Review Article: Scandinavian Parties in the Internal and External Arena

Party research lived a relatively quiet life during the 1970s and 1980s in the western world, and to some degree also in Scandinavia, although the central role of parties in the Scandinavian democracies made it impossible for political scientists to completely ignore political parties in their research. However, from the end of 1980s, political party research has been revitalized, and the number of publications has increased substantially. The three books reviewed here are part of the upswing during 1997, which, of course, includes other books and publications from that particular year. Why this renewed interest in studying political parties? For a long period after World War II, Scandinavian political parties were characterized as stable mass organizations. In 1973, the established Danish political system suffered an electoral backlash, and the shock waves gave fuel to speculations of party decline in electoral behavior studies. At the same time, similar trends were visible in Finland and Norway. Much later, interest focused on finding the same signs of decline in the internal party arena. The discussion is still alive, and during this process students of political science have gained new knowledge about parties and their organizations in Scandinavia.     

Power and Policy Design: A Comparison of Green Taxation in Scandinavian Agriculture

This article demonstrates the political importance of policy design in overcoming the opposition to the use of green taxes directed towards producers. The purpose of the article is to establish the link between the political power of producers and policy design. It is argued that the more politically powerful they are, the more likely policy makers are to reimburse tax revenues, to give producers control over the spending of the revenue and to design tax schemes in which there is a direct relationship between the subject being taxed and pollution. A comparison of fertilizer and pesticide tax policy making in Denmark, Norway and Sweden supports this argument.     

The Scandinavian Democratic Model

Given the continuing importance of democracy as an analytic concept. this article seeks to compare Scandinavian practice with accepted general definitions and theories. Definitions that recognize contemporary political democracy as consensual and procedural seem most appropriate to the Scandinavian cases. Although remaining dynamic. political democracy has not been a contested principle for more than 50 years.
Efforts since 1945 to extend democracy to social and economic spheres have been more controversial, however. Welfare state measures enjoy broad support, not least for functional reasons. For many, however, such policies seek a broader social democracy instead of merely a humane 'safety net'. Economic democracy remains the most contested dimension. Seeking to transcend corporatism and rational collective bargaining, economic democracy seeks simultaneously to promote greater economic equality and participation while maintaining an efficient productive system.
The dynamic and expanded democratic model has engendered much domestic debate about means and ends. This has been, on balance, a source of reinvigoration.     

The Scandinavian Welfare State: The Institutions of Growth, Governance, and Reform. Review Article

In a review of five recent works on Scandinavian politics and public policy, it is shown that the basis for talking about a Scandinavian model is unfounded. Politics and policies diverge from country to country and within each country from sector to sector as a result of institutional variation. This variation is embedded in institutional history which accounts for strong national path dependency in public policies. However, the institutional set-up at a given point in time also provides political actors with incentives for change. Two of the works reviewed take up this lead as they argue for institutional reform, in one case to protect the welfare state against political erosion, in the other case to facilitate renewed economic growth and improved living standards. The review concludes by arguing for the positive prospects for systematic comparative analysis of Scandinavian politics, providing a mixture of institutional and political similarities combined with theoretically relevant variation.     

Strategic Voting in Scandinavian Parliaments

Increasingly a case is being made that voting systems are highly manipulable —whether by strategic voting, agenda setting, or vote trading. Yet there exists little hard evidence on the actual extent of manipulation in real world settings¹ To a large degree this lack of evidence is a result of voting methods that allow only partial recovery of individual preferences over multiple alternatives and of a natural desire of legislators not to publicize misrepresentation of preferences or strategic agenda setting. Yet if we are to understand the empirical relevance of recent advances in the theory of voting, attempts must be made to apply new theoretical work to real world voting situations. In this paper we attempt to do this for voting in Scandinavian legislatures.
Our major concern is with effects of the order of voting on legislative proposals and with strategic voting that takes advantage of existing voting orders. Two distinct approaches are used. First, we present a detailed analysis of three situations in the Swedish parliament in which strategic voting was relevant. From these we conclude that when manipulation occurs in the Swedish context, it is not by altering the order of voting or by the creation of new, confounding alternatives, but by using strategic voting to take advantage of existing voting circumstances. Second, we take a more sweeping but less detailed look at voting in the Scandinavian legislatures. It appears from this analysis that the major way in which strategic voting is avoided is by limiting the number of alternatives to two.