Suchergebnisse

THIS ARTICLE ADDRESSES THE PROBLEM OF NORWEGIAN membership in the EC. Why is it so difficult for Norway to follow in the tracks of Sweden and Finland, and for that matter the rest of Western Europe?The changes on the European continent since the collapse of the East-West divide have also altered the political agenda in the Scandinavian countries. The ambitions of the EC-internal market as well as the Single European Act speeded up a discussion of how Finland, Norway and Sweden should position themselves in order not to lose out economically and become marginalized politically. In Norway, the traumatic EC debate in 1972 had split the country, and the parties, into two camps, resulting in the rejection of EC membership by 53 per cent of the electorate. Since then, the issue has been absent from political debate. In Finland and Sweden the official rationale for not discussing the issue disappeared simultaneously with the regimes in Eastern Europe, suddenly pushing the topic onto the political agenda, causing an abrupt change in Swedish EC policy.

Analyzes why Norway has been less ready than Sweden and Finland to embrace the pan-European ideal.

ABSTRACTA fifty‐year period of tranquility in the Scandinavian party arena was broken in 1970 with the success of the Finnish Rural Party and the Swedish Center Party. Three years later, Denmark and Norway witnessed the break‐through of heretofore unknown parties: the Progressive Party, the Center Democrats and the Norwegian Anders Lange's Party. Social Democracy consistently came out as the big loser.This paper focuses on party system stability and its correlates in postwar Scandinavia. What was it that the losing parties failed to adapt to: changing social conflict structures, changing political realities or both?The data from all four countries concur in highlighting the importance of the political as opposed to the sociological. The social changes which manifested themselves in the early '70s, most notably the decrease in class voting, were not dramatic enough to undermine the class character of the party systems. Even the new arrivals make sense in a left‐right perspective. The drop in class voting was an asset to whatever party knew how to take advantage of it; and the realigning elections in the early part of this decade testify to the unwillingness rather than the inability of most parties to do so.

Political scientists have a long-standing interest in identifying regions which are defined in terms of political stability. That is also what we set out to do, and in the process we get to evaluate two alternative methods of regionalization which are based on different theoretical models. The two models are geared to the specific requirements of longi tudinal analyses and represent recent efforts at methodological improvements. In both cases, the regionalization is performed on the basis of the distances between the geo graphical units with respect to component scores obtained from principal components analyses of Swedish community-level data over time. In the first case, the principal components analysis is carried out on the correlation matrix generated on party-strength data cast as percentages from the local arena at different points in time; in the second case, the principal components analysis is performed on the residual matrix, which is obtained by correlating the election-year specific error terms or residuals generated by regressing the community-level party-strength data on a series of socioeconomic indi cators, such as class structure and degree of industrialization.