Per Arnt Pettersen

PARTICIPATION IN LOCAL POLITICS IN NORWAY: Some Do, Some Don't; Some Will, Some Won't

Using data from two national surveys conducted in 1990 and 1993, this article investigates seven modes of sociopolitical behavior and one form of potential political participation in the context of Norwegian local government. Results indicate that factors associated with alternative modes of activity vary; different types of people tend to choose different channels of involvement. The most pronounced difference is found between activities directed toward influencing public opinion and those intended to influence political decision making more directly. Whereas the former mode is more typically chosen by younger, well-educated single women living in urban areas, the latter is more characteristic of married, better educated men living in smaller municipalities. Findings are characterized by a high degree of stability over the period considered. Only in the case of voting is there a suggestion of some possible change. After decades in which socioeconomic status variables have been of little significance for voting in Norway (a situation explained by the mobilizing effects of organizations), an effect of education was found in the 1993 survey. Also noteworthy is the distribution of participation among the population: rather than being cumulative, different forms of political involvement are relatively widespread.

Welfare State Legitimacy: Ranking, Rating, Paying: The Popularity and Support for Norwegian Welfare Programmes in the Mid 1990s

Welfare programmes are targeted at different beneficiaries and grounded on a variety of principles: universalism, means testing, needs testing, targeting, income supplements and income maintenance, to mention some of the most important. The first question asked is: who supports programmes targeted at the different groups? The second question concerns whether the support varies when different techniques are used regarding measuring support for welfare state programmes – those programmes that are recommendable, those people want to spend their tax money on and the programmes where increased spending is followed by acceptance of a tax increase. Basically the results are similar across different measurement techniques. But if an interest group is identifiable – such as parents with young children – there is a distinct tendency for the interested party to be more supportive when money and budget restriction are involved compared with the pure recomendability of the programme. Interested parties also tend to support programmes that they are or will soon be using, most obviously seen in support for day care centres, which are supported largely by families with children below the age of 7 years, and for schools and education, supported largely by families with children above the age of 7 years. Where no distinct interest group – beyond the actual beneficiaries – is identifiable, normative positions such as ideology are the best predictor of support for welfare state programmes.

Welfare municipalities: economic resources or party politics? Norwegian local government social programs of the 1920s

This article analyses the introduction of Norwegian local government social security programs for the elderly, disabled persons, widows and single mothers in the 1920s. The role of local government as an agent and initiator of welfare state development has been for the most part neglected within the welfare state literature. Indeed, the first social security programs in Norway were introduced by local governments, affecting nearly half of the population. Even if these programs were not very generous compared with the social security programs of our time, many of them were equal to, or even more generous than, the national pension scheme introduced in 1936. This article examines what distinguished the social security municipalities from those that did not implement such programs, and the variation in generosity profiles. The conclusion is that the main determinant regarding the implementation and generosity of the local social security programs is the political strength of the two Norwegian socialist parties at the time – the Social democratic party and the Labour party – both being too impatient to wait for a national social security plan, and both being willing to mobilise economic resources through taxation and borrowing.

Linking Coalitions to Policy Output: The Case of Local Government in Norway

The main emphasis in coalition studies has so far been on national coalitions—with the local level being rather overlooked—and in most studies estimating the impact of local politics researchers have used various indicators of the electoral strength of parties as their main political variable. In this analysis we investigate the genuine composition of coalitions in each and every municipality in Norway, describing which parties serve as the majority base for the mayor and the deputy mayor. This approach gives us the opportunity to investigate both the impact of the genuine political office holders, as well as the structural properties of coalitions, on policy output. Using a decomposition of school expenditure suggested by Falch and Ratts0, we are able to ask in what ways money is spent inside the sector, in addition to how much money is spent. The empirical results show that coalitions can be linked to policy output; the preferred spending objects vary both according to the parties forming the coalition and the structural composition of the coalition.