University of Bergen

Political research was a growth industry in Norway from the late 1950s well into the seventies. The expansion on the research front paralleled the expansion of teaching staffs and the increase in student loads (see our report on The Growth of the Profession'). Probably the best indicators of the growth in research activities can be found in the statistics issued by the Norwegian Research Council for Science and the Humanities.

Figure 1 gives the totals of funds granted year by year since 1961 by groups of
sciences; it can be seen that the total for the Social Sciences overtook the total
for the Humanities in 1968 and even surpassed that for Medicine from 1970 onwards.

Figure 2 shows that these increases reflect an expansion across the entire range of the Social Sciences. In absolute terms there was a tremendous increase in the amount of support for political research at least until 1973, but the share received for this type of research within the Social Sciences total remained roughly the same throughout the period. Information from other sources indicates a similar trend. Government departments offered more and more resources for social science research during the sixties and the seventies and the political scientists were on the whole successful in claiming their share of the totals. There were some setbacks, such as the failure to finance a major academic survey of the referendum in 1972, but the successes were even more spectacular: the largest of all the projects during the period, the Study of the Distribution of Power, was financed directly by the Prime Minister's office and offered a variety of opportunities for fresh data gathering and innovative conceptualizations.

This over-all expansion was accompanied by an increasing diversification of efforts, geographically no less than thematically. The establishment of a strong research milieu in Bergen during the second half of the sixties produced a climate of healthy competition which made for higher standards. Figure 3 gives a breakdown of the Research Council grants between Oslo and Bergen for the fifteen-year period. It will be seen that even though Bergen did not receive the first project grants until 1968, the ratio between the two centres changed rapidly until the younger university had bypassed the older institution. This picture is bound to change again during the next decade with the rapid expansion of research facilities in Trondheim and Tromsø and at the District Colleges.

This extraordinary expansion of research activities has of necessity produced a great increase in the rate of publication. You will find a reflection of this increased productivity in the cumulative bibliography of the research literature presented in this volume of SPS. But this hardly represents more than the top of the iceberg; there has also been a tremendous increase in the production of papers, reports, theses, etc., for limited circulation only. Our bibliography could not possibly cover all of this production. This goes a fortiori for this overview of trends and achievements. We cannot possibly go into details of all projects or all publications, whether commercial or otherwise; this would go far beyond the limits of this volume of SPS. No attempt will be made to cover all fields in equal depth. The main emphasis will be on the development of a tradition of empirical and analytical research and on the few extant attempts at systematic conceptualization and model-building. We shall focus almost exclusively on studies of conditions, structures and processes within national territorial communities. Readers interested

in Norwegian literature on international relations are referred to the Bibliography and to the surveys already published elsewhere.¹ Our overview will essentially take the form of an update of the account given in the first volume of SPS (Rokkan, A 1, 1966) covering the years 1960-65 and serving in its turn as a sequel to an earlier set of reports prepared in 1960.²

We have endeavoured to bring the account as far up to date as possible but are aware that our overview is particularly spotty in its coverage of projects launched, or publications issued, after the first half of 1976 - our deadline was January, 1977.

1. The Institutional Infrastructure

You cannot conduct serious research on political structures or processes without trained staffs, without funding, without infrastructure. We have already offered a set of growth curves for the production of graduates and for the allocation of funds. We can register a series of parallel efforts to build up infrastructures for research: institutes, clerical facilities, computing machinery, field organizations and data services.

The bulk of the research activities covered in this report took place within seven
institutes: the university departments in Oslo and in Bergen, the five independent
research centres.

The extraordinary increase in student loads during the sixties made it difficult to build up adequate research facilities within the university departments. In Oslo a considerable proportion of the research work initiated by staff members in the University Department was in practice carried out in the independent research institutions. The Institute for Social Research remained the headquarters of the programme of electoral research, the Institute for Peace Research played a similar role in studies of the international system, and the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs organized a number of projects in such fields as European co-operation, the Middle East conflict and Atlantic military strategy. It proved easier to build up research facilities within the broader Department established in Bergen in 1967, but even there some of the research work continued to be carried out within other institutional frameworks. The Michelsen Institute continued its programme in comparative politics and served as the headquarters of a Europe-wide facility, the Data Information Service set up by the European Consortium for Political Research. Further infrastructure developments took place at the periphery of the University. Two large-scale research projects, The Conditions of Living Survey and the Study of the Distribution of Power, had to establish their own temporary headquarters outside the University framework. Another major institution, the Norwegian Social Science Data Services, was housed by the University but was formally a federal organization under the Research Council.

None of these academic institutions has found it possible to build up their own field staff; the size of the country has so far made it too expensive to invest in a university-based survey organization of the Ann Arbor type. Instead, the political scientists at the universities have had to rely on the services of the commercial

polling organizations and, much later, on the Survey Division of the Central Bureau of Statistics. Norwegian academic social scientists have on the whole relied much more frequently on commercial interviewing than their Swedish counterparts [see the very interesting three volume review of Gallup materials edited by Alstad (D 31, 1969)]. The Central Bureau of Statistics did not establish a Survey Division until 1966, more than ten years later than the Swedes. Norwegian political scientists were for several years reluctant to enter into agreement with the governmental data collection agency: there were restrictions on the ranges of questions which could be asked and also problems of access to the original protocols. The situation has been changing since around 1972: the experiences made in the conduct of the largescale government-sponsored survey of Conditions of Living have shown that it is possible to work out acceptable forms of cooperation between academic social scientists and government statisticians. There seems to be wide-ranging consensus on the continued need for two parallel data-gathering organizations: the Central Bureau is clearly not keen on taking on the chores of routine political polling.

Just as they have not been able to build up their own field staffs, none of the seven institutions has been able to acquire large-scale computers of their own. The Institute for Social Research in Oslo was a great pioneer in the field of data processing: it built up a park of mechanical sorter-counters, verifiers and tabulators in the fifties, but had to retool after the arrival of the first electronic computers early in the sixties. These new machines were much too expensive for any single institute; they had to serve the whole of the university and this created great problems of coordination in the use of joint facilities. In fact, the early sixties proved a period of great frustration for all social scientists engaged in quantitative analysis. The computer manufacturers and the enthusiasts at the universities had promised all kinds of miraculous solutions to the problems of data handling and analysis but the great bulk of the working social scientists were sorely tried by the difficulties of programming, by the multiplication of errors and by the many 'accidental' losses of files. The arrival of the computer caused severe backlogs for several projects: data could no longer be analyzed on the old mechanical devices but there was hardly any one around who could get the jobs through the new miracle machines, the computers. There was an appalling shortage of staff trained for the new tasks and there was an even greater shortage of adequate software for the jobs of data handling and analysis typical of the social sciences. The pressure for action built up and the Research Council finally decided to take action to break the bottleneck by setting up a Committee on Social Science Data and allocating funds for the training of programming staff, for the development and installation of custom-tailored software, and for the organization of archives of data for easy access. This Committee got under way in earnest in 1967 and was transformed into the Norwegian Social Science Data Services, the NSD, during 1971.³ A number of steps were taken to improve software facilities at the different universities, to build up a series of archives of machine-readable data and to make these facilities easily accessible to the community of social scientists throughout the country. Heavy investments were made in the development of a large-scale bank for time-series

information on all the communes of Norway, with the facility covering the entire period since the establishment of local government in 1837 and linking up data from a great variety of sources. A parallel facility is being built up for elite biographies; the first archive of this type covers all members of the Storting and the Cabinet since 1814,⁴ another one will be built up for the upper echelons of the central administration. The NSD has its headquarters at the University of Bergen but has established local secretariats at each of the other universities. The organization has had considerable impact on political research in Norway since 1971. The easier access to data and software has accelerated the production of reports and the many 'user' meetings organized under the Services has made it easier to plan cooperative ventures.

