David Arter

Small State Influence Within the EU: The Case of Finland's 'Northern Dimension Initiative'

This article deals with regionalization in Northern Europe, focusing in particular on the Northern Dimension Initiative (NDI) which, launched in 1997, was Finlands first political initiative as an EU member. The NDI was ostensibly designed to enhance the influence of Northern Europe as a political actor by co‐ordinating the work of the various cross‐national initiatives that emerged there in the 1990s. The NDI was far from a routine initiative. It urged the need to improve co‐operation between the EU and such outside organizations as the Barents EuroArctic Regional Council and the Council of Baltic Sea States on the one hand, and to increase co‐ordination between different programmes and pillars within the EU on the other. The central question posed in this article is: ‘What does the NDI indicate about the ability of small states to influence EU policy? Have small states become more influential in the post‐Cold War era? Is ‘small’ synonymous with ‘smart’ in Joenniemis terms?

Analysing ‘Successor Parties': The Case of the True Finns

Whilst the ‘successor party’ (SP) has a well-established place in the literature on post-communist Eastern and Central Europe, occasional references to its West European counterpart have tended to use the term loosely and not separate it out from other varieties of new party. Focusing on the question, ‘where do parties come from?’ – that is, the process of party origination – this article makes a case for viewing the SP as a distinct genus in the West European party hemisphere. The SP is defined as a party which is nominally and legally a new entity that takes the place of, and fills at least some of the political space vacated by, a single, defunct party of origin. The mortality of the ‘original party’ is a sine qua non. SPs emerge with a clear political inheritance. What this is and how they interpret and respond to the inheritance makes the case for their systematic study. The paper also asks, ‘where do new parties go to?’ (how do they evolve?). The question of party change in SPs is analysed by reference to the True Finns.

Introduction: Comparing the legislative performance of legislatures

The problem with the central ‘Mezey question’ – ‘how much policy-making power does a legislature have?’ – is not so much the question itself, since legislatures have to do with law-making, however tenuously in some cases, as the absence of the precision tools with which to calibrate the extent of a legislatures policy power. This in turn has fed a tendency to accept rather than confront the legislative stereotypes embedded in the existing classifications of legislatures. There has also been a propensity to conflate ‘legislative capacity’ and ‘legislative performance’ and to reach conclusions about strength and weakness in legislatures from an assessment of a legislatures capacity – its potential policy power – rather than analysing the nature of its policy output. Strong committees, for example, do not in themselves betoken a strong, policy-making legislature. The starting point of this special issue is the need for systematic output analysis in comparative legislative research and, accordingly, the Introduction seeks to devise a series of indicators with which to make at least a rudimentary cross-national assessment of legislative performance.

Conclusion. Questioning the ‘mezey question’: An interrogatory framework for the comparative study of legislatures

The Conclusion broadens the notion of ‘legislative performance’ from various measures of legislative output to an analysis of the performance of legislatures in the totality of the legislative process. The shift is from the ‘how much policy power?’ question of Mezey to a broad-gauge ‘how?’ question, with the emphasis on process and the overall anatomy of legislative influence. The question is: ‘how do legislators, both severally and collectively, work to perform their legislative roles in the three phases of the legislative process – that is, in the formulation and deliberation of public policy and oversight of the executive?’ Fifteen subsidiary questions are then devised, which, taken together, constitute a framework for the comparative study of legislative performance in the macro-sense of the term.

Taking the Gilt off the Conservatives' Gingerbread: The April 2011 Finnish General Election

In a report on the 1979 Finnish general election sub-titled ‘The EmptyHanded Winner?’, the present author focused on the dilemma of the Conservatives (KOK), who advanced by over three percentage points to gain their (then) highest-ever vote but, unloved by Moscow, the Finnish president and the party political left – and not necessarily in that order – failed to negotiate a place in the post-election coalition. In those Cold War years the Conservatives, whose poll in 1979 was second only to the Social Democrats (SDP), were kept ‘out in the cold’ for so-called ‘general reasons’ (yleiset syyt) – the anticipation of a hostile reaction in the Kremlin and, by extension, the need to incorporate the Communist-dominated Finnish People’s Democratic League into government. The Conservatives in short were strategically marginalised. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the Nokia-led recovery from economic recession in the early 1990s, EUmembership in 1995 and post-industrial social structural change transformed Finland and, after several elections as ‘runner up’, the Conservatives, led by the finance minister Jyrki Katainen, became on 17 April 2011 the largest party for the first time since Finnish independence in 1917. It was ironic, however, that they did so as the second biggest loser in terms of parliamentary seats and with barely one-fifth of the active electorate – less than in 1979 – and that the only one of the eight parliamentary parties in the 2007–11 Eduskunta to gain either votes or seats was Timo Soini’s populist radical right True Finn Party (PS), which spectacularly claimed almost one-fifth of both votes and seats. When the international media wrote extravagantly about ‘a massive victory for a massive man’ (alluding to Soini), it was clear that the True Finns’ result had contrived to take much of the gilt off the Conservatives’ gingerbread. In his WEP report on the June 2010 Dutch parliamentary election, Joop van Holsteyn (2011: 412) notes that a remarkable feature of the poll was

On Assessing Strength and Weakness in Parliamentary Committee Systems: Some Preliminary Observations on the New Scottish Parliament

The article is in three parts. The first highlights some features of the Scottish Parliament and sketches the powers and functions of its committee system. The second presents (but does not test) a series of hypotheses relating to the legislative capacity of the Scottish committees. The third considers the limitations of existing approaches to the analysis of the Scottish committees and suggests a method of analysing strength and weakness in committee systems both in Scotland and elsewhere.

