Norway's politics: a parliament nobody can dissolve

Why no Norwegian government can call an election

The Storting's own account of itself states the mechanism in a single line: there are no by-elections, and there is no constitutional provision to dissolve the Storting between elections. Article 54 of the Constitution requires an election every fourth year by the end of September, and Article 71 makes those elected members of the Storting for four successive years. Election day must be a Monday in September, and the sitting government sets which Monday it is. That choice is the whole of a cabinet's discretion over the electoral calendar.

One exception exists, and it was written to protect the vote instead of the government. If something extraordinary has prevented a significant portion of the electorate from voting, two thirds of the sitting Storting may decide that a new election shall be held, and a newly elected Storting may not reverse that decision. The same article allows the proceedings to be extended by up to one day or postponed, in each case only as far as is necessary to give the electorate the possibility to vote.

The absence of the other option shapes the rest. Where a prime minister can go to the country, the threat of an early election disciplines a coalition from inside. Norwegian cabinets hold no such instrument. Article 15 obliges a member of the Council of State to submit an application to resign once the Storting has passed a vote of no confidence, obliges the King to grant it, and restricts the outgoing cabinet to the business required for the proper discharge of duties. The chamber that brought the government down then produces its successor from the same arithmetic, and the electorate is not consulted in between.

How the Storting turns votes into seats

The Storting has 169 members, and they arrive through two calculations laid on top of one another. 150 seats are settled inside 19 constituencies. The remaining 19, one for each constituency, are held back and distributed nationally, and they are called seats at large.

How many of the 150 a constituency receives is not a straight population share. The calculation combines population with area so that thinly populated constituencies are also adequately represented, which is the Storting's own wording for a rule under which square kilometres are counted alongside people. Article 59 sets the method for dividing them: proportional representation by the Sainte-Laguë method with 1.4 as the first distribution figure. List alliances are prohibited in the same article.

Counting inside constituencies produces what the Storting describes as a skewed distribution. When four seats are divided among seven parties no allocation can match the votes exactly, and the method itself tends to overrepresent larger parties and underrepresent smaller ones. The seats at large correct for that. They go to parties that ended with fewer members than their national share of the vote implies, in the constituencies where they came closest to winning a seat, and only parties above 4% of the national vote may compete for them. Constituency seats carry no threshold at all, so support packed into one part of the country can put a party in the chamber on a national share that would never reach the seats at large.

Voters choose between printed lists, and the parties decide who is on them at nomination meetings held in the months before the election. Almost anyone entitled to vote may stand, with exceptions that include civil servants in the ministries and the foreign service and judges of the Supreme Court. Until the amended Election Act came into force in May 2024, a voter could strike out names on a parliamentary list or give extra votes to particular candidates. That is now possible only in local government elections, which leaves the order a party publishes as the order that takes the seats.

What a minority government has to do

Labour governed with a majority of its own seats from 1945 to 1961, and no party has held a single-party majority since. Majority government did not become impossible, only uncommon. The centre-right coalition assembled in 1983 held a majority until the 1985 election removed it, and none followed until the coalition formed after the 2005 election, which took 87 of the 169 seats and kept 86 of them in 2009.

A cabinet without a majority, in a chamber it cannot dissolve, has to build one for each thing it wants. The record of how such governments have ended is a record of the questions on which no majority could be built.

Not one of those was followed by an election. Each was followed by another government assembled out of the sitting Storting. Thorbjørn Jagland's case is the most exact: after the September 1997 election he announced that his government would step down because Labour had failed to win at least 36.9% of the national vote, the share it had taken in 1993. A three-party minority coalition of the Centre, Christian Democratic and Liberal parties under Kjell Magne Bondevik moved into office in October. That government fell in March 2000 over gas plants Bondevik opposed on climate grounds, and Jens Stoltenberg took over at the head of a minority Labour cabinet without anybody voting.