These Norwegian efforts at infrastructure-building were heavily influenced by developments at the international level. Stein Rokkan took an active part in the movement of data archivists from the mid-fifties onwards (see Rokkan, A 2, 1964 and 1966) and later took the lead in developing a clearing-house for information about data holdings and data generation activities across Western Europe (Rokkan, A 2, 1973). In 1971 he was able to establish, under the auspices of the European Consortium for Political Research, a Data Information Service in Bergen. The service produced a quarterly newsletter, European Political Data, for general circulation within the ECPR network and helped to link up Norwegian research increasingly with parallel undertakings in other countries. The work within the organization has been pursued in close cooperation with the NSD, finding formal expression during 1976 when the EPD Newsletter was made a joint publication of the ECPR and the Norwegian organization.

The European Consortium for Political Research is in fact an important component of the infrastructure services available to Norwegian political scientists. Stein Rokkan served as Chairman from 1970 to 1976 and helped to bring a number of recruits to the Summer Schools, the Workshops and the other meetings of the Consortium. The training facilities organized by the ECPR added an important international dimension to the teaching at the universities and the Workshops provide a useful testing ground for graduate students and younger research workers. The ECPR gave top priority in all its activities to the development of facilities for the younger members of the profession and this policy is clearly beginning to produce payoffs.

2. Models and Conceptual Frameworks

The technology of the 'data revolution' produced a dramatic break with the earlier traditions of single-scholar documentary research; the 'new science of polities' set itself off from history and constitutional jurisprudence through its concentration on the developing methods of sampling, standardized data gathering and automated mass analysis. But this emphasis on technological innovation did not in itself guarantee the development of a systematic discipline of political analysis. The mushrooming organizations of pollsters and social surveyors and the increasingly powerful generations of computers opened up extraordinary possibilities

for research but also increased enormously the intellectual responsibilities of the analysts. It became easier to assemble data and easier to manipulate them, but it also became easier to produce statistical nonsense and to get lost in sheer numerology. Happily, the revolution in the technology of research was paralleled by a vigorous, if not always concerted, revival of interest in theory construction, in the formulation of models and in the systematization of frameworks for the design of research and the strategy of analysis. Only a handful of attempts were made at the formulation of general theories, but a remarkable number of 'middle range' models and frameworks were suggested and explored. Social scientists were caught in a dialectic dilemma: the computer technology forced them to systematize their conceptual apparatus and to sharpen their tolls of inquiry, but the onrush of data generated through these very techniques set increasingly difficult tasks for the theorists and the model-builders.

Since the early 1950s this 'data-theory' dialectic had conditioned the development of all the social science disciplines and had found particularly clear-cut expression in the field of political analysis. On the one hand the political process itself generated vast masses of readily codable data for this new machinery of analysis, on the other the conceptual and the methodological equipment inherited from a long tradition of philosophical thinking and historical exegesis proved highly inadequate in meeting the technological challenge. There was a gap between the accelerating production of new data for analysis and the slowly developing efforts to bring these masses of information under conceptual and analytical control.

The 'data-theory' gap became a concern of political analysts in most countries in the West throughout the sixties. It was perhaps less discussed in the circles where the study of politics remained a branch of traditional history, but it became an increasingly important issue among all students concerned with developing a truly comparative and cross-national discipline of political analysis.

In Scandinavia a number of attempts were made during the sixties to take up the challenge of this gap between theory and data in the study of politics. Most of these theoretical formulations reflected developments in sociology. In fact, there was a marked tendency toward a merger of research traditions at the borderline between sociology and empirical and statistical politics. Developments were much slower on the other frontiers of interdisciplinary exchange. There were scattered explorations of the possibilities of systematic application of formal models of decision-making. The anthropologist Fredrik Earth made imaginative use of paradigms from the theory of games (Earth, D 32, 1965) and the political scientist Knut Midgaard tried to systematize the implications of these paradigms for the study of negotiations (Midgaard, E 20, 1965). Elements of the March-Simon-type models of organizational decision-making gained ground during the sixties; the pioneers in this tradition were Knut Dahl Jacobsen (C 611, 1964, 1966) and Johan P. Olsen (C 610, 1970, 1971, 1972).⁵ The decisive thrust toward an 'economization' of political analysis came in the seventies, however; Gudmund Hernes made innovative use of Coleman's exchange models, not only in concrete analyses of transactions within Parliament (D 30, 1974) but with even greater impact in his analyses of concepts of power and powerlessness (D 10, 1975).

But the bulk of the efforts at theorizing remained heavily sociological in style and in orientation. Explicitly sociological frameworks for political analysis were developed by Erik Allardt in Finland, Ulf Himmelstrand in Sweden, Vilhelm Aubert, Johan Galtung, Stein Rokkan, Ulf Torgersen, Francesco Kjellberg and Øyvind Østerud in Norway.

Erik Allardt's continuous efforts to spell out paradigms for the analysis of forces making for conflict or consensus in industrializing societies have attracted a great deal of attention among students of politics in Scandinavia. His emphasis on the importance of theory building in the study of variations over time and across distinct territorial systems has had an increasing impact on the planning and design of inquiries into political statistics. This influence has been particularly marked in Norway. The new technologies of data gathering and data processing had made an early breakthrough in Norway: the Institute for Social Research in Oslo served as a bridgehead for a distinguished phalanx of American social scientists. The theoretical orientation of the early studies was essentially social psychological, emphasizing individual and small-group variables and having little if any concern for the historical and the geographical contexts of the variations under study. This changed with the institutionalization of nation-wide inquiries. Analysts had to face up to the wide range of variations among localities and regions and were forced to look for developmental dimensions in these variations. The new analysis tasks increased the demand for macrosociological model-building: Allardt was one of the first to take up this challenge and his work had a distinct impact on further explorations in this direction.

This trend toward a concentration on developmental and ecological dimensions of the national polity can be seen in the work of a number of Norwegian social scientists. Vilhelm Aubert broadened his study of the origins and functions of lawyers in Norwegian society (D 14, 1960) into an over-all inquiry into the growth and interlinkages of the professional elites (D 14, 1962) and suggested ways of using such data in an approach to the sociology of nation-building and national integration. This work was carried one step further by Ulf Torgersen in his analyses of the development of a variety of elite groups in Norway and in his sketch of a general sociology of the professions (D 32, 1972). Interestingly, this interest in the growth of ,core elites of nation builders was coupled with an intensified concern with developments at the peripheries of the nation, particularly in the economically and culturally backward communities of the North, the last area to enter into the national system of communication and exchange. Francesco Kjellberg's work on Political Institutionalization (D 30, 1975) has contributed important insights into the interlinkages between local social structure and governmental organizations. His analyses are based on field work experiences in Northern Norway as well in a rural community in Sardinia.

