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Little is known about the links between the business sector and civil society in Norway. To address the lack of knowledge, this study focused on members of the business elite who are elected representatives in voluntary organizations. Information about these representatives was obtained from a national survey of Norwegian elites and used to examine to what extent voluntary organizations are integrated into the business community's network of institutions and organizations outside the corporate world. The analyses demonstrate that voluntary organizations are well placed within this network. Moreover, business leaders who are elected representatives are well-connected. Several of them serve on state boards and have frequent contact with politicians and state administrators. Business leaders who have experienced pronounced social mobility seem to be more attracted to being involved in the governance of voluntary organizations than their colleagues with a more privileged background.

In the widespread complaints about the prevalence of party influence in local government there is a recognizable stereotyping of local politicians and parties which is a caricature of the complex reality. The purposes of this paper are to question the validity of the stereotypes and to suggest the abandonment of simplistic categories in favour of categories which go some way at least towards recognizing the complex variables which shape the role-playing of elected members.
What follows is based on a ten year period of participant-based research in an urban county borough council. Material from this specific study was supplemented by participant observation in a new county council and by observation-based research in two other boroughs. Participant research is a technique which creates a number of problems, the most formidable being that the researcher is a 'partisan' role-player in the ongoing local authority activities. In Halifax (the first-mentioned urban authority) this was not a great problem because the context was influenced by a three-party system in which the ongoing decisionmaking was tripartite and, indeed, occasionally multi-partite.

Research on the democratic legitimacy of non-elected actors influencing policy while acting as representatives is often lacking in governance literature, despite being increasingly relevant worldwide. Recent theories of representation argue that there are non-electoral mechanisms to appoint such non-elected representatives and hold them responsible for their actions. Consequently, democratic non-electoral representation can be achieved. Through empirical analysis, this article explores democratic non-electoral representation in governance networks by comparing how non-elected representatives, their constituents and the decision-making audience understand the outcome of representation to benefit the constituency, authorisation and accountability. The research findings conclude that all three groups mostly share the understanding of democratic non-electoral representation as ongoing interactions between representatives and constituents, multiple (if any) organisational and discursive sources of authorisation and deliberative aspects of accountability. All of these are non-electoral mechanisms that secure democratic representation. These findings make an important contribution to the literature on non-electoral representation in policymaking.

Little is known about the links between the business sector and civil society in Norway. To address the lack of knowledge, this study focused on members of the business elite who are elected representatives in voluntary organizations. Information about these representatives was obtained from a national survey of Norwegian elites and used to examine to what extent voluntary organizations are integrated into the business community's network of institutions and organizations outside the corporate world. The analyses demonstrate that voluntary organizations are well placed within this network. Moreover, business leaders who are elected representatives are well-connected. Several of them serve on state boards and have frequent contact with politicians and state administrators. Business leaders who have experienced pronounced social mobility seem to be more attracted to being involved in the governance of voluntary organizations than their colleagues with a more privileged background.

This paper analyzes the merits of a novel method of eliminating the power of a gerrymanderer that involves an endogenous weighting system for elected representatives. This endogenous weighting system ties the voting weight of elected representatives in the legislature to the share of the voters who voted for that representative's party and to the share of representatives elected from that party. If the weights are set correctly, it can be shown in the simple voting model of Gilligan and Matsusaka (Public Choice 100:65–84, 1999) that redistricting has no influence on the policy passed by the legislature. In effect, the endogenous weighting system converts a single-member plurality political system into one with proportional representation.