chamber abstains rather than supports.

Confidence is tested when someone chooses to test it. General debates on broader questions of government policy may be held in parliament and may be followed by a motion of no confidence, and the opposition rarely requests one because the government is usually certain of the numbers.

A government without a majority has to assemble one for each significant bill, which gives opposition parties direct influence over the text of legislation and makes committee work and negotiation the substance of Danish politics rather than the theatre around it.

The cost is slower decision-making and a great deal of horse-trading, and the benefit is that policy tends to be durable because more parties have signed up to it. Danish welfare, labour market and pension reforms have generally been agreed across several parties, which is why they survive changes of government. A reform passed by the government of the day alone would be reversed by the next one; a reform signed by five parties is not.

How the parties are arranged

Danish politics runs on blocs rather than on parties, and the blocs are stable while the parties inside them are not.

A red bloc of social democratic, socialist and left-liberal parties faces a blue bloc of liberal, conservative and right-populist ones, and governments are formed from within one of them with support from the rest of it. New parties appear regularly and some of them last: at one recent election only one of the new entrants cleared the threshold, while several others fell short despite substantial campaigns.

The largest party has for most of the past century been social democratic, and the party system as a whole sits within a narrower ideological range than the number of parties suggests. Danish parties disagree about tax rates, immigration and the size of the public sector, and they agree about the existence of a universal welfare state, membership of NATO, an open economy and the basic structure of the labour market.

That agreement is what makes minority government workable. A chamber whose parties differ on degree rather than on fundamentals can assemble a majority for a specific bill from an unexpected combination, and Danish legislation is frequently passed by coalitions that would not govern together.

What the state is expected to do

Denmark runs a comprehensive welfare state and finances it through high taxes, and the political argument is about the level rather than the principle.

Health care, education including university, childcare, elderly care and income replacement during unemployment and sickness are provided universally and funded from general taxation rather than from contributions tied to employment. That design makes benefits a right of residence rather than an entitlement earned, which is the feature that most distinguishes the Nordic model from the continental European one.

The administration of it is local. Municipalities deliver most services and raise a substantial share of the money through a local income tax they set, and regions run the hospitals, so the citizen's contact with the welfare state is with a body they elect separately from the national parliament.

The pressures on it are the ones every rich democracy faces and Denmark faces early because its model is expensive by design. An ageing population, rising health costs and the difficulty of maintaining public sector productivity all press on a system funded by taxing current work, and successive governments drawn from both blocs have raised retirement ages and tightened eligibility rules rather than reduce the coverage of the system itself.

What the realm actually is

Denmark is the centre of a realm rather than a unitary state, and the four reserved parliamentary seats are the visible sign of it. The Faroe Islands were granted home rule in 1948 and Greenland's colonial status was ended by the reform of 1953, and both have since moved to further self-government.

Each has its own legislature and government, and each has taken over a widening list of competences from Copenhagen. What remains with the Danish state in both cases is the shorter list: constitutional matters, citizenship, the supreme court, foreign policy and defence, though the North Atlantic territories have their own positions on the first two of those and have exercised them.

The most consequential exercise was European. Denmark joined the European Communities on 1 January 1973, and Greenland, which entered with it, later withdrew, which makes it one of very few territories to have left the European project, and it did so by its own vote while remaining part of the Danish realm.

That arrangement gives a country of under six million people a strategic position out of proportion to its size. Greenland's location, resources and airspace matter to powers far larger than Denmark, and the management of that interest is a permanent feature of Danish foreign policy rather than an occasional file. A self-governing territory whose external relations are handled by a small European state, in a region several great powers care about, is an arrangement with no obvious parallel.

Where the country stands internationally

Following the Second World War, Denmark ended a policy of neutrality that had lasted two hundred years. It has been a member of NATO since the alliance's founding in 1949, and membership remains highly popular, though there have been serious confrontations with the United States over security policy at various points.

The European position is more qualified. Denmark joined the European Communities on 1 January 1973 alongside the United Kingdom and Ireland, and it negotiated opt-outs from several areas of integration, including the single currency, which is why the krone rather than the euro is in circulation. It joined the Schengen area in 2001.

Nordic cooperation is the other frame and it is older and less formal than the European one. Denmark belongs to the Nordic Council alongside its neighbours, and the passport union, the common labour market and the mutual recognition arrangements among the Nordic countries all predate European membership by decades and continue alongside it.

The Arctic is the newest element of the position and the one changing fastest. Denmark sits on the Arctic Council by virtue of Greenland, and the retreat of sea ice has turned a peripheral file into a central one involving shipping routes, seabed claims, resource access and the security interests of much larger states.

Who runs the rest of the country

Danish local government is unusually powerful for a unitary state and unusually consolidated. A reform in the 2000s merged the counties and most municipalities into a much smaller number of larger units, replacing the counties with five regions and reducing the municipalities to fewer than a hundred.

The division of work is clear. Regions run the hospitals and the health service, which is by far the largest thing they do, and municipalities run schools, childcare, elderly care, social services and local planning, funded through a local income tax they set themselves within limits.

That local taxing power is what makes the arrangement real. A Danish municipality raises a substantial share of what it spends and answers to its own electorate for the rate, which is a different relationship from the grant-dependent local government of most European countries, and it means a voter can see the connection between the tax they pay and the school their children attend.

The consequence is that a great deal of what a citizen experiences as the Danish state is administered by a body they vote for separately. High tax rates and high service expectations meet at municipal level, and local elections are contested on the trade-off between them rather than on national party lines alone. Denmark: economy goes into what those services cost and Denmark: history how the arrangement was arrived at.