Who Should Govern Political Parties? Organizational Values in Norwegian and Danish Political Parties

Abstract

The article explores party member attitudes towards internal party democracy and party leadership in Danish and Norwegian parties. The focus is on the relationship between party members’ public policy values (measured by means of ‘old politics’ and ‘new politics’ value dimensions) and their organizational values (i.e. ideas about internal democracy), but the members’ educational and activism levels as well as indicators capturing factors specific to individual parties are also applied to explain party members’ organizational values. We find that positions on the two policy value dimensions are related to party members’ organizational values. But the relationships are not particularly strong, and their signs are contrary to expectations. One explanation may be that the ‘new politics’ literature draws a misleading picture of the organizational values of New Left and New Right party members – at least in the Danish and Norwegian cases. We also find that the social democratic parties in both countries differ considerably from the other parties in the sense that the dissatisfaction with the leadership was much stronger in these parties.