Against the backdrop of (i) the Finnish Eduskunta's enactment in June 2025 of a contentious change in the voting rules for elections to the S & aacute;mi Parliament and (ii) the publication in December 2025 of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining the historic discrimination practised against the S & aacute;mi population, this paper focuses on the representation of the indigenous S & aacute;mi minority in Finland. The central question, which comprises three integral parts, runs: How and why has the basis of S & aacute;mi representation changed and what was the S & aacute;mi view of their representational arrangements in the run-up to the 2025 electoral reform? Several variants of neo-corporatist representation are presented, in all of which S & aacute;mi elect S & aacute;mi to represent them. Ultimately, the case made is that the 2025 electoral reform marked a shift away from an inclusive, livelihood-based vocational franchise towards a more exclusionary, ethno-centric model predicated on strict S & aacute;mi-language criteria. The wider interest lies in the extent to which forms of neo-corporatist representation can retain utility and functional value under the cross-pressures of party-based territorial representation.

This paper focuses on the Alternative Member System (AMS), sometimes referred to as a Mixed-Member PR (MMPR) electoral system, in which seventy-three members of the devolved Scottish Parliament (MSPs) are elected from single-member, simple plurality, Westminster-style constituencies and fifty-six from eight New Zealand or Germany-style regions. These arrangements are evaluated against general criteria for assessing electoral systems and the representativeness and accountability of regional-list MSPs in particular called into question. Ultimately, a case is made for a shift from the present closed and anonymized party list system for electing regional MSPs to a more personalized semi-open list system in which, in addition to the choice of casting an en bloc list ballot, there would be a single candidate preference option. This would be to implement the recommendation (4.66) of the 2006 Arbuthnott Commission without the need for major electoral surgery.

This paper proceeds from the observation that, when viewed in comparative perspective the incidence of MPs seeking to become MEPs is highest in open-list (intraparty preference) voting systems and that in these systems votes will represent both a personal resource for MEP-candidates and an electoral resource for political parties. Finland is presented as a case of optimal list-system openness and all 124 MPs standing in the seven European Parliament (EP) elections between 1996 and 2024 are analysed by party (magnitude) and length of incumbency. Contrasting hypotheses are posited, relating to the incentive for MPs to use EP elections to cultivate a personal vote—possibly to further personal goals on the ‘domestic front’—or to run principally at the behest of the party. A surprising finding is that most MEP-seeking MPs are first-term MPs. Overall, whilst there are exceptions, most Finnish MPs running for Brussels neither want, nor expect to become MEPs; they are doing party service rather than servicing their personal vote.

This paper explores the value of 'localness', 'partyness', and well-knownness' (name-recognition from outside the world of politics) in the personal vote of dual mandate-seeking celebrity candidates at the 2025 Finnish municipal and regional elections. This was the first time these elections were held concurrently, and candidates could run at both levels. Theoretically, the article challenges the orthodoxy that the personal vote is by definition non-partisan. Rather, it asks: How far do localness and partyness mitigate the impact of well-knownness in the celebrities' personal vote? Ultimately, the case made is that for many, though by no means all dual mandate-seeking celebrity candidates, they will be known for their well-knownness as local politicians more than as 'names' from sport, television, or business. Equally, for a cohort of 'social media influencers', a process of digital personalization has extended the electoral reach of the celebrity candidate and undercut localness and partyness as explanatory variables.

At first glance government-parliament relations in Finland appear reminiscent of Alfred Grosser's classic characterisation of Fourth Republic France as 'nothing but opposition'. Over its first two years, the centre-right coalition formed in June 2023, faced 13 interpellations, which in turn generated no less than 32 separate motions of no confidence in it. It is not only whole governments that have been in the firing line. Between 2012 and 2025 no fewer than 15 individual cabinet ministers confronted votes of no confidence at the hands of the parliamentary opposition (one in fact twice), almost half of them in the lifetime of the present coalition. Consequently, the generic question in this paper runs: Does the recent surge in ministerial no-confidence votes represent a new form of legislative behaviour and a shift towards a neo-Westminster style of parliamentary politics in Finland?

