Electoral Politics, Party Performance, and Governance in Greenland: Parties, Personalities, and Cleavages in an Autonomous Subnational Island Jurisdiction

• Published in: Island Studies Journal
• Main Authors: Yi Zhang, Xinyuan Wei, Adam Grydehøj
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Island Studies Journal 2021
• Subjects: Physical geography; GB3-5030; Greenland; greenlandic
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.146; https://doaj.org/article/e72b36c07ebf46e1a7a4c3c19b96636b

Greenland is a strongly autonomous subnational island jurisdiction (SNIJ) within the Kingdom of Denmark. This paper takes its point of departure in studies of politics in small island territories to ask to what extent Greenland matches findings from other small island states and SNIJs in terms of personalisation of politics, party performance, and political cleavages that do not follow left-right divides. Even though Greenland possesses a strongly multiparty system, supported by elections involving party-list proportional representation within a single multimember constituency, a single political party, Siumut, has led the government for all but a brief period since the advent of Greenlandic autonomy in 1979. By considering Greenland’s political ecosystem, spatially and personally conditioned aspects of voter behaviour, and coalition-building processes, paying particular attention to the 24 April 2018 parliamentary elections, we argue that it is inappropriate to study Greenland as a monolithic political unit or to draw oversimplified analogies with party politics from large state Western liberal democracies. Instead, Greenlandic politics must be understood in relation to the island territory’s particular historical, geographical, and societal characteristics as well as its electoral system.