Lessons from the Nordics: does party membership still provide a meaningful link between citizens and politics?

Political parties play a crucial role in enabling the views of citizens to be represented in political decision-making. Yet across Europe, the vast majority of citizens no longer actively participate in political parties, with party membership numbers experiencing a sharp fall in recent decades. Drawing on a new edited volume covering the Nordic countries, Marie Demker, Knut Heidar and Karina Kosiara-Pedersen explain how parties might continue to link citizens with politics, despite the fall in membership numbers

Scandinavian Higher Education Governance – Pursuing Similar Goals through Different Organizational Arrangements

Under embargo until: 2022-02-03The differences and similarities among the three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have been discussed by social scientists on several occasions. Focusing on higher education (HE) governance systems, this paper raises three questions. (1) What are the differences and similarities among the three countries? (2) How can the similarities and differences be explained? (3) Are the similarities strong enough to justify the common label of a Scandinavian model of HE governance? The three HE governance systems are briefly described and compared. They are then analyzed as, respectively, outcomes of partisan politics or politico-administrative regimes. The paper argues that similarities such as publicness, massive investments, and emphasis on access are best explained in terms of partisan politics, while the variation in governance arrangements can best be explained by path dependencies following choices made at critical junctures within similar politicoadministrative regimes.acceptedVersio