This work parallels several other endeavours on the border between sociology and politics. Odd Ramsøy (C 21, 1962) has explored ideas set out by Edmund Leach and Talcott Parsons and tried to spell out a paradigm for the study of relationships upwards and downwards in hierarchies of systems. Johan Galtung has tried to operationalize a general 'centre-periphery' dimension and to formulate

hypotheses about the consequences of differences in positions on such a scale (D 31, 1961, 1964). In later papers the elements of this dimension - geographical, economic, social, cultural and political - have been analysed in further detail and a model has been suggested for the generation of hypotheses about the consequences of movements towards disequilibria in rankings on each of the elementary attributes (E 20, 1964). This style of model-building draws its strength from the important Yule-Lazarsfeld tradition of attribute combinatorics and has very direct applications in survey research and in aggregate comparisons of the type pioneered by Karl Deutsch and his colleagues at Yale. In series of articles in the Journal of Peace Research and other international media (D 0, 1967, 1968, 1975) Galtung has demonstrated great versatility in the development of multi-level models of interaction within the world community. His extensive experience with field work and teaching in the Third World helped him decisively in translating these abstract models into concrete analyses and made it possible for him to reach a world-wide audience. His current work on the 'cosmologies' of different civilizations (F 3, 1973) goes still further in theoretical generality, but has not yet reached the stage of synthesis.

Parallel theoretical developments have taken place within the long-term programme of electoral research carried forward since 1956 at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo and the Michelsen Institute in Bergen (Valen & Rokkan, Al, 1967). These studies were from the outset focused on the political effects of the historical processes of change in Norwegian society: the continuing spread of urban settlement, the exodus from the primary economy, the increase in the size and complexity of work organizations and the consequent changes in occupational structure (Valen & Katz, D 21, 1964). The basic design of the studies was formulated in a two-dimensional 'location chart for variables' (Rokkan, D 30, 1962). One dimension was structural: from attributes of the total nation through a series of sub-system attributes to attributes of the member-citizens. The other dimension was historical and developmental: the variables were time-specified at each level of the national polity, from the total 'state of the system' in its geopolitical environment to the behaviour of the constituent organizations, collective units and individual actors.

The early studies focused on the latest phases of change in Norwegian society: the years since World War 11. This soon proved an impossibly restrictive framework of analysis: the decisive party alignments had developed during the first decades after the introduction of manhood suffrage and the current constellations in each locality could only be understood against the background of these early alignments. The result was a gradual broadening of the programme: the task was to piece together a 'statistical history of Norwegian polities', to trace the spread of a series of political innovations from the central to the peripheral communities within the nation (Rokkan, D 30, 1966). The rationale for this programme was seen in the theories of social, cultural and political mobilization formulated by Karl Deutsch and Dan Lerner and brought into the broader framework of a developmental model by Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye and their associates. What was new in the Norwegian effort was the attempt to pin down a number

of 'threshold points' of local development through the accumulation of time series data for all distinguishable communities within the nation. This effort generated an interest in the identification of the 'crucial dimensions' of the emerging Norwegian party system (Rokkan & Valen, D 341, 1964). This interpretive model of the translation of successive cleavage lines into distinctive party alignments still calls for detailed testing region by region, but at least suggests a potentially fruitful line of comparative cross-system analysis. A first, still incomplete, formulation of a basic model for such comparisons of stages in the development of party systems was published in 1967 (Lipset & Rokkan, D 20, 1967) and was spelled out in greater detail in a volume published in 1970 by Stein Rokkan [Citizens, Elections, Parties (D 10)]. The model represents a first step in the 'operationalization' of the politically central dimensions of Talcott Parsons's A-G-I-L paradigm. It first suggests ways of locating the historically given party oppositions (whether local or nation-wide) in a two-dimensional diagram and then proceeds to specify conditions for the development of particular types of alignments within the framework of this classification. This attempt to get beyond the traditional two-country comparisons toward a hypothetical-deductive analysis of all extant cases represented a programme of its own: it suggested a number of concrete tasks of data organization and encouraged several other scholars to explore further possibilities of systematic comparison.₆ The early work on the genealogy of party systems quickly led on to analyses in greater historical depth. Stein Rokkan became increasingly interested in the development of a general model of the interaction of geopolitics and geoeconomics in the structuring of the territorial systems of Western Europe. The first attempts in this direction were published in 1971 and offered arguments for the construction of a 'conceptual map of Europe' (Rokkan, A 1, 1971; Eisenstadt & Rokkan, A 1, 1973; Rokkan, A 1, 1975, cf. Rokkan A 1, 1974). The model has already gone through a number of stages of specification and will clearly never be fully tested: the difficulties of systematic confrontation with historical data and interpreations are formidable and cannot possibly be solved by a single scholar.⁷

Several younger scholars have taken up the challenge of macrohistorical comparisons
but have found it advisable to stick to the 'most-similar systems' approach:
they have concentrated their efforts on the Nordic countries.

Of these analyses the richest in theoretical implications is probably the one by Øyvind Østerud: this focuses on the early agrarian structures in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and seeks to explain differences in the style and content of peasant politics against the background of information on land tenure systems, levels of commercialization and links to the urban economies.₈ Østerud's work is of particular interest because of its emphasis on the inherited structures, the contrasts in historical legacies before the decisive waves of democratization and mobilization at the end of the nineteenth century. William Lafferty and Stein Kuhnle have concentrated on the first waves of political change from the 1880s onwards. Lafferty's book on Economic Development and the Response of Labour in Scandinavia (D 10, 1971) subjected the well-known Bull-Galenson theories to a critical test by bringing together a variety of data and analyses in an effort to explain the differences between Denmark, Norway and Sweden in their rhythms of industrialization

and in the character of the consequent mobilization of urban and rural workers. In a follow-up volume he tried to analyze the data for Norway within a broader framework of ecological theory (C 21, 1974, cf. D 30, 1972). Stein Kuhnle's work parallels Lafferty's but covers a longer span of time. His initial analyses (D 10, 1975) covered the interaction between socio-cultural modernization (economic development, urbanization, schooling) and political mobilization across four Nordic countries, and his current work compares rhythms of welfare legislation over a period of more than one hundred years.

These various efforts at macro-historical analysis have obviously been influenced to some extent by the revival of Marxist theorizing in academic circles since the mid-sixties. The 'true believers' have on the whole had only minimal impact on theory development but the repeated clashes between 'humanistic' vs. 'scientistic' interpretations of the Marxian oeuvre have stimulated fresh attempts at general reformulations of the implicit models of historical dynamics. The leading Norwegian Marxologist Jon Elster⁹ has exerted considerable influence on political sociologists in Norway and has helped them refine their analyses of processes of change. Gudmund Hernes has combined elements from Marxist historical materialism, modern development economics as well as systems theory in an effort to formulate a general model of structural change.¹⁰ This formalization of notions of 'dialectic feedback' holds great promise but clearly calls for further specification and testing in concrete analyses of processes of socio-political change.

3. Mass Reactions and Electoral Behaviour

The breakthrough towards a 'new science of polities' invariably occurred at the lowest level of the system, at the level of the 'unit citizen' defined in electoral law (Rokkan, D 10, 1970, Ch. 1). The enforcement of the principle of 'one man, one vote, one value' set the stage for the emergence of a systematic discipline of political statistics: the economist could count physical and montetary units, the political scientist enfranchized citizens and their votes.

In most Western countries the earliest studies in political statistics concentrated on the official counts produced through the electoral machinery. In Norway there was no tradition of electoral geography or quantitative ecological analysis before World War 11. There was a curious attempt at an 'ethnic' interpretation of the regional constrasts in Norwegian politics in the nineties¹¹ but there was no Siegfried, no Tingsten. The breakthrough toward systematic electoral analysis came in the late forties and then through the introduction of political sample surveys, not through the analysis of official records.

