Birgitte Nyborg’s Speech
From Borgen (DR)
Categories:
Run time: 2:20
Note: English subtitles.
Clip Description: Birgitte Nyborg, the leader of a small centrist party in the Danish parliament, delivers the campaign speech that changes her party’s position — and, as the series has it, her own path to the prime ministership.
Comparative Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: Head of government versus head of state; how a party leader becomes prime minister without any voter casting a ballot for prime minister; coalition formation in a multiparty system; why a small party can hold leverage out of proportion to its seats, and what it has to trade to use it; negative parliamentarism and the confidence relationship.
Possible Uses in Classroom: The clip to use when students have learned that parliamentary systems exist but have not yet internalized that the executive is chosen by the legislature. Play it, then walk the seat arithmetic on the board. It also fills a gap that is hard to fill from American material, because the American system gives no analogue to a party leader campaigning for an office no one votes on directly.
Discussion Questions
- No Danish voter casts a ballot for prime minister. Trace the steps between this speech and someone taking that office, and say at which step the voters stop being involved.
- Nyborg leads a small party. Under what seat arithmetic does a small party gain leverage rather than lose it, and what does it usually have to give up to use that leverage?
- Compare this speech to what an American candidate for president would have to say in the same position. What does the difference tell you about what each system rewards?
Assignment
Take the most recent Danish general election result and work out, seat by seat, which coalitions were arithmetically available. Two pages: report the coalition that formed, name at least one that was possible and did not form, and explain why. Use the parties’ own published positions rather than press characterizations. The hard part is explaining why a mathematically available coalition was politically impossible — that is the whole assignment, and “they do not like each other” is not an answer.
Clip hosted on YouTube, posted by Nordic Noir & Beyond, the series’ UK distributor.
For AP Students
AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 2: Political Institutions
Topics: 2.1 Parliamentary, Presidential, and Semi-Presidential Systems; 2.2 Head of State and Head of Government; 2.6 Electoral Systems and Party Systems
Unit 2 is the heaviest unit on the Comparative exam and parliamentary government is its spine. The institutional mechanics here are exactly what the CED asks students to explain, and the United Kingdom comparison is immediate.
A caution before you use it: Denmark is not one of the six course countries. Use it to teach the mechanism, then move to the United Kingdom for anything the exam will ask you to evidence.
Discussion questions
- Define head of state and head of government and say who holds each in Denmark, in the United Kingdom, and in Mexico. Which of the three separates them least usefully?
- Proportional representation tends to produce coalition governments; single-member district plurality tends not to. Explain the mechanism, then name one case that cuts against the tendency.
- A vote of no confidence has no equivalent in a presidential system. What does its existence do to how a prime minister behaves day to day, compared with a president serving a fixed term?
Short activity
Build the coalition (15 minutes). Put a fictional 179-seat parliament on the board with six parties and their seat counts, arranged left to right. Have groups of three find a majority coalition and name the one policy concession that makes it hold. Then reveal that one party will not sit with another and have them do it again. The second round is where students discover that arithmetic is the easy part.