Governments that serve a full term are worth naming for how few of them there are. The coalition Bondevik formed in 2001, which depended on Progress Party votes from outside the cabinet, was the first to stay in office for a complete four-year election period since Per Borten's coalition of 1965 to 1969. The pattern is older than the postwar decades: nine governments held office between 1918 and 1935, nearly all of them minority cabinets, lasting eighteen months on average. In January 2020 the Progress Party left the governing coalition, and the three parties that remained continued in office as a minority for the rest of the term.

How parliamentarism became a written rule

The rule that a cabinet must not have the Storting against it has been in force since 1884 and was written into the Constitution in February 2007, one hundred and twenty-three years later. For most of that time it was constitutional custom, which is to say a rule everyone followed and no document stated.

What the king still signs

The Constitution grants the executive power to the King, and the Council of State exercises it in his name. Article 12 requires that Council to consist of a prime minister and at least seven other members. Decisions drawn up by the King are valid only when countersigned, normally by the prime minister. Article 30 obliges everyone with a seat in the Council to express an opinion frankly, and obliges a member who believes a decision conflicts with the form of government or the laws of the realm to protest and to enter the protest in the record; a member who has not protested is deemed to have agreed, and can be impeached for it. Where a parliamentary majority is clear the appointment of a government by the King is a formality, and where an election produces no clear majority the King appoints the leader of the party most likely to be able to form one.

Two further duties tie the government to the chamber. Under Article 26, treaties of special importance, and any treaty whose implementation requires a new law or a decision of the Storting, do not bind Norway until the Storting has consented. Under Article 82, the government must give the Storting all the information necessary for the matters it submits, and no member of the Council of State may give the Storting or its bodies incorrect or misleading information.

How the Storting can indict a cabinet

The case that settled parliamentarism was an impeachment. A Conservative government had refused to pass a constitutional amendment the Storting had accepted three times; the Riksrett, the Court of Impeachment, tried it and the government was forced to resign in 1884, after which decisive influence over who governed sat with the Storting and no longer with the king.

The court still exists. Article 86 seats six members elected by the Storting for six years alongside the five longest-serving permanently appointed justices of the Supreme Court, with the Chief Justice presiding, and it judges members of the Council of State, of the Supreme Court and of the Storting for breaches of their constitutional obligations. The limitation period for bringing an indictment may not be set at less than fifteen years. The institution lost most of its weight after 1884 and has been passive since 1927; the amendment of February 2007 rebuilt its composition with the stated intention of restoring it.

The same round of amendments removed the last piece of older machinery. Until 2009 the Storting divided itself into the Odelsting and the Lagting for the single purpose of voting on legislation, and the Lagting mainly confirmed what the Odelsting had decided. The amendment passed in February 2007 repealed the division from the 2009 general election, and the Storting became one chamber for every purpose.

Changing the Constitution is slower than changing a government, and deliberately so. Article 121 requires a proposal to be submitted to one of the first three Stortings after a general election and decided by one of the first three Stortings after the following election, with two thirds in favour, and it bars amendments that contradict the principles of the Constitution. Every amendment has to cross an election. That is the one point at which the electorate is written into a process it otherwise cannot interrupt.

Why two referendums settled the European question

Norway applied to the European Communities and their successor in 1962, 1967 and 1992. Parliamentary arithmetic was never the obstacle. Membership had a clear majority in the Storting through the 1960s, on the account of Store norske leksikon, and it was the fall of Per Borten's government in 1971, over division inside it about membership, that opened the way to a referendum the following year.

The 1972 vote went against membership after a mobilisation Store norske leksikon describes as a clear protest from the grassroots against the political establishment. The 1994 vote returned the same answer, with the fronts less hard than in 1972. Denmark, Sweden and Finland took the accession treaties. Norway did not.

Whether to hold a referendum at all is the Storting's own decision. Both votes happened because parliament chose to put the question, and in 1972 it put a question to which its own majority preferred the opposite answer.

What replaced membership gives European Union law effect inside Norway without giving Norway a vote on it. Under the European Economic Area agreement, transposed into Norwegian law as EØS-loven, Norway takes into its own law those pieces of European Union legislation deemed relevant and receives access to the internal market in return. Agriculture, oil and fish are not wholly covered. Governments since 1994 have asked to take part in areas of cooperation beyond the agreement and have been granted non-voting participation in several, among them the Common Security and Defence Policy, the Schengen Agreement, the European Defence Agency and 19 separate programmes.

