Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Svip | Hacker News Reader

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I cannot speak fully to the Swedish situation, but in Denmark, MPs are independent as defined in the constitution. Yes, elections are largely party-based, but once elected, MPs are allowed to vote as they want. Of course, if they chose to defy the party line, they risk "losing the whip" as they'd say in the UK, which basically amounts to being expelled from the party.

That being said, it does not take a lot of signatures to get on a ballot as a candidate outside the parties in Denmark (a few hundreds, I believe), though only two candidates have successfully managed to get elected that way. Conversely, Denmark has a high threshold for political parties (requiring signatures amounting to 1% of the vote of the last election, so usually around 21k), but the threshold to get into parliament is only 2% (which I believe is one of the lowest amongst countries that uses similar proportional representative systems).

Returning to the towing the line (or rather lack thereof), the Danish parliament have a lot of independent MPs in parliament, because a lot find reason to quit their party after getting elected. Wikipedia has a fine table of MPs who has changed colours since the last election in November 2022:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketi...

MPs are independent in Germany as well, but in practice they vote with their parliamentary group almost all the time. "Fraktionsdisziplin" (discipline of the group) is a common term and generally expected - failure to achieve that is considered failure of the leadership and can quickly escalate.

And even those who are elected directly wouldn't win their local election without their party, so all of them are very beholden to their party. Continuous defection on votes will see them not get re-elected, even if they don't get thrown out of the party.

Theory vs practice makes all the difference.

I don't necessarily think this is a failure of theory in face of practice. Most party members are team members, and are willing to follow party leadership most of the time. Yes, I know the leadership has leverage that ordinary members do not, but I think most of the time, leadership need not exert that leverage. But the list of members who switch party in Denmark between elections suggest that the theory is very much practised, but it needn't be all the time.

Most of the time leadership doesn't need to pressure individuals, because they follow the commands -- not because they so well aligned on all topic (they are not).

Of course there's an argument to be made that it would be a lot more chaotic if every elected MP truly was only beholden to their consciousness, because your certainty of how some vote will go would be very low and you'd have to actually convince MPs that it's the right thing to do (that would open up the question of transparency, i.e. who voted for what; official German politics are fundamentally opposed to that idea).

Brokering backroom deals among party elites is far more efficient and predictable -- you can always buy agreement by offering some concessions on a different topic they care about. But then we're back to that question: why do you need hundreds of people if the decisions are made by a few dozens?

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