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

Terrorism and Attitudes Toward Out-groups: A Political Perspective

How does terrorism affect attitudes towards out-groups? While research has found negative effects, these effects may be dependent on more factors than has been acknowledged so far. This thesis proposes a framework for understanding the consequences of terrorist attacks consisting of three parts; the terrorists’ group background, the framing of attacks and the public’s prior attitudes. Three empirical studies of surveys after attacks and of survey experiments explore this framework. The first investigates the reaction to the July 22, 2011 attacks in Norway and shows that the political response and people’s prior attitudes were central to the increase in out-group trust afterwards. The second studies the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks in Paris in 2015, showing that while people in France did not increase their opposition to immigration, people outside France did. This is interpreted in light of the French response with its emphasis on republican values such as tolerance. The last paper explores how the terrorist threat affects for support for counterterrorism and shows that this support increases even for measures that target other groups than the ones creating the threatpublishedVersio

Parties and Cleavages in the European Political Space

What kind of political system is the European Union and what will it be like in the future? Questions about the present and the future are hard to keep apart as the EU is an evolving project, currently engaged in the twin processes of enlargement and constitution making. When discussing the prospects of Europarties it therefore makessense to deal with both. Democratic aspirations are central to the EU project; in order to make a working democracy, then, the regime needs a competitive party system. In this paper I argue that we should not only survey internal EU trends – institutional as well as at party developments – to make judgements about democratic potential. We could also benefit from looking at historical experiences, and not only in the WestEuropean arena; the histories of competitive party systems in large-scale, multi-ethnic, federal states like for example U.S.A and India could be equally suggestive. The purpose here is to bring forward some speculations on the potential future party system of the European Union. The theme also invites reflections on the mechanisms creating and sustaining cleavage-based parties, i.e. parties deeply entrenched in territorial, cultural or economic interests. Non-cleavage based party systems would not by any means exclude a competitive party system, but it would be of a different sort.political parties; European Parliament; political representation; history; polity building

Party member survey 2000

The Party Democracy Survey consists of the following surveys: - A study conducted in the 1980s which consist of two surveys: a study of the national of party elites in 1984 and a study of national convention delegates in 1985. - Party Member Survey 1991 - Party Member Survey 2000 - National Convention Survey 2000-01 This is the Party Member Survey from 2000. The project aims to investigate the allegation of a party crisis through empirical research on two levels in the sections: surveys of party convention delegates in season 2000-2001 and including a representative sample of party members in 2000. This makes it possible to compare the different layers of the parties, both in terms of actual activity, perceptions of party democracy, political attitudes and social background. Furthermore, the time dimension key: the results can be compared with previous surveys of national convention delegates in 1985 and party members in 1991. Project manager is Professor Knut Heidar, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, and researcher Jo Saglie, Institute for Social Research. The project is affiliated with Makt- og Demokratiutredningen, and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The project's main results will be published in the Makt og demokratiutredningen book series

Partydemocracy - Delegate, 1985

Partydemocracy - Delegate, 1985 The Partydemocracy Survey consists of the following surveys: - A study conducted in the 1980s that consists of two surveys: a study of the national party elites in 1984 and a study of national convention delegates in 1985. - Party Member Survey 1991 - Party Member Survey 2000 - National Convention Survey 2000-01 This study documented is the national convention delegates in 1985. A major goal of this investigation was to obtain more systematic knowledge of Norwegian political parties. This applies particularly to the parties' organizational structure, their personnel and the question of how parties work towards their political views, ie. the decision-making process. The project will therefore aim both to encourage new and systematize existing knowledge that sheds light on the political party's role and place in the Norwegian political system. This study was funded by the Council of Social Science Research (RSF) at the Norwegian Public Scientific Research (NAVF), currently The Research Council of Norway (NRC)

Norwegian Party Congress Delegate Survey, 2009

This data wasa collected for the project "Political Parties and Democracy: Decline or Change?" The aim of "Political Parties and Democracy: Decline or Change?" is to illustrate various aspects of party policy development, which can give us new and improved knowledge about challenges and the behavious concerning democracy and the parties in the 21st century. We are particularly interested in the dynamics of the relationship between voters, party members, candidates and political leadership, with regard to public opinion formation, policy development as well as recruitment for public office at the national level. Another main subject is the parties' development as arenas for political participation. The project has therefore in the spring of 2009 conducted two separate surveys among the seven largest parties in Norway; one with Norwegian Party Congress delegates in spring 2009 and one with a representative sample of party members. Data from "Norwegian Party Congress Delegate Survey, 2009" are made available for research purposes (including phd and master theses) when ordered if there is documentation showing that a data protection official or the Norwegian Data Protection Autority has been notified, or a data processing agreement has been made with UiO. Researchers who wish to have access to this data are sworn to secrecy and must sign a declaration of confidentiality/loan agreement. In some cases, NSD can facilitate an anonymized version of the dataset