Private organizations for the conduct of nation-wide sample surveys emerged shortly after the end of World War II and were soon producing large quantities of information about reactions in the Norwegian electorate. The Norwegian Gallup Institute established a regular service of monthly polls and fed information about the results to the headquarters of the parties willing to pay. Academic social scientists soon took an interest in this new source of data and tried to make use of the facilities of the survey organizations. A first academic survey of the national electorate

was conducted as early as 1949. This was to be the first of a long series. The mushrooming Institute for Social Research trained a number of young academics in the techniques of field work and data processing and organized a number of sample surveys, some local, some nation-wide. Most of the nation-wide studies were carried out in co-operation with the Gallup Institute. Plans for a governmental survey organization came quite late, by 1964. The majority of the surveys were not explicitly designed as inquiries into political processes in Norway but they invariably included a series of questions about public issues and electoral behaviour. A useful collection of summaries of the findings of the Gallup surveys was edited by B. Alstad in 1969 (D 31): this covers twenty years of activity and offers a wealth of tables for most aspects of Norwegian life. Most of the Gallup data for the sixties and the early seventies have been reformatted and merged into one single file by the Norwegian Social Scince Data Services, thus making it much easier to get access to the data for secondary analyses.¹²

Of immediate interest to political analysts were the studies of attitudes on international issues carried out within what was to become the Institute of Peace Research [Note especially the early reports by Johan Galtung (D 31, 1961 and 1964) and the later analyses by Gleditsch, Hellevik and others of variations in attitudes to membership in the European Community (Gleditsch, Høivik & Hellevik, D 340, 1974; Hellevik D 31, 1972)]. This group made extensive use of the services of the competing survey organization FAKTA. This company lost out in the early seventies and in 1975 entered into a complex merger with the Gallup organization.

Of great importance for an understanding of changes in the Norwegian electorate in the early sixties were the surveys of attitudes towards unionization carried out by Egil Fivesdal (D 14, 1964) and Sverre Lysgaard (D 12, 1961). Political analysts also benefitted greatly from the study of attitudes toward the use of alcohol carried out under the direction of Sverre Brun-Gulbrandsen. These added important details to the growing body of statistical information on regional contrasts in political culture.¹³

Systematically designed surveys of political opinions, attitudes and behaviours have been organized since 1957 under a joint programme of electoral research at the Institute for Social Research and the Michelsen Institute (Valen & Rokkan, A 0, 1967).

The first reports on the surveys carried out at the time of the 1957 election were published in 1959 but it took several years before the general results of the analysis work could be presented to the public. A major event in the history of the programme was the publication in 1964 of the principal report on the local surveys conducted in the Southwest of Norway. Henry Valen's book with Daniel Katz (D2l, 1964, 2nd ed. 1967) was the first broad presentation of facts and findings from a pioneering study of party activities and voter reactions in Norway. The parallel analyses of the nation-wide data collected in 1957 have not been presented in any single report, but have found their way into a variety of technical reports and interpretive statements (Rokkan, D 10, 1963, 1966, 1970; D 30, 1962, 1966; D 341, 1960; Rokkan & Valen, D 341,1964).

The pressure of other work did not make it possible to organize a further nationwide

survey at the election of 1961, but some secondary analysis was subsequently carried out on the basis of Gallup data for the dramatic period of mobilization against entry into the Common Market from 1961 to 1962 (Rokkan & Valen, D 341, cf. Rokkan & Høyer, D 341, 1962).

By the time of the next national election, however, there was so much interest m public circles in this type of research that grants were made to the programme both from the Government and the Research Council. A nation-wide panel survey was carried out before and after the election of 12-13 September, 1965. The focus was again on the political effects of the processes of change in Norwegian society and on this occasion there were for the first time since the war really significant movements in the dependent variables: a marked increase in turnout and a sizeable reduction in the strength of the governing party. To explore the effects of one major change in the technology of electioneering a study of differences between communes with and without television coverage was built into the design: this necessitated a separate interview operation in districts of the North not having TV. The nation-wide sample interviewed in 1965 was interviewed again at the equally dramatic election of 1969.

These panel data offered extraordinary opportunities for analysis and a number of important reports were published in the early seventies: we cite the detailed analysis of the dimensionalities of electoral choice undertaken by Henry Valen in co-operation with Phil Converse of the Ann Arbor team (Converse & Valen, D 341, 1971; cf. Valen and Martinussen, D 342, 1972), the innovative work on political resources and modes of participation carried out by Willy Marthinussen (D 30, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973) as well as interesting contributions by Ragnar Waldahl to the study of face-to-face communication about political issues (D 341,1974).

The extraordinary mobilization of support across party lines for and against entry into the European Community offered a fresh challenge to the Norwegian team of electoral analysts. Unfortunately, it proved impossible to organize a major survey operation in 1972 but the Gallup Institute generously offered space for a considerable battery of questions about the underlying attitudes to national independence and international co-operation. The violent disruptions of established loyalties produced by the referendum provided unique opportunities for analyses of processes of realignment. The panel interviewed in 1965 and in 1969 were interviewed again in 1973 and were even sent a mail questionnaire at the time of the local and provincial elections of 1975 (Valen, D 342, 1976). A few reports have already been produced on the basis of this unique set of panel data (Valen D 342, 1973, 1976; Rokkan & Valen, D 342, 1974; Valen & Rokkan, D 341, 1974) but a number of detailed analyses are still in progress.

The joint programme went far beyond the organization of sample surveys, however. A central element in the programme was the development of a time series archive of coded information on the political, economic, social and cultural structure of each commune in Norway. This archive has involved a great deal of work and is still in full development: it was transferred to the Norwegian Social Sciences Data Services in 1971 and incorporates more than 15,000 variables covering

a period of close to 140 years - from the 1840s to 1976. The early analyses of this material simply helped to check the reliability of the data collected by the survey method. The first publications reviewed evidence of the patterns of regional variations in the strength of the parties and in the level of participation (Rokkan and Valen, D 341, 1964; Rokkan, D 30, 1966); the later ones focused on variations in the local conditions of political mobilization and made use of extensive information on the activities of different parties at the level of the commune. One of the first reports brought in an important developmental variable: the politicization of local elections through the breakdown of the traditional territorial oppositions and the entry of nationally organized parties. This work was subsequently followed up in a historical study of rates of politicization (Hjellum, D 21, 1967).

In recent years, the group organized by Stein Rokkan in Bergen has pushed these analyses of historical trends at the local-regional level several steps further. Stein Kuhnle has studied processes of suffrage extension and political mobilization since 1814 (D341, 1972; D 10, 1975) and Frank Aarebrot has tried out a series of regression models in a study of the decisive waves of increases in registration and turnout from 1876 to 1897.¹⁴ Lars Svåsand has focused attention on the spread of popular movements and party organizations in the seventies and eighties (D 10, 1975) and has also published a statistical analysis of the first two-party contest in Norwegian history, the election of 1882 (Svåsand, D 342, 1973). The period from 1900 to 1936 has also been extensively studied on the basis of information now in the NSD archives of commune data. Gabriel Øidne has reviewed in some detail the fate of the Venstre, the dominant party of opposition to the centralurban establishment in the important election of 1903 (D 21, 1972). Sten Sparre Nilson¹⁵ has looked at the variations in the Republican votes at the referendum held in 1905 and correlated them with the votes in the two consultations on Prohibition organized in 1919 and 1926. William Lafferty has carried out detailed ecological analyses of commune data on the speed of industrialization and the radicalization of the labour movement from 1910 to 1924 (C 20, 1974). And Terje Sande has opened up a new field of research on developments at the local level by analyzing in some detail data on the impact of electoral realignments on increases in communal budgets, tax rates and indebtedness from 1910 to 1924, a period of accelerated expansion of infrastructure equipment and social services.¹⁶

The electoral historian Gabriel Øidne is the only scholar so far to have made extensive use of the statistics by wards in a major city: his study of the contrast between East and West in Norway was followed up in 1973 (D 30) by a parallel study of the East-West contrasts within the city of Oslo.