The Constitution has a gate for this. Article 115 lets the Storting consent, by a three-fourths majority with at least two thirds of its members present, that an international organisation Norway belongs to may exercise powers normally vested in the authorities of the state, and it withholds from any such transfer the power to alter the Constitution.

Which alliances Norway holds outside the European Union

The record puts Norway in the United Nations from 27 November 1945, NATO from 4 April 1949, the Council of Europe from 5 May 1949, the European Free Trade Association from 3 May 1960, the World Trade Organization from 1 January 1995 and the Schengen Area from 18 May 1999. For the Nordic Council, the Arctic Council, the OECD and the European Economic Area it carries no start date.

NATO is the older commitment and the less contested one. Norway was among the states that founded the alliance on 4 April 1949, and Norwegian forces have served in operations under the United Nations, under NATO and under the European Union's Common Security and Defence Policy. Conscription runs to about six to twelve months of training, and women have been drafted alongside men since 2013.

The state also administers territory a long way from Europe. The Act of 27 February 1930 declares Bouvet Island, Queen Maud Land and Peter I Island subject to Norwegian sovereignty as dependencies, and on 12 June 2015 Norway formally annexed the area between Queen Maud Land and the South Pole that maps had until then left unclaimed. An earlier attempt to annex East Greenland ended in defeat at the Hague Tribunal in 1933.

How the Sámi Parliament fits the system

Article 108 obliges the authorities of the state to create conditions enabling the Sami people, as an indigenous people, to preserve and develop its language, culture and way of life. The institution built for that is the Sámi Parliament, opened at Karasjok on 9 October 1989.

It has 39 representatives, elected by and among the Sámi from seven constituencies every fourth year. The plenary assembly is its supreme body, meets four times a year in the parliament building at Karasjok, and sits in public. An executive council of five, chaired by the president, runs the daily work and holds office as long as the plenary has confidence in it, which reproduces at a smaller scale the relationship between the Storting and the Council of State. The Sámi Parliament states that nobody has the authority to issue instructions to it and that it sets its own priorities, and it has taken over administrative responsibility in fields including language, culture and education. Influence over traditional territories runs through it and through the Finnmark Act.

The other half of the record is the objection. Norway has been criticised internationally for the Norwegianisation policies pursued against the indigenous population and for discrimination against it, and in 1990 Norway ratified the International Labour Organization convention of 1989 on indigenous peoples. The institution dates from 1989. The policies it was built to answer are older.

How local government keeps being redrawn

Article 49 gives the inhabitants the right to govern local affairs through locally elected bodies, with the details left to ordinary law. The Alderman Act of 1837 first set out what those authorities could do. Below the state there are two tiers, counties and municipalities, each with a directly elected assembly, and Oslo is both at once.

Statute settles the division of work. Municipalities run kindergartens, primary and lower secondary schools, primary healthcare, care for the elderly and disabled, local planning, water and sewerage. Counties run upper secondary and vocational education, county roads and public transport, regional planning and cultural heritage. The state keeps hospitals, universities, the police, the courts, the armed forces and foreign policy. Every county also has a governor appointed by the King in Council who oversees how counties and municipalities administer themselves, and Svalbard has a governor of its own who answers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The map has been redrawn twice inside a decade, the second time in reverse. The municipal reform of 2015 set out to consolidate 428 municipalities into 356. The regional reform of 2020 cut the counties from 19 to 11, though few new responsibilities moved with them. Then the mergers came apart: Viken divided back into Akershus, Buskerud and Østfold, Vestfold and Telemark separated, Troms and Finnmark separated, and as of 1 January 2024 there are 15 counties and 357 municipalities.

The electoral map did not follow. The Storting is still elected from 19 constituencies, and those constituencies correspond to the county borders as they stood before the reforms, so the country votes on a county map that no longer administers anything.