The End of the Social Democratic Hegemony? The March 2007 Finnish General Election

The 18 March 2007 general election marked the centenary of mass democracy in Finland. On 25 May 100 years earlier, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy of the Czarist Russian Empire, all men and women over 24 years were enfranchised in elections to the new 200-seat unicameral Eduskunta and women were also eligible to run as parliamentary candidates. Nineteen women MPs were returned to the 1907 Eduskunta. Following the 2007 general election that number had risen to a record 84 (42 per cent) and included the first female member to represent the singlemember constituency of the Åland islands. Not all recent figures compare favourably, however. In 1907 turnout was 70.7 per cent and that level has not been reached in any of the last five general elections. In 2007 turnout was 67.9 per cent, the lowest since the Second World War. If the relatively low level of civic mobilisation reflected a particularly bland campaign – even by Finnish standards – and the widespread voter perception of only minimal policy differences between the parties, the result defied the last-minute opinion polls. Of the two leading parties in the centre-left ‘red earth’ coalition, the Centre, although losing four Eduskunta seats, emerged as the largest party in consecutive elections for the first time in its history. Its coalition partner, the Social Democrats, lost eight seats and slumped to become the third largest party for the first time ever. The Conservatives, the leading opposition party, however, won the second highest vote in their history and gained ten parliamentary seats. All in all, the centenary election marked the possible end of the Social Democratic hegemony, and offered the prospect of the ‘normalisation’ of centre-right government in Finland.

Committee cohesion and the ‘corporate dimension’ of parliamentary committees: A comparative analysis

As a counterpoise to the focus of this special issue on party cohesion and the conventional wisdom in western Europe that it is the parliamentary party groups that are the pre‐eminent actors, this article explores the notion of committee cohesion. It begins by identifying several factors that are likely, either severally or in combination, to impinge on the level of cohesion in parliamentary committees. The problems of defining and measuring committee cohesion are then considered and the significance of one possible indicator of committee cohesion‐the committee bill provision ‐ discussed. Conflict and cohesion and the complex internal dynamics of committees are said to occupy the operational middle ground between the use of their formal powers ‐ which comprise the ‘inputs’ ‐ and the enactment of a committee bill or the instigation of an inquiry ‐ which constitute the ‘outputs’. Conflict and cohesion as properties of parliamentary committees belong to the largely secret world of legislative operations ‐ the world of ‘withinputs’.

A ‘Pivotal Centre Party’ Calls the Shots: The 2015 Finnish General Election

The Finnish general election on 19 April 2015 resulted in a resounding defeat for the blue–red, Conservative–Social Democrat core of the four-party governing coalition led by Alexander Stubb and the Phoenix-like rise from its 2011 nadir of the opposition-based Centre Party, which became the largest party for the third time in the last four elections. This is a remarkable achievement for a former agrarian party in a post-Nokia, post-modern society. The populist True Finns (or The Finns as they now call themselves), which in 2011 recorded an unprecedented 15-percentage-point advance, consolidated their position by becoming the second largest legislative party, whilst the election produced the worst ever result for the two historic leftist parties, the Social Democrats and post-communist Left Alliance, which together polled well under one-quarter of the vote. Among the minor parties, the Greens profited from the travails of the Left Alliance, to gain more votes than ever before and five extra parliamentary seats. Crucially, the result of the 2015 general election allowed the Centre to ‘call the shots’. Put another way, the verdict of the voters cast the winner in the role of a ‘pivotal centre party’ with the luxury of selecting its coalition partners from among parties either to the left or right. In the event, the Centre leader’s preference was for a unique combination of Centre, True Finns and Conservatives, with the backing of 124 members in the 200-seat Eduskunta.

From the ‘rainbow coalition’ back down to ‘red earth’? the 2003 finnish general election

The night of 16 March 2003 witnessed one of the most exciting elections in Finland for years. For once, the result was not cut and dried within an hour of the polling stations closing – an election vigil in name only – and even as the clock approached midnight it was not absolutely clear which party had won the greatest number of Eduskunta seats. What was evident was that the leading opposition Centre party, headed by a woman, had two MPs elected for the capital Helsinki for the first time in its history. The largest governing party, the Social Democrats, led by Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen, had claimed its first gains in power since 1983. The Greens and the Christian Democrats had achieved their best ever parliamentary election results. Turnout, too, rose for the first time since the 1980s, due in no small measure to the huge support for a professional boxer and weightlifter who, standing as an independent, polled the highest individual tally of all the candidates in Helsinki except the prime minister. The three larger parties – the Social Democrats, Centre and Conservatives – all nominated (German-style) ‘prime minister candidates’ and a highly personalised campaign saw the media focus on the ‘big three’. Yet, ironically, with only just over 6,000 votes separating the two front-runners, the Centre and Social Democrats, it was not at all clear at the end of a dramatic night who the next Finnish prime minister would be. The days of the ‘rainbow coalition’ seemed numbered. But would Finland return to the historic ‘red earth’ combination of Social Democrats and Centre that had dominated governments for half a century up to the late 1980s?