The joint programme of the two institutes was broadened during the sixties to cover the mass media. The Institute for Press Research set up at the University of Oslo made a number of important contributions to the study of the impact of changes in the technologies and the economics of the mass media on political alignments in Norway. The National Research Council set up for some years a Secretariat for Media Research at the University of Bergen and this group cooperated closely with the team of electoral analysts in a number of joint projects (Torsvik, Rokkan, Holbæk-Hanssen, D 332,1972).

Among the many inquiries organized in this field four groups are of particular
importance:

- the detailed historical-statistical studies of the political economy of the press
undertaken by Svennik Høyer (D 332, 1960, 1973,1975);

- the analyses of survey evidence of the importance of newspaper reading for
active vs. passive voters in different local settings, originally presented in an article
by Stein Rokkan and Per Torsvik, later developed in further depth by Torsvik;17

- the content analyses of party campaign materials, newspaper articles and stories in weekly magazines carried out by Svennik Høyer (D 32, 1963, 1975), Sigmund Grønmo (D 21, 1975), Per Arnt Pettersen (D 32, 1975) and Per Torsvik (D 332, 1973);

- the studies of the impact of television during the sixties and seventies carried
out by Per Torsvik (D 332, 1967), Henry Valen (Valen & Torsvik, D 342,
1967) and Helge Østbye (D 332, 1972).

The Norwegian programme of electoral research has been carried forward in close co-operation with social scientists in other countries. A number of international working conferences have been organized (Rokkan, D 30, 1962) and efforts have been made to integrate findings for Norway into a wider context of comparative political analysis (Valen & Rokkan, D 342, 1974). Two explicitly comparative articles have been published (Rokkan & Campbell, D 340, 1960; Campbell & Valen, D 20, 1961) and a number of ad hoc confrontations of crossnational data have been attempted. Stein Rokkan has written several programmatic statements on the potentialities of comparative electoral research and has taken the lead in organizing an International Guide to Electoral Statistics. The first volume, covering fifteen countries of Western Europe, was published in 1969 (Rokkan & Meyriat, D 340, 1969).

The joint programme of electoral research will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 1977. It is still going strong but the key participants are now spread over three universities in Norway: Henry Valen in Oslo, Willy Marthinussen in Trondheim, Stein Rokkan in Bergen. The programme is no longer as unified as it once was but this diversification has clearly proved a strength. The group is currently engaged in co-operative projects with other teams of social scientists in Norway and has taken up new approaches to the study of the socio-cultural dynamics of mass politics. Willy Marthinussen is engaged in a study of the political resources of the poor and the deprived in cooperation with Gudmund Hernes and Stein Ringen. In this study data from the electoral panel survey will be combined with data from the large-scale government-sponsored survey of Conditions of Living in Norway. This extensive survey is partly modelled on the Swedish Low-Income study (Johansson, D 30, 1971) and parallels on several points the four-country survey of dimensions of welfare organized by Erik Allardt (B 20, 1975). The Conditions of Living survey has opened up new avenues of co-operation among economists, sociologists and political scientists and promises a number of analytical innovations. The survey offers a solid basis for the construction of indicators of inequality and will help to clarify a number of issues in the current controversies over the failures and the dilemmas of the welfare state.

Important projects of survey research have also been organized within the other large-scale programme of concerted studies sponsored by the Norwegian government: the study of the Distribution of Power. Johan P. Olsen and Harald Sætren have undertaken a major nation-wide survey to map the spread and the cumulation of memberships and participant activities, not only in the established parties and the voluntary organizations but also in all kinds of ad hoc movements, demonstrations, etc. These data will be combined with parallel information from interviews with civil servants, officers of associations, Members of Parliament and other elite groups and will provide us with materials of crucial importance for our understanding of the channelling of pressures on decision-makers and decisionimplementers in the Norwegian polity.

4. Parties, Interest Groups and Popular Movements

The bulk of the studies carried out within the joint programme of electoral research have focused on the explanation of reactions at the lowest level of the political system - the behaviour and the attitudes of the 'unit citizens' on the electoral rolls. In recent years, however, there has been a marked tendency to devote greater resources to the study of variables at higher levels of the system: to treat such variables as dependent and worthy of explanatory efforts in their own right rather than as independent and intervening variables in the study of the mass electorate. In a mass market the behaviour of consumers cannot be understood without information about the product, the retailers, the wholesalers and the advertising operations. In a mass democracy, the behaviour of the rank and file voters cannot be understood without detailed knowledge of the alternatives marketed, the policies and the candidates promoted by each party, the local and the regional networks, the central structure, the communications machinery. But political research must go beyond pure market research; the alternatives offered to the consumers are not finished products but living human beings continuously interracting with others in a variety of organizational networks. These networks of interaction set complex tasks for the student of politics and no single approach can give all the answers. Statistically oriented students will tend to start out from the discrete units in each network: the candidates and the representatives, the party personnel, the local organizations, the press. The historically oriented scholars will tend to focus on central policy-making in the legislature and the party bureaucracy and trace repercussions downward in the system.

In the joint research programme developed by the Institute for Social Research and the Michelsen Institute attempts were made to explore several approaches to the study of such networks of interaction, but the bulk of the work concentrated on unit statistics. Henry Valen established an archive of data about candidates at the Storting elections of 1957 and 1961 and also collected information about party organizations and party membership in each commune. The first analysis to be published on this basis focused on the relationship between local politicization and candidate recruitment (Rokkan & Valen, D 341, 1964). Much more detailed analyses of candidate characteristics were published in 1966 (Valen,

D 32). Following up this work at a different level of the system, TorsteiTi Hjellum (D 21, 1967) analyzed the composition of the lists of candidates presented at local elections in the West of Norway and tried to pinpoint the effects of the emergence of partisan conflicts on the recruitment of leaders from different social strata. This paralleled Francesco Kjellberg's study of the professionalization of local politics in an isolated community in the North (C 71, 1965).

These early studies were followed up in the second half of the sixties within a broader programme of research on local politics at the University of Oslo. Francesco Kjellberg and Audun Offerdal organized several studies of the personnel of city councils (Kjellberg, C 71, 1967; Kjellberg and Olsen, C 71, 1968; Kjellberg, C 71, 1971; Kjellberg & Offerdal, D 32, 1971; Offerdal, D 341, 1974) and also encouraged a set of initial inquiries into local budgetary processes (Kjellberg, C 51, 1974).

The statistical studies of party entrenchment and leader recruitment will clearly have to be supplemented by detailed studies of developments at the centre of each party organization. Henry Valen has worked extensively on the development of the Norwegian party organizations and has prepared a broad presentation of the available information on constitutional structure and decision-making procedure in a compendium for students (D 21, 1962, 1964).

But much still remains to be done on the history of Norwegian party developments. Academic historians have recently begun to take a serious interest in the emergence and early structuring of the parties. Rolf Danielsen has dealt in some detail with the development of distinct political alliances and 'proto-parties' in the seventies and eighties (Kaartvedt, C 321, 1964, Vol. II) and has analysed the changes in the party systems after the introduction of manhood suffrage in 1898 (D 21, 1962). Detailed research on the history of the Venstre, the great party of opposition to the old Establishment, has been pursued for some years at the Institute of History at the University of Bergen. Leiv Mjeldheim has published an important report on a series of analyses of group representation and processes of interest aggregation in this multi-facetted party during its heyday from 1906 to 1918.¹⁸ Edgar Hovland has sifted a great deal of material on the history of the early agrarian organizations and Rolf Danielsen and Alf Kaartvedt are at work on a major history of the conservative party, the Høyre.

