Elections In Norway Research Articles

The results of local elections 2023 in Norway

The article examines the results of local elections in Norway on September 11, 2023, in comparison to the results of elections in 2019. A description of the socio-political situation in Norway on the eve of elections is undertaken. Possible options for cooperation in large municipalities based on election results are analyzed. The author explores reasons for the decline in popularity of the Workers' Party. A forecast is given on how the election results may affect the parliamentary elections in Norway in 2025 and the current party politics.

Homophily and polarization on political twitter during the 2017 Norwegian election

Ideological homophily on social media has been receiving increased scholarly interest, as it is associated with the formation of filter bubbles, echo chambers, and increased ideological polarization. And yet, no linkage necessarily exists between ideological homophily, echo chambers, and polarization. Despite political interactions on social media taking place to a large extent between like-minded individuals, cross-cutting interactions are also frequent. Using Twitter data, we investigated the extent to which ideological homophily, echo chambers, and polarization occur together and characterize the network of political Twitter users during the 2017 election in Norway. Despite the presence of some degree of ideological homophily, we did not find evidence of echo chambers in the Norwegian political Twittersphere during the 2017 election. And yet, the retweet network is characterized by a significant degree of polarization across ideological blocs. Our findings support the thesis according to which polarization on social media may have drivers other than the technological deterministic effect of social media affordances enhancing the formation of online echo chambers.

Results of parliamentary elections in Norway

The article examines results of the parliamentary elections in Norway on September 13, 2021. The author analyses the changes in electoral process in Norway, compares results of the leading political parties in 2017 and 2021, and studies their pre-election programs, discusses possible options for formation of a government based on results of the elections, forecasts how the election results might affect further development of party and political system of Norway and relations with Russia.

Wybory samorządowe w Norwegii. Przykład obywatelskości w ugruntowanej demokracji lokalnej

The main aim of this paper is to present the issues concerning local elections in Norway. The following timeframe was adopted: from the date of passing the first bill on local government (1837), to the comprehensive description of the municipal and provincial elections held in 2011, 2015, 2019. The electoral system for Norwegian local government allows all social groups and local electoral committees to be represented in local government. This is proved by: the ability to ‘create’ their own electoral registers by adding new names on ballots, a large number of political entities seeking mandates, the way of counting votes and the distribution of seats in councils. The proportional system of counting votes in Norway (applying the modified Sainte-Laguё method) is connected with the opportunity to cast an individual vote (the principle of proportional representation). This solution enables numerous political groups and local committees to stand for election. Moreover, women have a sufficient representation in local governments to exert a real impact on the decision-making process. Such an electoral system is open to foreigners who, after fulfilling specific requirements, have the right to vote and be elected.

When is a Reminder Enough? Text Message Voter Mobilization in a European Context

Sending text messages reminding people to vote has only been examined as a mobilization tool in three studies, two of them done in the United States. The results from these studies are mixed. We investigate this tool’s effectiveness using a field experiment in a different context, municipal elections in Norway. We find strong mobilization effects among groups traditionally low in participation (immigrants and youth voters). Young native Norwegians show an intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of 4.58% points, foreign nationals who have recently established Norwegian residency show an ITT effect of 2.93% points, and among immigrants who have lived in Norway for 7 years or more the treatment effect is 2.7% points. Even among native Norwegian voters over 30, with a baseline turnout of 73%, text messages generate a 0.96% points increase in turnout.

Participation in Indigenous Democracy: Voter Turnout in Sámi Parliamentary Elections in Norway and Sweden

This article compares and analyzes voter turnout in the 2013 elections to the Sámi parliaments in Norway and Sweden, using data from voter surveys. Is voting in these elections motivated by the same factors that explain turnout in national parliamentary elections? First, the study showed that a common election day for national and Sámi elections is an important reason for the higher turnout in Norway. Second, involvement in Sámi society was the most important factor for explaining turnout in both countries. General political resources and motivation had some explanatory power in Norway, but not in Sweden. This possibly reflects a more far‐reaching difference between Sámi politics in Norway and Sweden. In Norway, the Sámi electorate seems to be more politically integrated in the national polity, and the institutional ties between Sámi and national politics are stronger. This may be explained in part by the historical legacy of each state’s policy.

Indigenous Political Journalism in the Norwegian and Swedish Public Service Broadcasters

Across the world, Indigenous peoples are reclaiming their cultural and political identities, after having suffered decades of assimilation, repression and marginalisation. A major tool in this process is Indigenous journalism, which allows for storytelling and news reporting from the inside, as opposed to being a marginalised group that is only reported about from the outside. This article presents a comparative analysis of Indigenous political journalism as practised in the Norwegian and Swedish public broadcasters. The article explains the differences between the practices of NRK Sápmi and SR Sameradion & SVT Sápmi regarding their reporting on the campaign leading up to the Sámediggi elections in Norway and Sweden in 2013. The analysis shows that Sámi journalists on both sides of the border adhere to commonly shared characteristics of Indigenous journalism practices, but with considerable variation between them. There are two main conclusions of the analysis. First, NRK Sápmi and SR Sameradion & SVT Sápmi indeed practise Indigenous journalism, but do so differently, and second, ethnic identity counts, but institutions decide. Sámi journalism is constrained not only by national borders but also by the institutional framework of the parent company, the public service remits and the resources available to them.