When viewed as a response to long-term decline in a party’s core constituency – whether class, religion or language-based – catchall strategies involve the inherent risk of marginalising the party’s core voter without achieving significant and/or sustained electoral renewal. The risk of core shrinkage will not be offset by a durable electoral dividend and the catchall strategy may well feed the very decline it is designed to arrest. Whilst catchall strategies are not the exclusive preserve of any one type of party, the type of party may well affect the likelihood of achieving a catchall performance. Following Kirchheimer, parties based on a ‘specific professional category’s claims’, such as the Swedish Agrarians, cannot realistically aspire to a ‘successful transformation’. Accordingly, this paper considers whether the pursuit of a catchall strategy by an historic, niche agrarian-class party with exceptional regional strength in neighbouring Finland could hope to achieve a ‘catchall performance’. More widely it considers whether a catchall strategy is a realistic option in multiparty systems in which ‘new politics’ parties squeeze the available policy space and multi-dimensional cleavage structures cannot readily be accommodated within a single party.

(1990). The Swedish Riksdag: The case of a strong policy‐influencing assembly. West European Politics: Vol. 13, Parliaments in Western Europe, pp. 120-142.

In the three West European polities in which Cold War communism gained its greatest traction - Italy, France and Finland - the distinctive ecology of rural communism gave rise to references to 'red zones' or 'red belts' in the countryside. These were marked by the numerical strength, electoral stability and geographical continuity of communist support. Against this backdrop, this article poses two period-based research questions. First, what was the extent of party change in the historic strongholds of rural communism in Western Europe between the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991? Second, to what extent has a tradition of radical leftist voting persisted in the rural red belts in the post-communist era? The paper offers a comparative perspective on the trajectory of rural communism in the Finnish case, where recent evidence points to a significant shift of radical left voters to the radical right in traditional red-belt territory.

This article seeks to contribute to the electoral and party politics debate in three main ways. The first is the claim that parachuting politicians into districts in which they have no prior connections is not a nomination practice that is the exclusive preserve of plurality electoral systems, nor does it necessarily engender the critical reaction of carpetbagging in the United States or ‘captain’s picks’ in Australia. Second, the practice of parachutage is tied to the personalisation literature but, in contrast to this literature, the article views [parachute] personalisation and party as complementary and mutually reinforcing rather than contradictory. Parachute personalisation serves party-based representative democracy rather than attenuates it. Third, the article questions the undue focus in the personal vote literature on a candidate’s personal-vote-seeking attributes. Rather, in concentrating on the transferability of the parachute vote as an electoral resource, the generic term ‘personal vote’ is viewed as comprising a mélange of party-vote-earning attributes – inter alia name-recognition and reputational status as a party office-holder – and personal-vote-earning attributes – name-recognition from outside party politics (sport, music, etc.). The central question addressed runs: When and why in an intraparty preference voting system – Finland is the focus – is parachute personalisation practised and with what result?

Rarely, if ever, has a Finnish general election attracted such foreign media interest. Reporters came from across the globe, not to witness Finland become NATO's thirty-first member-state on 4 April, two days after the general election, but to see if the party-loving Social Democrat prime minister Sanna Marin could secure a second term at the helm.(1) In the event, Marin became only the third prime minister in recent times to increase the party vote, albeit by not quite enough, and she promptly indicated she would stand down as party leader. The election was won by the two main opposition parties, the National Coalition and Finns Party. The National Coalition became the largest parliamentary party for only the second time in its history, whilst the Finns Party gained over one-fifth of the national poll for the first time and became the largest party on the basis of the popular vote in no less than half the 12 mainland constituencies. Despite their deep differences on major policy issues - including immigration, taxation, development aid and climate policy - the National Coalition and Finns Party ultimately formed the core of a centre-right government, although it took almost to midsummer to do so, and it was then characterised by a minor coalition party leader as an 'unhappy marriage' made out of necessity.

