Anders Todal Jenssen

The Many Faces of Education: why are people with lower education more hostile towards immigrants than people with higher education?

Abstract Research differs a great deal as to the reasons why highly educated people in many surveys express more positive views about ethnic and other minorities than the lower educated. Six main types of explanation have been put forward; (1) Tolerance and conception of rights are among the norms that the educators try to impart. The longer the education, the greater the chance of the students’ internalizing these norms. (2) Education will confer knowledge, and thus break down stereotypic beliefs about immigrants. (3) Long‐time education will increase the cognitive competence, and so make people more resistant to hostile propaganda about immigrants and more able to understand actual situations of conflict. (4) High education will lead to jobs with high social status, protected from direct competition with immigrants on the job and housing markets. (5) High education will strengthen the general ability of mastering, thus reducing the danger of situations creating conflicts and aggression. Against these hy...

Gender Stereotyping of Political Candidates

Abstract Electoral research has demonstrated how men and women sometimes have different political preferences. Men are typically thought to be more concerned about taxation, business policies, etc., while women care more about issues related to the welfare state. Thus, it seems obvious that stereotyping influences candidate evaluation with regard to issue competence. In this article, we investigate whether stereotyping also influences how the electorate views the communication skills of the candidates. We ask whether the gender of politicians affects the way citizens evaluate various aspects of the qualities of a political speech, and thus their support for political parties. The experiment used in this study is based on a pre- and post-stimuli questionnaire. Stimuli are videotapes of genuine political speeches (originally given by party leaders in October 2000) performed for the experiment by one female and one male actor. Our main finding is that the male “politician” was believed to be more knowledgeable, trustworthy and convincing than the female “politician” even though they presented the same speech verbatim. These differences in scores were the result of the male part of the audience consistently rating the female lower and the male higher than did the females in the audience. Among the female audience, the two politicians received almost identical scores on all traits. The candidate’s popularity and the popularity of the candidate’s party were also affected by the gender of the politician who performed the speech.

All That is Solid Melts into Air: Party Identification in Norway

For two decades researchers have been arguing whether profound changes were taking place in electoral politics or not. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to party identification in the European debate. In Norway, party identification has dropped dramatically since the mid-1980s. We hypothesize that the strong psychological ties between citizens and parties, described as party identification, have become a rare occurrence for several reasons. The intense debate over EU membership weakened the formation of party identification in two periods linked to the referendums in 1972 and 1994, but we also believe the observed decline in party identification to be a long-term change linked to the fading of the old cleavages and the decline of parties as mass organizations. The hypotheses have been tested on data from the Norwegian Electoral Surveys and the Referendum Surveys from 1972 and 1994. Although the hypotheses find support, alternative explanations cannot be ruled out at this stage.

Widening or Closing the Knowledge Gap? The Role of TV and Newspapers in Changing the Distribution of Political Knowledge*

Abstract The public has gradually become more dependent on the mass media for their political information as alternative channels of political communication have been marginalized. Political knowledge is not equally distributed, and according to the knowledge gap hypothesis, the gap between the most and least knowledgeable is likely to widen due to the pattern of media consumption, the different content of printed media and TV, and the abilities of the audience as linked to educational differences. Most of the empirical research on the knowledge gap hypothesis has been done in the USA, a media system very different from those of the Nordic countries. The strong tradition of PB TV and the high rate of newspaper consumption make the Norwegian media environment favourable for political knowledge gain, but it may, for the very same reasons, lead to a widening knowledge gap, according to the knowledge gap hypothesis. In the present paper, the impacts of TV and newspaper consumption on the distribution of political knowledge are studied. Two hypotheses are tested: TV exposure as leveller and newspapers exposure as enhancer of the knowledge gap. The empirical analyses are based on the 1997, 2001 and 2005 Norwegian election studies.

Voters’ Decisions in the Nordic EU Referendums of 1994: the Importance of Party Cues

Parties play a minor role in most textbook comparisons between representative democracy and direct democracy. Parties are not only absent from the traditional depiction, they are sometimes described as having given up their democratic responsibility in the case of referendums. They leave the responsibility for solving difficult problems to citizens and withdraw from public debate, failing to give citizens the political guidance they badly need. In this portrait, the political scene is left wide open to various political extremists, and referendums are frequently described as rule by the least informed, the inept, and the irresponsible. Ordinary voters are fooled, seduced, and frightened into making incompetent or even disastrous decisions. Even the ‘populist’ refutation of the above argument contends that voters are more competent than usually believed. With the exception of Budge (Budge, 1996), the assumption that parties withdraw from the politics of direct democracy is rarely questioned.

Wearing the veil: hijab, Islam and job qualifications as determinants of social attitudes towards immigrant women in Norway

ABSTRACT Immigrant women are a particularly vulnerable part of the immigrant population. In this paper we analyse negative attitudes towards immigrant women in Norway. We focus on immigrant women’s formal job qualifications, their religious background and wearing of hijab – the headscarf sometimes used by Muslim women. Using survey-embedded experiments we are able to analyse the net effects on attitudes of job qualifications, Islamic religious background and the hijab. The results show that native population frequently has more negative views of Muslim women who wear a hijab. The negative effects of a hijab do not seem to be strongly reduced if a woman wearing it has higher education. With a single exception, the results also show that Muslim background in itself (i.e. without the hijab) does not have any strong effect on attitudes of the native population towards immigrant women.

Tactical Voting in Norway: Context, Motives and Occurrence

Hitherto, tactical voting has not been a topic in Norwegian electoral research, despite the fact that tactical considerations have been publically discussed both by politicians and citizens for years. The complexity of the electoral system is partly to blame. Norwegian voters experience a number of tactical situations that give rise to rather different dilemmas, and hence several tactical motives. These need to be mapped and analysed separately. A set of survey questions has been especially designed for the present study to record these motives. Special attention has also been paid to the political sophistication of voters, campaign messages encouraging tactical voting, and the restraining effects of habitual voting and negative attitudes towards tactical voting. These factors may modify the inclination to tactical electoral behaviour. The web survey designed for the present project was conducted immediately following the Norwegian parliamentary election of 2013 (N = 2,278). Of the voters in the survey, 18.3 percent reported casting a tactically motivated vote. The 4 percent threshold on the distribution of compensatory seats, the competition for the last district seats and the composition of government coalitions triggered tactical voting. Tactical voters do not stand out as more politically sophisticated than other voters. Rather than calculating the expected utility for each party, they seem to rely on campaign information from the political parties and the media when voting tactically. For the habitual voters and voters with a strong dislike of tactical voting, the propensity for tactical voting is well below average.