Bølgebrydning. At tune ind på queerfeministisk historie med FRANKs Voluspå

2013 marked the centenary celebration of the suffragettes’ fight for the right to vote in parliamentary elections in Norway. The article “Breaking the Waves: Tuning into Queer History with FRANK’s Voluspå” analyses the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK’s response to the centenary, which included the artist book Voluspå (2013) and the exhibition Marie Høeg Meets Klara Lidén (2013–14), where photographs by the Norwegian suffragette and photographer Marie Høeg (1866-1949) were brought in dialogue with Swedish contemporary artist Klara Lidén. Through an analysis of FRANK’s “performative historiography,” the article discusses the value of revisiting one of feminist history’s most central narrative figures: the wave metaphor. With inspiration from feminist theorists including Clare Hemmings, Ednie Kaeh Garrison, and Tina Campt, the article suggests the importance of recalibrating the wave metaphor from an oceanic to an auditive register, as this opens up for a model of historical engagement attuned to the politics of affective dissonances and resonances across time and place.

Issue Voting as a Constrained Choice Problem

AbstractPrevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies. Choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters, and their composition is left to researchers' discretion. This article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set. We apply the “constrained choice conditional logistic regression” to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in Norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters' choice set compositions. Further, we look into the effect of parties' policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters' choice sets. We find that voters' choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties' policy offerings on their electoral fates.

The Power of Parties: Evidence from Close Municipal Elections in Norway

AbstractWe show that small shifts in representation can affect policy in proportional election systems. Using data from Norway, we find that a larger left‐wing party leads to more property taxation, higher childcare spending, and lower elderly care spending, while local public goods appear to be a non‐partisan issue. These effects are partly due to shifts in bloc majorities, and partly due to changes in the left–right position of the council, keeping the majority constant. The estimates on spending allocations are rather imprecise, but they are consistent with evidence on politicians' fiscal preferences and patterns in media attention.

A formal analysis of the Norwegian E-voting protocol

Norway used e-voting in its last political election both in September 2011 and September 2013, with more than 28,000 voters using the e-voting option in 2011, and 70,000 in 2013. While some other countries use a black-box, proprietary voting solution, Norway has made its system publicly available. The underlying protocol, designed by Scytl, involves several authorities (a ballot box, a receipt generator, a decryption service, and an auditor). Of course, trusting the correctness and security of e-voting protocols is crucial in that context. In this paper, we propose a formal analysis of the protocol used in Norway, w.r.t. ballot secrecy, considering several corruption scenarios. We use a state-of-the-art definition of ballot secrecy, based on equivalence properties and stated in the applied pi-calculus. Used in September 2011 and September 2013 for municipality and county elections in Norway [25], E-voting was tested in ten municipalities. During this nationwide local elections, more than 28,000 voters did use internet to cast their vote in 2011 and 70,000 in 2013. While many countries use black-box proprietary solutions, Norway made the protocol publicly available [23]. One key feature of this system is that voters can check that their votes have correctly reached the ballot box ( cast-as-intended property) without anyone else knowing their vote. The goal of this paper is to conduct a thorough analysis of the Norwegian protocol for the ballot secrecy property: does this system guarantee that no one can know how some voter voted? Formal methods have been successfully applied to security protocols with the development of several tools such as ProVerif [10], Avispa [4], or Scyther [20] that can automatically analyse both protocols of the literature and fully deployed protocols such as TLS [9]. We therefore chose to model and analyse the Norwegian protocols in a symbolic model named the applied pi-calculus model [1]. A first issue comes from the fact that the underlying encryption primitive is non standard and rather complex. Indeed, the decryption key is split in two shares a 1 and a 2 with a 3 = a 1 + a 2. Each of these three keys a 1 , a 2 , a 3 is given to one administration authority. As further explained in Section 1, this allows for re-encryption and is crucial for the cast-as-intended property of the protocol.

Local candidates and voter mobilization: Evidence from historical two-round elections in Norway

What effect do candidates with local ties have on voter turnout and party support? A considerable challenge within the existing literature on the personal vote, including that part which derives from local ties, is disentangling it from the party vote using observational data. We exploit the unique institutional context of Norway’s historical two-round system, and data measured at the municipality level, to evaluate the mobilizational impact of voter attachment to parties versus (local) candidates. Under this system, entry into the second round was unrestricted, with the number and identity of candidates determined by elite coordination decisions. In municipalities where coordination at the district level between rounds resulted in the withdrawal of a candidate with local ties, we document a strong negative effect on both turnout and party support, which highlights the value of the personal vote for mobilization, and the potential trade-offs that confront parties and coalitions in nomination decisions.

