Norwegian Parliamentary Elections
AS OF 2026-08-30 · 63 CONTESTS · parliamentary, 8 September 2025 · WIKIPEDIA, NATIONAL ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES
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Every Storting election from 1815 to September 2025: sixty years of indirect voting by landowners and officials with no parties at all, the impeachment that created parliamentary government, the dissolution of the union with Sweden, Labour's twenty years of single-party majorities, and the eight-party chamber of today.
Source: Wikipedia election articles · as of 2026-08-30
Storting seats
169
85 for a majority
Elections since 1815
63
September 2025
53
Labour seats, with the Progress Party second on 47
Latest
2025
Labour Party largest
The chronology
Every Storting election since 1815, newest first. The first two dozen have no parties in them because none existed yet, and every member is listed as an independent.
The present Storting · 2017–2025
Erna Solberg's right-wing coalition held for eight years, Labour's Jonas Gahr Støre took it back in 2021 and lost his Centre Party partner over energy prices in 2025. That September the Progress Party finished second with 47 seats, its best result, and Labour was returned as a minority government all the same.
The four-party system and after · 1985–2013
Labour's majorities went and did not come back. The Progress Party turned tax and immigration into a permanent bloc on the right, the Centre Party carried rural Norway against Europe in a second referendum in 1994, and government became a matter of assembling three or four parties rather than winning.
Labour's long ascendancy · 1945–1981
Labour governed alone for the twenty years after the occupation, holding an absolute majority of seats at six consecutive elections, and built the Norwegian welfare state while doing it. The EEC referendum of 1972 split the country along a line that has never quite closed, and the oil began to arrive in the same decade.
Between the wars · 1921–1936
Proportional representation replaced single-member districts in 1921 and the Storting fragmented at once. Labour grew from a revolutionary party that had joined the Comintern into the largest in the country, took office briefly in 1928, and returned in 1935 on a crisis pact with the Agrarians that ended a decade of minority governments.
Parliamentarism and the union's end · 1882–1918
The impeachment of the Selmer cabinet in 1884 established that a Norwegian government answers to the Storting rather than to the king in Stockholm, and Venstre and Høyre were founded within weeks of each other to fight over it. Universal male suffrage arrived in 1898 and turnout promptly passed 80%. The union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905 and women received the vote in 1913.
The officials' Storting · 1815–1879
Norway kept its own constitution and parliament through the union with Sweden, and elected them in two stages: voters chose electors, electors chose members. The franchise reached farmers who owned their land, townsmen of property and public officials, which in practice was a few per cent of the population, and no parties existed to organise any of it. Almost every member on this page is listed as an independent because that is what they were.
The long arc in charts
Hover any point for the exact figure.
Turnout since 1882
Norwegian turnout crossed 80% when universal male suffrage arrived in 1898 and has stayed near it ever since, without compulsion and without the postal machinery other countries rely on.
Labour's share
From nothing in 1900 to 48% in 1957 to the high twenties today. No other line explains as much of the Norwegian century.
Records & superlatives
Highest turnout
90.2%
1894, of the elections with a recorded figure
Lowest turnout
41.8%
1865
Highest vote share
63.4%
Liberal Party, 1885
Most seats won
117
Independents, 1859
Elections with no parties
24
1815 to 1879, before Venstre and Høyre existed
Labour majorities
6
consecutive absolute majorities of seats, 1945 to 1961
How Norwegian elections work
Proportional representation with levelling seats
150 district seats are allocated by a modified Sainte-Lague method across 19 constituencies, then 19 levelling seats correct the national result for parties that clear 4%. A party below the threshold can still win a district seat, which is how small regional lists reach the chamber.
A fixed four-year term with no early election
The Storting cannot be dissolved. A Norwegian government that loses its majority resigns or carries on as a minority, and the country still votes on the second Monday of September in the fourth year. Minority government is therefore normal rather than a crisis.
Rural seats weigh more
Seats are apportioned on a formula that counts area as well as population, so a vote in Finnmark carries more weight than a vote in Oslo. The effect is smaller than it was but has never been removed.
Sixty years without parties
Before 1884 there were no organised parties, so the early rows list every member as an independent. That is the record, not a gap in it: voters chose electors, electors chose officials and farmers, and the divisions were personal and regional.