With the pun intended, this article asks whether, in overwhelmingly secular societies, the four Nordic religious-niche parties created by revivalist Christians before and after the Second World War, and whose strength has been in their countries' Bible Belt regions, have a future as broad-based, religious-mainstream parties or are destined to 'wither on the vine'? If, as the parties' literature suggests, niche-party 'nicheness' is variable, can the 'pure type' of religious-niche party modify its nicheness and, if so, how, and with what result? The argument made is that i) the Nordic Christian parties have sought to expand beyond their revivalist core by 'importing' continental Christian Democracy as an 'unsecular politics' strategy and ii) that whilst, outside Denmark, support for the Nordic Christians is no longer a proxy for religiosity, and charismatic leadership has enabled the Christian parties intermittently to attract a wider body of 'unsecular voters', they have struggled to retain them in face of competition from a populist radical right playing the 'Christian heritage' card.

The first aim of this study is to put the Finns Party on the academic map of the European far-right. Whilst averaging almost one-fifth of the vote over the last four general elections, it has been curiously absent from the comparative parties’ literature. The second aim is to consider how the search for an appropriate classification of the Finns Party might help to navigate a way through the terminological maze of parties parading under the European far-right umbrella. The starting point is a simple, working definition of the two main sub-types – radical right and extreme right – which the article provides. It also canvasses wider recognition of the intraparty dynamics and coalitional character of far-right parties and the need to incorporate a greater role for social media into work on party classification, not least in providing a mouthpiece for extremist elements. In the Finns Party’s case, an online extreme-right faction was able to exert disproportionate influence within, and ultimately capture the party.

Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 triggered a process that saw Finland abandon its traditional policy of military non-alignment and, together with Sweden, submit an application for NATO membership. Finland's history of Finlandisation came up routinely in the parliamentary debates on a NATO application and there was a broad consensus that NATO membership would mark the end of Finlandised Finland. Accordingly, this article has a dual aim. First, it seeks to chart the main lines of post-war Finnish foreign and security policy since the late 1960s using Finlandisation and post-Finlandisation as the organising concepts. Second, it explores why, ultimately, Finland applied for NATO membership in May 2022. Putin's invasion of Ukraine, it is suggested, engendered a psychosis of fear among the Finnish public, stirring collective memories of the loss of land, lives and livelihood at the hands of unprovoked Soviet aggression in the 1939-40 Winter War and the fear of history repeating itself at various tension points in Finno-Soviet relations thereafter. Strikingly, until 24 February a clear majority of politicians and the Finnish public opposed NATO membership.

This article addresses a curiously neglected question, namely why do the vast majority of Finnish MPs—one of the highest levels in the world—hold a seat on the municipal council? The basic presumption is that Finnish parliamentarians are not first and foremost ‘office-seekers’; they do not seek municipal council office as a primary goal. Rather, they view municipal elections as a means of attaining localness, either as a personal vote-earning attribute (PVEA) or then as a representational attribute, bolstering their credentials as ‘local MP’ for the municipality. To test this reasoning, the analysis focuses on MPs’ decisions on whether to contest the four municipal elections between 2008 and 2021 ( n = 796). The results show that the incentive to ‘cumulate’ is greatest for first-term legislators and those occupying marginal list positions at the previous general election, but that the incidence of dual mandate-holding does not rise systematically with the size of the municipality whilst national celebrity trumps localness as the primary vote-earning attribute. The evidence is also consonant with the view that dual mandate-holding is as much a representational merit as an electoral imperative.

In the genealogy of the Scandinavian populist-party family, agrarian populism has been largely neglected and, when discussed at all, it is traced back to Finland in the late 1950s. This paper argues: (i) that agrarian populism long predated the 1950s and that it was politically salient from the decade before Finnish independence in 1917; (ii) that it is useful to distinguish between an agrarian-class and agrarian-populist party type; (iii) that in wider comparative perspective, first-wave Finnish agrarian populism was distinctive; and iv) that during the critical party-building phase, the Finnish Agrarian Party (AP) is best characterised a populist party embodying a diffuse small-farmer antipathy towards socially superior urban elites. The AP did not create this 'bigwig hatred' (herraviha), but in perpetuating it and 'othering it' within a binary 'us-and-them' paradigm, it became the first populist party in both Finland and Scandinavia.