Among the political scientists, Ulf Torgersen has carried out a series of painstaking analyses of the growth of the urban parties in the eighties and nineties and has looked into principles and procedures of member recruitment (D 21, 1961-62). This set of studies was later followed up through an analysis of changes in the systems of representation on the national party conventions from the early period of indirect elections through the brief period of run-off majority elections to the period of PR contests after 1920 (D 21, 1966). Torgersen's historical studies of party structure go further in sociological depth than any others thus far carried out and constitute important elements in a broad programme of studies of changes in the recruitment and functions of Norwegian elite groups in the decades before and after the extension of the suffrage (cf. D 14, 1961, D 32, 1972).

The period of run-off majority elections from 1906 through 1918 has been

opened up- for detailed research by Tertit Aasland. Her study (D 342, 1965) of the party labels of the candidates and the second-round coalitions in the five elections held in this period is of great interest and points to a number of challenging tasks of statistical analysis as well as raising important questions about variations in party strategy under the impact of changes in the rules of the electoral game. She has also contributed to the study of two important changes in the party system during this period: first a report on the organization of the Radical wing of the Venstre after 1906 (D 21,1962), later a much more thorough study of the developments which led up to the organization of a nation-wide Agrarian party during World War I.¹⁹

The further developments from World War I to the entry of the Labour party into the national establishment have given rise to a great deal of excited speculation and controversy but have not as yet been subjected to systematic scrutiny. Torgersen (D2l, 1961; Landsmøtet) and Lafferty (D2l, 1969, cf. also C 21, 1974) have studied in great detail the struggle between the different factions of the Labour party during the crucial years after the Russian Revolution. Knut Heidar (D 32, 1974) has established an archive of biographical information on the elites of the Labour party and has analyzed in some detail the relationships between trends in recruitment and changes in ideology.

The crisis years of the thirties have been attracting increasing attention both among historians and political scientists. Nils Ørvik's history of the conflicts over foreign policy (E 22, 1961, vol I) gives fascinating details about the tense years from 1928 to 1933: the trend towards a polarization of the political forces, the traces of Verfemung and militarization. But solid monographs on this phase of near-disintegration are still missing. The early work of Sten Sparre Nilson on the background of the Quislingities has been followed up by Rolf Danielsen, Stein Ugelvik Larsen and Jan-Petter Myklebust. They have built up an important file of biographical information on all members of the NS, the Norwegian National Socialist party, and have carried out some initial analyses of this material (Larsen & Danielsen, D 21, 1975). Jan-Petter Myklebust has aggregated the membership figures by commune and tried to analyze the fit between membership development and voting strength.²⁰

The internal histories of the parties after the five years of German ccupation have as yet attracted little scholarly attention. Thomas Wyller has written a vivid narrative of the crucial events of the summer of 1945 and has raised a very important question for further research (C 21, 1963). The established parties had lost face in the early months of occupation in 1940 and did not really count in the resistance front, yet the first result of Liberation politics was the reestablishment of all the parties largely on the same lines and along the same dimensions as before the interregnum.

The intriguing history of the Communist party, the only one of the pre-war parties to organize for resistance on its own, is not well known. The U.S. trained Norwegian political scientist Trond Gilberg has dealt in some detail with the links with the Soviet 'mother' party (B 23, 1973). The Swedish political scientist Ingemar Glans has carried out a detailed study of the Left Socialists in Norway

and Denmark, but unfortunately only a small part of this has as yet been made
available to other scholars (D 20,1965).

The history of the Labour party after its accession to power has so far mainly been described in official accounts. The only academic studies of internal developments in the party organization are by Fredrik Hoffman of the short-lived split in the party ranks over the atomic rearmament of Germany (D 21, 1966) and by Knut Heidar on recruitment and deradicalization (D 32, 1974). An American student (Groennings, D 21, 1962) collected a great deal of information on the efforts to establish mergers and co-operative arrangements among the four nonsocialist parties, but made very little headway towards an interpretation of the findings. An American analyst of political finance, Arnold Heidenheimer, has dealt in more detail with the parapolitical organization Libertas and has analyzed its activities in a comparative perspective.²¹

The detente between the parties during the period from 1945 to 1961 has been the subject of a great deal of discussion (H.F. Dahl, D 21, 1969). Ulf Torgersen has recently gone into this process in some detail and has tried to throw light on dilemmas of party strategy in the phase of de-ideologization (chapter in Allardt and Rokkan, D 30,1970).

All students of political parties have in one way or another had to face up to the existence of the parallel network of interest organizations and popular movements. At the level of unit statistics the linkages between the two channels of influence can be studied through the collation of information about joint positions and memberships. Henry Valen looked into these linkages in his studies of party personnel and Ottar Hellevik and Gudmund Hernes have explored the configurations of organizational commitments in great detail in their work on the members of the Storting (C321: Hellevik 1969, Hernes, 1973). Parallel studies of the organizational links of functionaries within the central administrative organs are under way within the Tower' programme (Olsen, Egeberg and Sætren, D 10, 1975).

Stein Rokkan has on several occasions called attention to the challenging tasks of research inherent in the 'two-tier' system of public decision-making (D 10, 1963 and 1966).²² He organized a set of initial studies along these lines at the Michelsen Institute during the sixties. Jorolv Moren established a basic file of information on Norwegian organizations at the Institute and published a useful reference guide on all nationwide associations (A 4, 1966 and 1972). This data file has since been expanded by Abraham Hallenstvedt and his coworkers and has been placed at the disposal of the Data Services.

The focus of all these inquiries was on the relationships between the numerical-electoral' and the 'organizational-functional' channels of influence on central decision-makers (Rokkan, D 341, 1975). Jorolv Moren reviewed trends towards an institutionalization of functional representation across Western Europe (C 51, 1962) and worked extensively with the American scholar Kvavik (D 11, 1975) in a broader study of interest organizations in Norwegian politics. Moren also edited with Hallenstvedt and others a useful collection of analyses of the 'votes count, resources decide' thesis.²³

This theme has become a central one in the current programme of research on Tower' in Norwegian society. Gudmund Hernes and Johan P. Olsen are developing new approaches to the conceptualization of the multiplicity of channels of influence in the modern industrial state and have gathered a vast amount of fresh data for the testing of alternative models. Johan P. Olsen and his associates within this large-scale programme are applying elements of organization theory in an effort to explain variations in the degree of interpenetration between governmental agencies and organized social interests: which are the principal factors making for higher or lower likelihood of such interpenetration and what are the strategies open to interest organizations in their interaction with public power structures?²⁴ Gudmund Hernes and Ole Berrefjord are conducting a detailed inquiry into the linkages between business corporations, branch organizations and governmental agencies and have sketched the contours of a theory of sources of change in mixed 'market-command' economies.₂₅

5. Institutions of Government and Processes of Policy-Production

A crude map of the territory for disciplined political research may be generated
from two dimensions in an Easton-type model of a differentiated polity:

