Stein Rokkan

The Structuring of Mass Politics in the Smaller European Democracies: A Developmental Typology

There is a curious awkwardness about discussions of “types” in comparative politics. Aristotle and Montesquieu taught us to proceed by classifications of regimes, and the current generation of computer enthusiasts have offered us more and more powerful tools for the handling of wide ranges of attributes of political entities and for the establishment of complex multi-dimensional typologies. Yet as soon as we are confronted with a concrete table of alternative types and look over the lists of cases assigned to each cell, our first reaction is almost immediately to add further distinctions, to reject the imposition of similarities across historically distinct units. The student of politics is torn between two sets of super-ego demands: he feels an obligation to reduce the welter of empirical facts to a body of parsimoniously organized general propositions but he also feels under pressure to treat each case sui generis , as a unique configuration worthy of an effort of understanding all on its own. This is of course a dilemma common to all social sciences but is particularly difficult to handle in the study of such highly visible, amply documented macro-units as historical polities. Students of census records, elections and survey data have an enormous analytical advantage: they deal with large numbers of anonymous units and can therefore proceed with the analysis of their data with a minimum of interference from exogenous “noise”. The student of comparative politics is roughly in the position of a social scientist asked to analyze the census records or the survey responses of a set of close friends: he cannot prevent himself from bringing into his analysis of the coded data on the punched cards a wide range of uncoded “surplus” information acquired through years of acquaintance with the subjects. The standardized sample survey derives great methodological strength from its programmatic insistence on equality, anonymity and distance in the treatment of the information collected: the data are given once and for all in the protocols or on the IBM cards and there is no allowance for fuzzy interaction with the subjects outside that framework.

Towards a Generalized Concept of Verzuiling: A Preliminary Note

M Y early work on cleavage structures and mass politics in Western Europe focussed on the formation of the full-suflrage parry systems as they emerged during the first quarter of the twentieth century: I tried to develop a parsimonious model for the explanation of variations in the structure of the electoral alternatiues presented to the citizency during the final stages of formal democratization.’ I emphasized again and again that this was a deliberate simplification of a set of complex historical processes: I was fully aware that there were other manifestations of mass politics equally worthy of systematic analysis. In fact in one of my early articles on Norwegian developments 1 called for detailed analysis of the parallels and the interactions between two sets of organization-building efforts: the structuring of alternatives in what 1 called the ‘numerical democracy’ channel and the building of effective units of action in the corporate bargaining channel.2 Robert Alford and Roger Friedland have recently taken me to task for my failure to bring these two components of mass politics into a unified model:3 in fact they use my ‘two-tier’ analysis of the Norwegian regime as a springboard for a critique of my model for the explanation of variations in the formation of party systems. I accept their basic argument. I can only plead in defence that models have to be built up and tested step by step: it proved easiest to start off with comparisons of party systems but that was clearly only a beginning. A full-fledged model would have to generate hypotheses not only about the emergence of alternatives in the electoral channel but also about the structuring of mass organizations in the corporate channels and about types of interlinkages between the units in the two arenas. This is a demanding set of tasks and we cannot hope to get far in this direction just within one local team: this is clearly a theme for intensive cross-national d i scu~s ion .~ So far, our group has given priority to detailed analyses of Norwegian data on organizational developments in the two channels: Frank Aarebrot and Bjarne Kristiansen have worked extensively on the early counter-cultural organizations and their role in the first waves of mass mobilization, Kjell Eliassen and Lars

The Mobilization of the Periphery: Data on Turnout, Party Membership and Candidate Recruitment in Norway

We shall present and discuss in this paper a set of data on turnout, party membership and candidate recruitment in Norwey. Our approach is essentially ecological: we shall present our statistics by local administrative units and will be particularly concerned to highlight differences between the central, urbanized districts and the peripheral, sparsely populated districts. Our data were assembled within a programme of research on elections after World War II: the bulk of them came from the punched-card archives of commune data and candidate data set up jointly by the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the Institute for Social Research.1) Our perspective on these data is not limited to the post-war period, however. Our analysis experience soon prompted us to look back over a longer period of time and to interpret our findings in a developmental perspective. We chose as our points of departure the first elections after the introduction of universal suffrage: for elections for the Storting this was in 1900 for the men and in 1915 for the women, for local elections the crucial years were 1901 and 1910. These were indeed decisive events in the history of the nation: large sections of the adult population were for the first time given formal rights to take part in political decision-making and allowed to make their preferences count in moulding local and national policiy. Our concern is to gain insight into the implications for the polity of the entry of these new masses of citizens ihto the electoral contests. The first prerequisite in any such study is detailed information on the reactions of the last enfranchised: how much difference did suffrage make to them? how easily could they be persuaded to make use of their rights, to mobilize for joint action, to take a direct part in organizational work?