Small-party persistence is a story in itself, especially when the party in question emerged as an entirely new party, lacked societal rootedness and did not boast any recognisable persons among its founding figures. The particular case is the Finnish Christian League SKL (from 2001 Christian Democrats KD), one of a family of post-Second World War fundamentalist Christian parties in the Nordic region which, over the six decades of its existence, has, unlike its Swedish and Danish counterparts, consistently surpassed the threshold of representation, but only once gained over 5 per cent of the national vote. This article asks firstly: What factors would account for SKL/KD’s persistence as a small party? Secondly, why has SKL/KD remained a small party despite efforts to expand its electoral base? Was Kirchheimer correct that certain types of party simply cannot become catchall parties? Kirchheimer, it is argued, was essentially right: SKL/KD’s ‘nicheness’ has been its greatest electoral strength but also the greatest barrier to electoral growth and significant party change.

For an electorate numbering under 21,000 persons, voters in the autonomous Aland islands are remarkably well represented. They vote in Finnish general elections, presidential elections and European Parliament elections; they vote for a 30-seat regional assembly, the Lagting; and they vote for one of the 16 municipal councils on the islands. For Lagting elections there is one MP for barely seven-hundred voters. This low MP-voter ratio, when taken together with open-list PR electoral rules enabling citizens to cast a personal vote, and a broad consensus over Aland's self-governing status, would appear to militate against the need for party representation. Yet Alanders are today served by an institutionalised party system which, while reflecting Scandinavian influences, is distinctive in its own right. Accordingly, this report poses three basic questions: (i) When and why did an Aland party system emerge? (ii) To what extent does it resemble the classical 'Scandinavian party system model'? (iii) What does the most recent 2019 Lagting election indicate about the balance between personal representation and party representation?

This article seeks an insight into the nature of intraparty competition in an open-list single preference voting system, and it does so by analysing the distribution of votes for Centre Party candidates in the 40 or so municipalities making up the northern Finnish constituency of Oulu in each of the five general elections between 2003 and 2019. It builds on Grofman's distinction between a geographical constituency and a candidate's electoral constituency to map the ecology of candidate support in a constituency with (1) a larger than average district magnitude (M); (2) a significantly larger than average territorial magnitude (T); and (3) a substantially larger than average Centre party magnitude (P). Setting M, T and P within a party organisational framework, the article identifies (1) a significant disparity between levels of intraparty competition at district and sub-district levels; (2) several contextual factors that act more as disincentives than incentives to engage in personal vote seeking across the electoral district.

This article is the first expressly to focus on membership ballots as an instrument in the selection of parliamentary candidates in Finland, a polity in which the nomination process is inclusive and decentralised. A Finnish case study is of comparative interest for three main reasons: (i) Finland is one of the few European countries in which candidate selection is regulated by the state; (ii) challenging much of the literature, the combination of democratised selection procedures and an intraparty preference voting system has not incentivised individualistic parliamentary behaviour and reduced legislative party unity; (iii) contrary to the trend towards the democratisation of nominations elsewhere, membership ballots, from being routinised and internalised in the four larger historic parties, have become the exception rather than the rule in Finland today. Accordingly, this paper assesses the changing trajectory of membership ballots and asks what does their de-institutionalisation indicate about the [changing] dynamics of intraparty participatory democracy?

The governing Centre and Conservative parties played the 'economy' card - we've got Finland 'back into shape'; the green parties, the Greens and Left Alliance, played the 'climate change' card, demanding action to go with the talk; the Social Democrats played the 'caring' card and the need for a Finland that cares for the elderly, the low-paid and young persons; the Finns Party in contrast played the 'no one likes us, we don't care' card, seeking to exploit its pariah status for electoral gain. The adoption of a siege mentality strategy, designed to capitalise on its ostracised position, served to mobilise protest support and the Finns Party came within a whisker of beating the Social Democrats into second place. The Social Democrats then turned the clock back and put together the type of left-centre ('red mud') coalition that had characterised Finnish governments for half a century from the mid-1930s onwards.