Norway in Transition: Transforming a Stable Democracy by Oyvind Osterud

Author:Oyvind Osterud [Osterud, Oyvind]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317970361
Google: jdGMAQAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 20859214
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The End of Cleavage Politics?

In the 1980s the conservative and centre-right governments (1981–86) worked to liberalise the economy and to reform the ‘social-democratic state’ built by the Labour Party after World War II. Two highly visible policies of the new Conservative government was the extended opening hours for shops and the end of the broadcasting monopoly. These changes challenged the old left to reconsider their traditional ‘statist’ reflexes, and opened a debate on which of Labour's legacies were worth keeping (Førde 1989). Did the ‘open society, new state’ policies of the bourgeois governments and the response of Labour also signal the end of cleavage politics?

Looking at Norwegian voters, the answer is ‘no’; cleavages still help explain electoral choices, even if researchers might differ on the relative weight of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ cleavages and the importance of value orientations for electoral behaviour (Aardal 2003; Knutsen 2004). How is this stability reflected in the parties’ programmes and policies since the 1980s? Have the changing surroundings and new membership influenced parties’ political profiles? Traditionally, Norwegian politics has been consensual and multi-dimensional compared to other European countries, Britain for example. There are many ‘relevant parties’ which are fighting many cleavage dimensions simultaneously, but with little tendency towards polarisation.

The familiar political landscape painted by Rokkan and Valen since the early 1960s – with its left–right dominance and with the centre–periphery conflict and the moral–religious issues added – was still very much in evidence among delegates to party conferences in the mid-1980s (Heidar 1988). However, they needed to be supplemented by divisions over environmental policies. The question is now: Have later developments – the media politics, the electoral volatility or the Europeanisation and globalisation processes – cut the parties loose from old cleavage politics?

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