Most of the efforts within the empirical-statistical school of politics have focused on the feedback units: their economic, social and cultural situation, their opinions and attitudes, their alternatives of action and their actual decisions. A few studies have cut across several levels of the polity but have then restricted themselves to one single analytical task, say, the recruitment of incumbents to higher-level roles, or the interlinkages among units and across levels through cross-cutting careers and through role cumulations. In Norway, such studies can clearly be multiplied in many directions and will no doubt contribute significantly to our knowledge and understanding of processes of change in the polity from one phase of nation-building to another. Analyses of such unit statistics will add precision and depth to the uncertain impressions of the traditional historians, technically unable as they have been to master the vast masses of potentially important data. But purely statistical studies of recruitment channels and career stages are not likely to pay off intellectually before they are built into a wider framework of research on the structural contexts, the norms of procedure and the strategies of decisionmaking in conflicts among units at different levels of the system. Historians have made great contributions to our knowledge and our intuitive understanding of the processes of change in the building of the Norwegian polity but have felt under less obligation to systematize their findings and to check through the consistency of their modes of reasoning. They have been fascinated by concrete sequences of decisions and have developed their conceptualizations ad hoc. To make progress toward the systematic study of national political development it will be essential to develop a mixed strategy. Efforts must continue toward fuller technical and analytical control of the data masses but the procedures of interpretation must be subjected to detailed scrutiny through the accumulation of contextual knowledge and through the development of theoretically grounded models applicable across a wide range of concrete situations.²⁶

The extensive studies by Aubert and Torgersen of the recruitment of elite personnel in Norway exemplify possible approaches to such a mixed strategy. They have both accumulated large masses of unit statistics but their essential concern has been to fit their numerical findings into broader theoretical interpretations of the characteristic trends of development in Norway.

Another outstanding example of 'cross-level' analysis is Knut Dahl Jacobsen's meticulous case study of the conflict between administration and Parliament over the organization of services for agriculture from 1874 to 1899 (C 611, 1964). The theme of the study is a standard subject of administrative history, the development of a distinct unit of the national bureaucracy, yet the unit is not studied in isolation but in the wider context of over-all changes in the balance of political forces and in cultural modes of interaction. The entire enterprise is designed not as a contribution to 'linear history' but as an attempt at the development of a model for research and potentially of a theory of the sources of variations in the strategies of bureaucratic units under changes in the levels of pressure from clients and alternative services. The study is of great potential value in the planning of comparative research on the functions of bureaucracies and representative organs in the process of nation-building and points to crucial issues in the study of the emerging nationstates

in the developing areas of the world.

Jacobsen's study suggests a cyclical movement of expansion, contraction and 'de-traction' in the growth of bureaucracies under the pressure of new demands from lower levels in the system: once new channels of influence and action have been institutionalized the leeway for administrative discretion increases and the chances for new disturbances decrease. Interestingly, this line of cyclical interpretation has recently also gained ground among professional historians. In a brilliant and provocative apergu of Norwegian history since 1814 Jens Arup Seip has suggested a three-stage dialectic: first nation-building under the aegis of a concerted body of appointed officials, next a sixty-year period of multi-party competition and mass mobilization, and finally a return to the rule of the central bureaucracy in the form of the 'one-party state' (C2l, 1963). This academic tour de force obviously did not pretend to be based on detailed research but it does suggest important tasks for longitudinal analysis. Seip has recently pursued his analyses in further depth in the first volume of an ambitious history of Norway since 1814.²⁷ Ulf Torgersen has on several occasions (C 21, 1964, C 341, 1968) pointed to the great flexibility of the Norwegian administrative elite, its capacity for survival. This is clearly a theme of great importance in the analysis of breaks in recruitment traditions: at which points in time were the sons of the 'official' families most likely to opt out of the normal careers and what were the typical alternatives? This is a central question in the study of the fate of the radical groups of the twenties and the 'domestication' of the Labour party.

However far social scientists plan to go in the production of time series analyses, our knowledge and understanding of the processes of national development will essentially reflect the work of professional historians. This is not the place for a detailed review of historical research on facets of nation-building in Norway; we shall confine our attention to a few outstanding examples of analyses and interpretations of immediate interest to the student of politics.

The most important historical contribution to the study of central institutions of the Norwegian polity was no doubt the four-volume history of the Storting published on the occasion of the sesquicentennial celebrations in 1964 (Kaartvedt C 321, 1964). The two first volumes, by Alf Kaartvedt and Rolf Danielsen, are at a high level of scholarship and represent admirable efforts at systematization. These are not 'linear histories', but rather the emphasis is on organizational structures and procedures, on the alternatives under consideration, and on the forces making for decisions in one or the other direction. Professional political scientists might in fact have produced volumes along much the same lines - less readable perhaps but with more detailed statistics. The third volume covers the period from 1906 and is at a distinctly lower level of scholarship; but given the very scanty production of historical monographs for this period this was perhaps only to be expected. The fourth volume is a grabbag of contributions and deserves little notice. Tertit Aasland's study of the legislative record of women members of the Storting is of considerable interest, however. This was one of the first explorations of legislative behaviour in Norway (cf. also Aasland C 321,1963).

Another early example of statistical research on the behaviour of Members of

the Storting was Ottar Hellevik's study of the use of the right to question cabinet ministers (C 321, 1965). A great broadening of this field of study took place in the late sixties. Ottar Dahl and his colleagues in Oslo built up a complete file of roll call data for the 1860s onwards and applied various techniques of cluster analysis to identify groupings within and across the parties (Dahl, C 321, 1971 and 1976; cf. Støten, C 321, 1966). The Swedish political scientist Bo Bjurulf has created similar files for the other Nordic countries and has published comparative analyses of these data with Ingemar Glans.²⁸ These files of roll call data will soon be linked up with a large archive of biographical data on Members of Parliament, Cabinet Ministers and Secretaries of State. This archive covers the entire period from 1814 to the present and has already provided the basis for a series of publications, the most interesting of which are no doubt those by Kjell Eliassen and Mogens Pedersen (C 320, 1973). The archive was originally established under the joint programme of electoral research at the Michelsen Institute but is now part of the offerings of the Norwegian Data Services. Kjell Eliassen has recently produced a useful handbook for users of this archive.²⁹

Members of the Storting have often been the targets of bothersome social scientists eager to interview them about their experiences and their views. Fortunately for the reputation of the discipline, at least two of these interviewing operations have provided the basis for high-quality research. Ottar Hellevik's volume on the Storting as an elite body (C 321, 1969) offers a well-organized collection of useful information. Gudmund Hernes's thesis³⁰ represents a distinctive innovation in the study of legislative bargaining behaviour; he demonstrates the great potentialities of Coleman-type procedures in the analysis of resource aggregations and coalition strategies. Some of the models first developed in this study will be tested on a broader range of materials in the Tower' study (Hernes, D 10, 1973). In fact, the M.P.s interviewed in 1966 are currently being approached for a second round: this should create an ever richer data base for the analysis of conflicts and coalitions at the legislative level.

