Embodying ‘the Nordic race’: imaginaries of Viking heritage in the online communications of the Nordic Resistance Movement

ABSTRACT

Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of National Socialism and thus potentially make this ideology palatable to Nordic publics. Second, to differentiate their racially oriented political project from a wider far-right or populist right concern with the defence of European Christian heritage and/or civilization against Islam. And, third, to thematize and perform a certain hyper-masculine identity, especially in the context of martial and sporting competitions arranged by the organization.     

Center Parties, Party Competition, and the Implosion of Party Systems: A Study of Centripetal Tendencies in Multiparty Systems

Centripetal party competition is traditionally associated with the need to capture the median voter in a two-party system, whereas the existence of center parties is associated with centrifugal party competition. This article argues that the existence of a 'pivotal center party' leads to centripetal party competition in multiparty systems. A pivotal center party is so strong in electoral terms that forming a majority either to the left or to the right of it is unrealistic. Therefore, office-seeking political parties are forced on to a centrist course. This dynamic can be so forceful that the major parties to the left and to the right of the center party decide to govern in a broad coalition, and we may speak of an 'implosion' of the party system. The theoretical argument can explain party system developments in the Netherlands and Finland.     

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific .     

Priming,Issue Ownership,and Party Support: The Electoral Gains of an Issue-Friendly Media Agenda

Issue ownership theory posits a positive relationship between electoral support and public attention to issues that a party “owns.” We investigate this key prediction of the issue ownership theory in a dynamic analysis of 20 years of party support and media coverage across multiple parties and issues. The results provide support for the basic electoral implication of issue ownership theory, showing that increased media attention to owned issues increases support for the issue owners. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the effect of the ownership mechanism materializes differently for opposition and government parties. Opposition parties benefit from media attention to owned issues without losing ground when news concentrates on issues owned by government parties, while government parties, always struggling with the electoral cost of ruling, lose votes when news about opposition-owned issues increases without gaining support when the media agenda is “issue-friendly.”     

The Growing Importance of Issue Competition: The Changing Nature of Party Competition in Western Europe

Changes in Western European political parties in general have attracted considerable scholarly interest, whereas changes in party competition have been almost overlooked in an otherwise extensive literature. Using the party manifesto data set, this article documents that party competition in Western Europe is increasingly characterised by issue competition, i.e. competition for the content of the party political agenda. What should be the most salient issues for voters: unemployment, the environment, refugees and immigrants, law and order, the welfare state or foreign policy? This change is crucial because it raises a question about the factors determining the outcome of issue competition. Is it the structure of party competition itself or more unpredictable factors, such as media attention, focusing events or skilful political communication? The two answers to this question have very different implications for the understanding of the role of political parties in today's Western European democracies.     

The puzzle of Dutch welfare state retrenchment

In the literature on welfare state retrenchment and in the general emphasis on the resilience of welfare states, the Dutch case appears puzzling by virtue of the fact that significant retrenchments have actually taken place in the Netherlands. It appears even more puzzling considering that the arguments in this literature as to the difficulties in welfare state retrenchments apply very well to this case, whereas the arguments as to why after all welfare state retrenchments are possible do not apply particularly well. This article argues that the explanation for the Dutch puzzle should be found in Dutch politics. Due to the power of the CDA as a pivotal centre party, the PvdA was at an early stage forced to accept welfare state retrenchment. A party consensus thus emerged allowing Dutch governments to define the issue of welfare state retrenchment as a matter of economic necessity.     

New Public Management Reforms of the Danish and Swedish Welfare States: The Role of Different Social Democratic Responses

This article investigates market-type reforms of the service welfare states in Sweden and Denmark. Sweden has implemented such reforms to a greater extent than Denmark. The explanation should be found in the different responses of the Social Democratic parties to the NPM agenda in general and market-type reforms in particular. In Denmark, the Social Democrats have opposed market-type reforms, whereas in Sweden they have been more open towards these ideas. With this focus, the paper differs from most other writings about variation in the extent of NPM.