Elite Interaction

While a good deal of research has examined the uses of Twitter in journalism, comparably few research projects employ comparative research designs in order to provide new insights. The present study details Twitter use by public service broadcasters (PSBs) during recent national elections in Norway and Sweden. Utilizing quantitative analysis of social media content in tandem with qualitative interviews with key PSB journalists, the main results indicate that while the PSB organizations—the Norwegian NRK and the Swedish SVT—are both frequently contacted by “regular” citizens on Twitter, they seem to prefer to retweet and interact with journalists, politicians or other “elite” users. Compared with the interviews performed, the study uncovers an interesting tension as journalists often talk about the need to engage with “regular” users—a practice that is arguably in line with PSB regulations, but that is seldom adhered to in the contexts studied here.

The Social Media Paradox Explained: Comparing Political Parties’ Facebook Strategy Versus Practice

Political parties’ interaction strategy and practice on Facebook is the topic of this article. Political parties and individual politicians can use social media to bypass media and communicate directly with voters through websites and particularly social media platforms such as Facebook. But previous research has demonstrated that interaction on social media is challenging for political parties. This study examines the disparity between interaction strategy and online responsiveness and finds that political parties identify three clear disadvantages when communicating with voters online: online reputation risk, negative media attention, and limited resources. In addition, the authenticity requirement many parties adhere to is creating a “social media interaction deadlock,” which is increasing the disparity between the parties’ expressed strategy and online performance. This study compares major and minor political parties’ interaction strategy during the 2013 national election in Norway and combines interviews of political communication directors with an innovative method to collect Facebook interaction data.

Did the Financial Crisis Save the Red-Green Government in the 2009 Norwegian Election – the Dissatisfaction with Rising Expectations Superseded By a Grace Period?

AbstractAccording to much of the voluminous literature on economic voting, governments are rewarded or punished for their economic policies as a consequence of economic changes. Economic problems decrease the chance of re-election, whereas good times improve the incumbent’s chances. The last three national elections in Norway give evidence to the contrary. In the 2001 and 2005 elections all economic indicators pointed upwards, but the governments were nevertheless voted out of office. In 2009 the international financial crisis challenged the Norwegian economy, but the government was still re-elected. We argue that this must be explained by introducing two new factors into the economic voting argument: the role of the media and the role of popular expectations. According to the sociotropic voter argument, voters assess the national economy, rather than their personal economy, when they decide how to vote. We argue that sociotropic voters rely heavily on the media as their source of information. In a complex economy, the voter’s personal experience is of little relevance when it comes to assessing the government’s economic policies. The media also form people’s expectations. In 2001 and 2005 expectations exceeded the economic output, whereas in 2009, the public’s expectations were well below the government’s ability to deliver, creating a rare grace period for the governing parties. A content analysis of two major newspapers demonstrates that the financial crisis dominated the media agenda for more than three months, and that the tone in the coverage was positive towards the government during this period. A significant change in party support in this period is demonstrated through auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) modeling of a time series based on opinion polls.

Do re-election probabilities influence public investment?

An insight from dynamic political economy is that elected officials may use state variables to affect the choices of their successors. We exploit the staggered timing of local and national elections in Norway to investigate how politicians’ re-election probabilities affect their investments in physical capital. Because popularity is endogenous to politics, we use an instrumental variable approach based on regional movements in ideological sentiment. We find that higher re-election probabilities stimulate investments, particularly in programs preferred more strongly by the incumbent parties. This aligns with theory where capital and current expenditures are considered complementary inputs to government production.

The Norwegian Electoral System and its Political Consequences

The electoral system is an integral part of any representative democracy, and the choice of system is an important framework for individual behavior and party competition. An electoral system is a result of compromise between parties with vested interests in the system setup. However, no system satisfies all ideal claims. This article is an introduction to the electoral system used in parliamentary elections in Norway; it emphasizes the political consequences of vital elements such as the balance between provincial and compensatory seats, and the geographical distribution of seats and electoral formulae. In sum, the system introduced in 2003 is more proportional in terms of the parties’ share of seats compared with votes, and the geographical distribution has become more systematic and less skewed, although the ideal of one vote-one value has not been achieved. Both the present and previous electoral systems combine elements reflecting different principles and concerns such as increased proportionality, on the one hand, and the fear of a fragmented party system on the other. The analyses show a complex interplay between different parts of the system. One and the same system may have different effects depending on the balance between the parties and between electoral districts. Thus, in order to study the effect of changes in the electoral system one needs to use simulations based on election outcomes over time.

Moderator Bias in Television Coverage of an Election Campaign with no Political Advertising

AbstractTV journalists may influence election outcomes through the way in which they cover election campaigns. This is perhaps more of an issue in countries with no political advertising, where the only connection between politicians and voters through the most important medium, television, is mediated by TV journalists. The present article analyzes journalist moderator behavior in an election campaign in which there was no political advertising and no party-controlled election TV programming. Data were collected from election cross-examination programs on the two TV channels covering the 2005 general election in Norway. There was little consistent information for voters across programs. There were significant biases in moderator treatment of politicians along the left/right political divide. The present article may contribute to increased consciousness among journalists of the possibility of moderator bias in this sort of journalistic campaign coverage. Implications for the outcome of the election are discussed.

The Storting Election in Norway, September 2005

The Storting Election in Norway, September 2005

The Storting election in Norway, September 2001

The Storting election in Norway, September 2001