Entries, voices, exits : Towards a possible generalization of the Hirschman model

Exit, voice and loj,altj, is an exciting and intriguing essay: exciting because of the keen insights it offers into the underlying similarities in the structures of decision-making options in the economy and in politics; intriguing because of the extraordinary range of questions it incites about further possibilities of model-building across other sectors of human life. Exit, voice starts you thinking in many directions: once you are caught in the magic of the model you keep on discovering parallels and analogues at all

Politics between economy and culture: An international seminar on Albert O. Hirschman's. Exit, voice and loyalty

The International Social Science Council in 1973 inaugurated an innovation in its series of seminars on developments at the &dquo;cutting edges&dquo; of social science theory and research: it organized an interdisciplinary encounter around one single pathbreaking volume, Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, voice and loyalty. The Council has organized over the years a number of important conferences and seminars on convergences and divergences in current research and thinking in particular fields but until 1973 these discussions always ranged across

Models and Methods in the Comparative Study of Nation-Building

The extraordinary growth in the number of legally independent units of government during the 1950s and ’60s has prompted a wide variety of scholarly efforts toward description, analysis and theorizing. The literature generated through these efforts is voluminous and dispersed and has so far never been subject to systematic codification.l In this brief paper there can be no question of doing justice to the entire range of approaches to the comparative study of state formation and national development. Only a few lines of attack will be singled out for discussion and even these will not be evaluated in any great detail: the purpose is not to review the past literature but to define priority tasks for future cooperative data processing and interpretation.

Electoral Activity, Party Membership and Organizational Influence: An Initial Analysis of Data from the Norwegian Election Studies 19571)

In planning and imh(ementing the various studies in the programme the Norwegian team has benefitted ~,reatly from the aid and assistance of a number of social scientists experienced in such research in other countries. We are quite particularly indebted to Professors Daniel Katz and Angus Campbell of the University of Michigan and Dr. Gorges Dupeux of the University of Bordeaux for their contributions to our programme during their stay m Oslo.

Data Services in Western Europe: Reflections on Variations in the Conditions of Academic Institution-Building.

Whichever agencies, organizations, movements you propose to compare across the 17-odd political systems of Western Europe, you do well to start out from some study of differences in the historical processes that led up to the current constellations of institutions. This holds for bureaucracies, for parliaments, for political parties, for interest groups. It also holds for data services for social science research. To reach some under-

Centre formation, nation-building and cultural diversity : Report on a symposium organized by Unesco

main components in this complex concept and how can we compare territorial units on such possible dimensions of &dquo;nation-ness&dquo;? Can we fruitfully operate with one concept of &dquo;nation-building&dquo; across all areas of the world or must we content ourselves with region-specific comparisons? Is the &dquo;nation-state&dquo; essentially a European and a Western construct or can it also be fruitfully applied in the study of the recent crop of sovereign political units in the Third World, in Asia and in Africa? Is &dquo; nation-ness &dquo; a

Archives for Statistical Studies of Within-Nation Differences

The current efforts to build up data banks for rapid retrieval have concentrated on the two extreme levels : the individual and the nation. The archives and repositories set up for the storage, classification and retrieval of materials from sample surveys focus on the individual as the basic unit of variation 1. The Data Programme set up by Karl Deutsch and his associates at Yale University focusses on variations at the national level 2. In this paper, arguments will be advanced for the development of data banks at the intermediary level of the locality : we shall explain the background for the establishment of one such &dquo;ecological&dquo; archive and we shall say a few words about the range of analyses possible on the basis of information collected at this level of the system. Our Norwegian punched-card archive grew out of a long-term programme of research on elections and electoral behaviour 3. Our original