Tor Bjørklund

Do Labour Parties Suffer from Declining Turnout? Evidence from Norwegian Local Elections

Abstract The argument that declining voter turnout harms social democratic parties has received little support in research on national elections, but partisan consequences of declining turnout in local elections has been less explored. Norwegian local elections – where both turnout and support for the Labour Party have declined since the early 1960s – are used as a test case. Analyses of aggregate data gave no systematic support for the hypothesis that Labour suffers from lower turnout. Declining turnout and declining Labour Party vote were not causally related, and the correlation between the two variables seemed to be the result of other long-term social changes. Analyses of survey data pointed to three flaws in the premises on which the hypothesis was based. First, the effect of declining turnout on the biased class composition of the abstainers was ambiguous. Second, the Norwegian Labour Party suffers less from differential turnout than before as a result of declining class voting. Third, the Labour Party may suffer from a demobilisation of the working class, but the party may also benefit from a demobilisation of the young.

Anti-Immigration Parties in Denmark and Norway

The main anti-immigration parties in Scandinavia are the two Progress Parties in Norway and Denmark and the Danish People’s Party, formed in 1995 as break from and after 1998 the de facto successor to the Danish Progress Party. Initially, immigration was not even on the parties’ agendas. The Progress Parties were formed as anti-tax parties, reacting to the rapid expansion of the welfare state. The Norwegian party was inspired by the success of the Danish Party that had been launched in 1972 by tax lawyer Mogens Glistrup. Both parties had their electoral breakthroughs in landslide elections in 1973, with 15.9 percent and 5.0 percent of the votes respectively.

THE POLITICAL REPRESENTATION OF IMMIGRANTS IN OSLO AND COPENHAGEN: A STUDY OF ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND VOTING BEHAVIOR

This chapter is about non-western immigrants’ representation in elected assemblies in Norway and Denmark. Non-western immigrants are a small minority in these countries. That may be a difficult position since democracy is based on different forms of majority rule. Every democracy faces the dilemma of how to treat minorities. The checks on direct power from the majority vary from one country to another. One aspect is the electoral system, which may or may not have built-in mechanisms that defend minorities.