Civic Decline? Trends in Political Involvement and Participation in Norway, 1965–2001

Electoral turnout in Norway has been declining over a long period for local elections and, at the four most recent Storting elections, turnout has been at a lower level than in the preceding 25 years. This article investigates whether the fall in turnout generalises to other forms of political participation and political involvement. Data from the Norwegian Election Studies 1965–2001 and the Norwegian Values Studies 1982–1996 are analysed. In contrast to the decline of turnout, the authors find that the broader political activity of citizens has increased. The rise in political involvement and activism is quite widespread, covering dimensions like political interest, political discussion and political action. The increase includes forms of participation where political parties play a strong role and in direct action where parties are supposed to be less important. Education is strongly associated with most forms of civic participation and the rise in educational levels normally leads to an increase in participation rates. Data show that women are now as active as men in most dimensions of participation. In Norway, turnout at elections displays one pattern over time, while other indicators of political participation and involvement show different trajectories. There is no general civic decline. Using political involvement and participation as a criterion for judging the state of democracy, and taking into account the whole set of indicators studied in this article, one may reasonably conclude that Norwegian civic democracy is in better health than if one focused only on the fall in electoral turnout.     

Economic crisis, party system change, and the dynamics of class voting in Venezuela, 1973–2003

The breakdown of the old catch-all party system in Venezuela, and the sudden rise to power of leftist former coup leader Hugo Chávez provides an instructive case study to examine the sources of party system change, the rise of populism and the politicisation of class. Using nationally representative survey data this paper analyses different models of voting behaviour over time, and examines the extent to which the determinants of electoral choice have changed. It argues that although economic crises during the 1990s undermined support for the existing parties, it did not create a politically salient class-based response. Rather, it created the electoral space for new actors to enter the political stage and articulate new populist issue dimensions. Explanations for the politicisation of social cleavages in Venezuela can therefore best be understood in terms of ‘top-down’ approaches which emphasises the role of political agency in reshaping and re-crafting political identities, rather than more ‘bottom-up’ factors which emphasise the demands that originate within the electorate.     

Policy Substance and Performance in American Lawmaking, 1877–1994

This article reconsiders the importance of including policy issue content and legislative significance in our study of lawmaking. Specifically, it demonstrates theoretically why lawmaking might vary by policy substance and empirically shows how incorrect conclusions would be drawn if lawmaking is studied by pooling enactments instead of disaggregating laws by policy issue content. It accomplishes this by bringing new tools, including a policy classification system and a way to measure the significance of public laws, to help overcome an array of measurement-related problems that have stymied our ability to better understand lawmaking. The policy coding schema introduced is applied, by careful individual human coding, to every public law enacted between 1877 and 1994 (n = 37,767). The policy issue and significance data are used to construct a number of new measures of legislative performance and are useful to test hypotheses within studies of Congress and American Political Development.