Foreword

This eight volume of Scandinavian Political Studies offers a wide selection of current
research in our countries.

We have seen in recent years a marked diversification of research efforts in the Nordic countries. The emphasis is no longer so exclusively on such traditional fields as public administration, interest organizations, elections and parties: we have witnessed a number of serious attempts at systematization in new fields of inquiry.

In this issue we present reports on such new initiatives as well as on efforts to
fill important lacunae in established fields.

We have organized the contributions into five groups: the first is devoted to theory development, the second to elections and partisan alignments, and the third to the press and the flow of news. The review and bibliographical sections are the same as in preceding volumes.

The year 1972 was dominated by the EEC issue, which is bound to be of great importance in the study of Nordic politics. The EEC has divided the North and has created new alignments, new divisions within each national system. The issue has many facets. Five of the reports presented in this volume of SPS can be said to reflect efforts to cope with facets of this issue in systematic research: the study by Knut Midgaard and associates on the theory of negotiations, the pioneering survey carried out by Ole Borre and Daniel Katz on the Danish election of 1971, and the reports by Jørgen Elklit and Nikolaj Petersen, Henry Valen, Nils-Petter Gleditsch and Ottar Hellevik on the much-debated referenda in Denmark and Norway on the entry into the EEC. Research on the impact of the EEC issue will no doubt increase in scope and quantity over the next couple of years and we shall no doubt be carrying further reports in future issues of the SPS.

It is a pleasure to present in this volume the innovative work of Bo Bjurulf on the mathematics of electoral systems. Research in this field has a long tradition in Scandinavia: the early discussions of modes of PR were quided by analyses by mathematicians such as Thiele and Nyboe in Denmark, Phragmen in Sweden. Bjurulf s work continues an established tradition, but the computer has made it possible to undertake analyses well beyond what was possible in the earlier phase.

It is also a pleasure to present the work of Risto Alapuro on the politics of
academic groups in Finland. This is a neglected field of research in Scandinavia.
We hope to present in later volumes reports on research on the role of intellectuals

and academics in the politics of other Nordic countries: not only on the right, but
also on the left.

SPS has devoted one whole issue and published several further articles on the mass media in our countries. In this issue we offer two reports on recent research in this field: Claes-Olof Olsson and Lennart Weibull report on a study of the transmission of news, and Kari Sulevo presents an analysis of the attitudes to foreign policy expressed in Finnish newspapers.

Our review section is particularly full and varied this year. In addition to the very interesting first reports on the two referenda on the EEC we take pleasure in presenting an article on the fifth Nordic country, Iceland. We have again and again called for articles on Icelandic politics but until recently without any luck. We are proud to be able to offer a report on the latest election in Iceland by the first lecturer in our discipline at the Håskolas Islands, Olafur Grimsson. With the hotting up of the 'cod war' this small country has become a central target of attention in European politics.

We are most grateful to our helpers in the other countries for their patient and
conscientious work and trust that we shall be able to expand and improve this
co-operative service in the years to come.

Bergen, 1973