Economics, politics, and foreigners: Populist party support in Denmark and Norway

This paper investigates the dynamics of vote intention for the Danish and Norwegian Progress Parties. It shows that support patterns for these populist parties can be explained with similar independent variables. These include national economic conditions and political events. Empirical support for the usefulness of these variables is stronger in the case of the Danish Progress party. The analysis also suggests that increases in support for both parties during the 1980s was to a significant extent driven by the increase in the number of foreigners entering these countries.     

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.     

Participation and Social Capital Formation: Norway in a Comparative Perspective1

Voluntary associations are often ascribed a fundamental role in the formation of social capital. However, scholars disagree on the extent to which face‐to‐face contact, i.e. active participation, is necessary to create this resource. The impact of participation in associations on social capital is examined using three dimensions: intensity (active vs. passive participation), scope (many vs. few affiliations) and type (non‐political vs. political purpose). While those affiliated display higher levels of social capital than outsiders, the difference between active and passive members is absent or negligible. The only cumulative effect of participation occurs when the member belongs to several associations simultaneously, preferably ones with different purposes.     

Democracy and decentralisation: local politics,marginalisation and political accountability in Uganda and South Africa

While democratic decentralisation is viewed as an important vehicle for development in sub‐Saharan Africa, its viability in practice is often doubted. Lack of resources, expertise, marginalised populations and the inexperience of local electors are all barriers to successful decentralisation. However, often overlooked are the diverse ways in which local people use the opportunities provided by democratic decentralisation to engage local authorities and demand accountability. Using examples from Uganda and South Africa,¹ this article demonstrates how local people use democratic openings to meet the challenges of marginalisation and demand accountability. While the data is from the mid to late 1990s, the evidence presented here is relevant to the continuing debate over democratic decentralisation for it reveals something that is not always recognised: lack of resources is not necessarily the problem; developing political capacity for demanding accountability for existing resources is what is important. The implication is that for decentralisation to be effective, practitioners must develop a better understanding of local political engagement so that their efforts may strengthen rather than thwart emerging political relations of accountability. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local government grants and income tax revenue: Redistributive politics in Norway 1900–1990

An important aspect of the welfare state is public provision of private goods, primarily education and health care. In Norway the provision of these services has been organized through the local public sector. The development of the welfare state has to a large extent been the development of welfare communes. The important revenue sources of the local and county governments, grants and income tax revenue, have been controlled nationally, and the paper addresses the determinants of these revenues during 1900–1990. The approach combines a demand model of local public services emphasizing price and income-elasticities with a political economy model of central government ideology and strength. The decision making is understood as bargaining between the government and interest groups, and the political structure consequently is of importance for the policy outcome. The analysis shows how politics matter, and the results indicate that a minority coalition government implies 30% more grant and income tax revenue to local and county governments than one party majority in the long run.     

Who benefits? Intergovernmental transfers,subnational politics and local spending in Ecuador

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the intervening role that local political elites play to translate government transfers into effective public spending. We want to know whether mayors spend IGTs to provide basic public services or infrastructure works, and whether such investments are instrumental to secure their advantage as incumbents. To test these arguments, we use a combined dataset of local public finances between 2001 and 2015 and electoral results for the 2009 and 2014 municipal elections in Ecuador. We find that mayors do respond to political incentives and make strategic spending decisions to invest on public services and visible infrastructure projects. However, we find selective spending was insufficient to secure incumbency advantage in the 2014 election. We argue that the executive intervened to block or limit the impact of spending decisions at the local level, thus creating an incumbency disadvantage for mayors. Further research is needed to explain this.     

Political parties and coalitional behaviour in Belgium: the perspective of local politics

Abstract. What constitutes the starting point of this analysis is the limitations of traditional coalition theories. A particular weakness of the traditional approach is its treatment of political parties as unitary actors, largely unaffected by less formal determinants of coalitional behaviour, and each making rational calculations about the utility of coalition formation.
The alternative is a new multidimensional perspective of coalitional behaviour, based on a number of components. The aim of the article is a first and exploratory assessment of the relevance and usefulness of this multidimensional reorientation of coalition theory with regard to local politics (i.e. the municipal-council arena).
This assessment is based on a general analysis of the coalitional behaviour of political parties in Belgium (the Flemish part of the country) at the local level. The most important elements of both the formal and the multi-dimensional approaches for a study of local-coalition phenomena in Flanders are briefly summarized. It is along these lines that the results of the municipal-council elections in 1982 are discussed. Finally, a provisional evaluation is made of what and how the multi-dimensional alternative could contribute to a better understanding of coalition politics at the local level.     

