Archive of Voting Records

Period: 1979-2015

Abstract

The Archive of Voting Records consists of voting records from the electronic voting system of the Norwegian Storting (the parliament). The archive has data on two levels:

• The single vote of the legislators
• The voting-issues

The voting records

The basic information is the legislators' vote (the 'Ayes' and 'Noes'). The legislators are identified by unique ID-numbers. These are the same numbers used in the different Achives of Politicians. This implies that all the information in these archives is also available through the Archive of Voting Records (e.g. party affiliation, constituency, occupation, education etc.). Note that the single vote of a legislator and the aggregated vote of his/her party rarely differ.

Information about the voting-issues

The information includes:

• Identification and date of the votes
• The committees of which the recommendations was prepared
• The Presidium (president presiding the votes and the party affiliation of his/hers)
• The subjects of the votes
• Type of chambers, recommendations, proposals and votes

The archive is most often used to make disagreement indices between couples of parties. In general the data quality is considered to be good. Note, however, that some types of votes that take place in the Storting are not conducted electronically, and hence are not included in this archive. Firstly, if the president of the Storting knows that the assembly is unanimous there (most often) will be no (electronic) vote. This implies that the disagreement indices between couples of parties may be somewhat too high. Secondly, small parties with only one or two legislators are to some degree under-represented. This is due to the fact that when the president knows that a small party's proposal is not supported by other parties, there often will be no (electronic) vote at all. This might underestimate the disagreement between small and large parties.

Note that the number of recommendations and proposals has varied quite a lot since the late 1970s. This is mostly due to altered voting procedures throughout the years. In some electoral periods personal proposals and recommendations have been treated in one vote, while separately (two votes) in others. In 1997 there e.g. was a change in the Rules of Procedure regarding the treating of the Fiscal Budget. This change reduced the number of votes by about 50 percent.

Also note that the period 1981-1989 (session 126-133) only holds information about what the 'seat' (and hence the party) voted, and not what the different legislators voted.

About Archive of Voting Records

Contents (No English translation)

Background (No English translation)

Quality of Data (No English translation)

Use in Analysis (No English translation)

Sources (No English translation)

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