There are 179 MPs in Folketinget, the parliament of Denmark. But only 175 of them are elected in Denmark proper, while the remaining four seats are guaranteed for the so-called North Atlantic MPs from Greenland and the Faroe Islands, which both are autonomous members of the Danish Realm today after being under Danish colonial rule for centuries.
Dataset
nordatlantisk-ft is compiled from data available on Folketingets Open Data platform (Folketinget 2025) and comprises voting records of Northatlantic MPs. This includes records of 10073 ballots in Folketinget as per the last update (August 27, 2025). The dataset documents voting behavior of MPs from Greenland and the Faroe Islands and also contains metadata on each ballot – e.g. date and topic of each vote or the overall ballot result.
See the Codebook for details and refer to Berntzen et al. (2019) for background information on Folketingets open data ecosystem.
MPs
This dataset contains votes cast by Greenlandic and Faroese MPs since October 07, 2004. There have been 21 individual politicians from Greenland or the Faroe Islands who served as MPs in the time frame covered by Folketinget’s Open Data Platform (Table 1). 12 of them are members of Greenlandic parties, and 9 are representing Faroese parties. See Harder (2022b) for a list of all Greenlandic and Faroese MPs and their party association(s) going back until 1953.
As documented in the column substitute, some of the politicians that are part of this data set joined Folketinget in the role of a substitute member, filling in for the originally elected MPs while they were on leave (cf. Harder 2022a, 12–13). Figure 1 shows membership periods and substitions on a timeline for the duration that is covered by this data set.
Political Parties
Since 2004, MPs from the Faroe Islands were members of 4 different political parties. Voters in Greenland elected politicians from 2 different political parties. However, two of the Greenlandic representatives – Aleqa Hammond and Aki-Matilda Høegh-Dam – switched party affiliation during their time as member of Folketinget and joined two relatively young parties (Nunatta Qitornai and Naleraq).
See Ackrén (2015) for an analysis of the development of Greenlandic political parties until 2014. For overviews of the Faroese political party system see West (2022 in Faroese; 2020 in Danish).
All represented political parties are listed in Table 2 with additional information (where available) on their positions from the ParlGov dataset (Döring, Huber, and Manow 2022). Figure 2 shows the allocation of Folketinget seats to political parties from Greenland and the Faroe Islands on a timeline.
Exploratory Plots
The following exploratory plots were generated using ggplot2 with the data available on August 27, 2025, covering voting behaviour from 21 MPs. These visualizations make no distinction between directly elected MPs and substitute MPs.
On a proposal, members can either vote for, against or neither for or against (abstention). Taking into account all ballots that are recorded in this data set, Greenlandic and Faroese MPs actually cast a vote in just 1.8% of them. For 39445 out of 40176 cases, the MP in question is listed as absent.
Votes Per MP
Figure 4 visualizes the distribution of votes cast by each MP that is part of the dataset. MPs are grouped by whether they are representing Greenland or the Faroe Islands. As MPs are absent for most ballots, Figure 5 shows the distribution only with votes that were actually cast.
Votes Per MP Without Absences
Votes Per MP Over Time
The distribution of recorded votes by all MPs is displayed on a timeline in Figure 6. Again, MPs are grouped by whether they are representing Greenland or the Faroe Islands. As MPs are absent for most ballots, Figure 7 shows the timeline only with votes that were actually cast.
Votes Per MP Over Time Without Absences
Back to topReferences
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