‘Successful African local government’: Some methodological and conceptual issues

Attempts to identify and explain successful African local governments are made in a special issue of Public Administration and Development (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1992). These attempts are critically assessed, specifically the choice of indicators, the analysis of structures and actors, aggregation, and the role of political factors. It is argued that methodological and conceptual improvements in these areas are needed to advance the comparative study of African local government performance. Future studies should also pay more attention to equity, to resource mobilization from poor and declining economic bases, and to the impact of political pluralism.     

Exploring uniformity and variability in local electoral outcomes: Some evidence from English local elections 1985–1991

A detailed analysis of English local elections between 1985 and 1991 seems to support the propositions that a proportion of electors hold contradictory local and national voting preferences at one and the same time; and that there is significant variation in party performance both between and within local authorities. The paper concludes that the stimuli to which electors respond in local elections are often those most relevant to the ‘context’ in which their vote is cast. If partisan dealignment has led to a greater willingness on the part of the electorate to regard voting as a matter of ‘horses for courses’, there may not only be a further fragmentation in the results of elections of all kinds but the parties may experience different degrees of success depending on the nature of the contest.     

The Distribution of Political Participation in Norway: Alternative Perspectives on a Problem of Democratic Theory*

How citizen participation is distributed within the population is one of several fundamental questions of general significance to democratic theorists. This article briefly reviews some of the most salient normative arguments regarding the distribution of democratic citizen participation and then turns to the principal conceptual-methodological issues to be encountered when considering the basic empirical question. Against this background the Norwegian case is discussed in detail, first in light of prior synchronic investigations, then by means of a diachronic analysis of panel study data from the 1965, 1969 and 1973 national election surveys. These analyses document more broadly based citizen participation in Norway than might otherwise be anticipated and discredit the idea of a cumulative hierarchical overlap pattern of political involvement. The article concludes with a discussion of several considerations relating to these findings, all of which suggest the need for greater sensitivity and explicitness among those who would advance claims or comparisons regarding the distribution of citizen participation in modern democracies.     

Newspaper markets and municipal politics: how audience and congruence increase turnout in local elections

Media coverage of politics is widely considered essential to political participation. However, studies on local elections do not yet generally take the effect of the media environment into account. This article posits that the territorial fit between newspaper markets and municipal boundaries makes citizens’ exposure to locally relevant news more likely. We use fine-grained data on newspaper readership in order to assess the effect of the territorial structure of the newspaper market on turnout in municipal elections in Switzerland. The analysis shows that newspaper audience in a municipality and the congruence of newspaper markets with municipal territories both have substantial positive effects on levels of turnout in municipal elections. The findings suggest that future research on local political behavior should better acknowledge the influence of the media environment – which can be adequately measured by newspaper audience and congruence. Implications are that current structural changes in the media system bear threats to local democracy via the territorial upscaling of media markets.     

Climate politics in hard times: How local economic shocks influence MPs attention to climate change

Most countries struggle to implement CO₂ reducing policies. Implementation is politically difficult since it typically forces politicians to trade-off different concerns. The literature on how parties and members of parliament (MPs) handle these trade-offs is sparse. We use structural topic models to study how MPs in an oil dependent environment responded to a shock in the oil price that created spatially concentrated costs of climate policies. We leverage the rapid oil price drop between parliamentary sessions and MPs’ constituency adherence in a difference-in-differences framework to identify if MPs respond differently to variation in the salience of trade-offs. We find that MPs facing high political costs of climate policies tried to avoid environmental topics, while less affected MPs talked more about investments in green energy when the oil price declined. Our results suggest that the oil price bust created a ‘window of opportunity’ for advocates of the ‘ green shift’.     

Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction

Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service cycle it occurs, and what is generated in the process, the article offers and develops a typology of coproduction that includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design, delivery, assessment). The levels, phases, and typology as a whole are illustrated with several examples. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for research and practice.     

Some talk: Money in politics. A (partial) review of the literature

The financing of political campaigns is an area of active scholarly study. I review some of the recent literature and discuss important methodological issues that arise in empirical research on campaign expenditures and campaign contributions. The effects of campaign expenditures and advertising on candidate and ballot-measure elections are summarized, as are the impacts of contributions on contributors’ welfare. Many states have changed their campaign finance laws in the past few years, and I describe work that exploits variations in these laws. A discussion of the strategies used by interest groups to allocate their campaign contributions provides insights into contributors’ motives.     

E‐Participation,Transparency, and Trust in Local Government

This article examines the relationship between electronic participation (e‐participation) and trust in local government by focusing on five dimensions of the e‐participationprocess: (1) satisfaction with e‐participation applications, (2) satisfaction with government responsiveness to e‐participants, (3) e‐participants’ development through the participation, (4) perceived influence on decision making, and (5) assessment of government transparency. Using data from the 2009 E‐Participation Survey in Seoul Metropolitan Government, this article finds that e‐participants’ satisfaction with e‐participation applications is directly associated with their development and their assessment of government transparency. The findings reveal that e‐participants’ satisfaction with government responsiveness is positively associated with their perceptions of influencing government decision making. Furthermore, there is a positive association between e‐participants’ perception of influencing government decision making and their assessment of government transparency. Finally, the article finds that there is a positive association between e‐participants’ assessment of government transparency and their trust in the local government providing the e‐participation program.     

Voter Turnout in Norway: Time, Space, and Causality

This article focuses on diachronic and synchronic variation in Norwegian electoral turnout from 1945 to 1991. The model contains aggregate data divided into two-year intervals with regions as cross-sections. The impact of both socio-economic and political variables is tested. The two-dimensional view on turnout variation makes it possible to distinguish between short-term and long-term effects, as well as between national versus local factors. In contrast to related studies, this analysis actually tests for causality relationships between different political variables. The empirical results indicate that an increase in either national unemployment or regional income contributes to an increase in turnout rates. Electoral participation is also positively related to Labour support, industrial employment and strike activity.     

A theory of coalitions and clientelism: Coalition politics in Iceland, 1945–2000

Abstract.  This article serves a dual purpose. First, it provides detailed information about coalition formation and termination in Iceland from 1945 to 2000 following closely the format of Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm (eds), Coalition Politics in Western Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which considers the other Western European democracies. The political landscape of Iceland is surveyed, as is the institutional framework that structures the formation of coalitions, coalition governance and cabinet termination while providing complete data for each cabinet. Second, the effects clientelism has on coalition politics through the inflated importance of the executive office are considered. The patterns of coalition politics in the Nordic countries are compared to offer preliminary evidence supporting the theory.     

Local government decision‐making—citizen participation and local accountability: some evidence from Kenya and Uganda

The current fashion for decentralisation is built on the assumption that it will result in decisions that reflect local needs and priorities. Yet representative democracy, through periodic elections, is a crude mechanism for establishing these needs and priorities. Most local government systems offer few other opportunities for citizens to participate, particularly for the poor, and few mechanisms of accountability. This article reviews the literature relating local level decision‐making, citizen participation and accountability. It then presents the findings of a study of decision‐making about the use of resources in a sample of municipal governments in Kenya and Uganda. Local governments in Kenya have traditionally offered minimal scope for citizen participation or accountability, but this is beginning to change, mainly as a result of performance conditions applied through the recently introduced Local Authorities Transfer Fund (LATF), together with an increasingly active civil society. In Uganda, which has undergone a radical decentralisation, there is much greater scope for citizen participation at the local level but there are still many of the same problems of local accountability as in Kenya. The article reviews some of the examples of, and reasons for, good (and bad) practice. It concludes that factors like committed local leadership, central monitoring of performance, articulate civil society organisations and the availability of information are critical. But even with these, there is no guarantee that decentralised decision‐making will be inclusive of the poor. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.