The volumes on the Storting deal in some detail with the legislative-executive balance but obviously say very little about the actual procedures of the Cabinet. A well-informed overview of recent developments in the relationships between the two branches of government has been presented by Stavang (C 341, 1964). A penetrating analysis of the juridical intricacies of the various forms of delegation of legislative authority has been given by Opsahl (C 321, 1965). A useful rundown of information about the organization and the routine operations of the Cabinet is found in a volume by a former official of that organ K. Bloch (C 311, 1963). The Cabinet and the Prime Minister's office are obvious targets of study in the programme of Tower' research. There are well-known difficulties of access to information but data on the allocation of time by various actors in this arena are being collected! Hardly any serious research has as yet been carried out on Cabinet-level coalitions in Norway. Data on the composition of the few extant coalitions have been incorporated in a number of cross-national files but Norwegian political scientists have not yet been able to contribute to this important fields of research.³¹

A history of the central administration is nearing completion. Jacobsen has analyzed the crucial changes under the impact of democratization in the second half of the 19th century, while Johan P. Olsen has organized a series of studies of the central apparatus of the State within the Tower' programme.³² Olsen has been a pioneer in the use of the tools of organization theory in the study of administrative decision-making and implementation. He has studied local budget-making (C 10, 1972) and the structuring of universities (C 10, 1971 and 1972) and he is currently engaged in a series of investigations of the linkages among the administrative apparatus, the network of interest organizations and the various agencies of the electoral-legislative channel.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic service have been subjected to detailed research at the Oslo Institute for Peace Research (Galtung & Ruge, C 621, 1965; Ruge, C 611, 1965; Hveem, E 23, 1972). A variety of studies of influences on foreign policy have been undertaken within the peace research group as well as within the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Polhøgda Foundation. Kjell Skjelsbæk has followed up ideas originally formulated by Johan Galtung in a series of studies of voluntary organizations at the international level (Judge and Skjelsbæk, E l, 1973; Skjelsbæk, E l, 1973): parallel studies have been pursued at the Nordic level by Abraham Hallenstvedt and Aira Kalela, Jaakko Kalela and Raimo Lintonen in Finland (A 1, 1975). Within the 'Power' programme a series of studies of policy response to the multinational corporations have been carried out by Helga Hernes (E 21, 1973) and Harald Knudsen. Olav Knudsen has made a major contribution to the study of the role of the shipping interests in Norwegian foreign policy (E 21, 1972) and Finn Sollie and his associates at the Polhøgda Foundation have opened up a field of very immediate concern in the current geopolitical situation: the study of the politics of the ocean and the seabed (Sollie, E 24, 1974). The Norwegian Institute for Foreign Affairs has throughout the period been dominant in the fields of strategic analysis (Hoist, E 151, 1967) and European studies (Sæter, E 24, 1975).

In the study of domestic politics we can also register a marked increase over the years 1965-75 in the number of systematic studies of policy processes and policy outputs. Such inquiries have been pursued at all levels, local, provinicial, national.

An early study in the style of the American analyses of sources of variation in state budgets was Eldrid Nordbø's research on local service offerings in the social sector.³³ Francesco Kjellberg, Karl-Erik Brofoss and Tore Hansen have done pioneering work on municipal budgets³⁴ and the Norwegian Social Science Data Service has built up a large file of information commune by commune on rates of taxation and types of expenditure. A first historical study of changes in policy outputs at the local level was recently completed by Terje Sande: this focuses on a period of explosive growth in communal activity, the period from 1913 to 1923. Sande has cooperated with the American scholar Richard Hofferbert on a cross-national study of time-series data for local- and provincial-level expenditures and has tried to develop a set of models for the explanation of changes in the steps of incrementation in the allocation process.³⁵

Ulf Torgersen has pioneered another type of policy study within specific urban settings. He and his collaborator Lars Gulbrandsen have been engaged for some time in a study of policies of public housing and their consequences for the behaviour of different categories of clients (Gulbrandsen and Torgersen, D 31, 1974).

Parallel studies of decision-making at the intermediary level of territorial organization, the fylke, have been undertaken by Harald Baldersheim (C 71, 1972, 1975), Per Stava (C6ll, 1973) and Torodd Strand (C 610, 1975).³⁶ This is a field of great importance. The decision to introduce direct elections to the fy Ikesting and to build up stronger administrative units at this level is bound to add to the strains between centre and periphery in the Norwegian system and will also have consequences for the recruitment and the careers of party activists.

Another set of agencies likely to be the targets of thorough inquiries in the future are those of the Social Security Administration. Else Øyen has carried out a pioneering study of the implementation of welfare measures (C 51, 1974) and Jon Eivind Kolberg (C 51, 1974) has reviewed data in the NSD archive on variations in social security payments across regions and types of communes.³⁷ The remarkable acceleration of social security budgets in recent years clearly argues for a greater concentration of research efforts in this field.

Only a handful of attempts have thus far been made to subject policy-making processes at the national level to systematic scrutiny. Alf-Inge Jansen has carried out an initial study of steps in the formulation of science policies, mainly within the Research Councils. Per Arnt Pettersen has written a thesis on factors affecting decisions on labour market policy³⁸ and Odd Handegaard has been looking into the complex processes of bargaining characterizing policymaking in the fishery sector of the economy.³⁹

Aubert's pioneering studies in the sociology of law have stimulated a great deal of interest in the role of the judiciary in Norwegian politics. Aubert has shown how content analyses of court decisions can contribute to our understanding of the politics of the courts. Torgersen (C 331, 1963) has concentrated on the politics of recruitment and has given us an illuminating comparison of the Supreme Courts in Norway and the U.S. In the mid-sixties, the historian Jens Arup Seip opened up a fascinating discussion with the jurist Andenæs over the political role of the Norwegian judiciary (C 331, 1964, 1965). This controversy offered excellent examples of the importance of explicitly generated conceptual models in the conduct of concrete inquiries.

The Cabinet crisis in the summer of 1963 prompted a great deal of acute discussion of constitutional issues but no systematic reinterpretation of the political functions of the Basic Law of 17 May 1814. The most comprehensive attempts at an evaluation of developments in constitutional law is still the one due to Torstein Eckhoff (C 21, 1964).

There is still no adequate academic presentation of the essentials of Norwegian political institutions. The American political scientist Storing prepared a handy little textbook in the early sixties but this is very traditional in its approach and will have to be rewritten in the light of the detailed research under way. Leiv

Mjeldheim's textbook is much better and ought to be translated (C 21, 1969). Ulf Torgersen has published the first version of what promises to become a useful compendium for students (C2l, 1964). One of the leaders in the comparative politics movement, Harry Eckstein, brought the Norwegian system into the focus of current debate by producing a 'theoretical case study' of the interaction of forces making for conflict and forces making for cohesion and identity (C 21, 1966). Eckstein's provocative interpretation was largely based on the findings on cleavage configurations reported on within the Norwegian programme of electoral research. The main thrust of his arguments was that cleavages need not find expression in overt and acute conflict as long as they are contained within an overarching system of norms. To Norwegians, some of his arguments seemed too obvious to be worth explicit statement but within a broader comparative perspective they certainly made sense: try to compare the norms of conflict management in Norway with those prevailing in Ulster, in Lebanon or in Uganda!

6. Comparative Cross-National Research

All political research proceeds by comparisons: comparisons over time, comparisons of the characteristics and behaviour of actors and collectivities, comparisons of localities, comparisons of total political systems. Whatever the method, any systematic treatment of politics must resort to comparative analysis. It has been stated that 'structural-functional analysis' is simply another term for 'sociological analysis'; it might be said with equal justification that 'comparative polities' is just another term for 'political science'. This is true up to a point but there is nevertheless a distinction. The expanding comparative politics movement has brought into analytical focus a broader range of units than was usual in earlier treatments. Traditional political analysis tended to stick to the one nation or to the one cultural area: the cross-system comparisons rarely went beyond simple juxtapositions. The comparative politics movement of the fifties was vastly more ambitious: its professed aim was systematic analysis across all extant units of territorial government. The much-discussed Almond-Pye Committee of the American Social Science Research Council proposed a series of universal models for the comparative analysis of processes of political 'modernization'. These were not restricted to any one area of the world but were designed as paradigms for research across any set of systems. The corresponding efforts of data organization pioneered by Karl Deutsch and his partners were equally global in scope. The expanding files that provided the basis for the two editions of the World Handbook cut across all units of government and assumed that comparisons would make sense across all the culturally distinctive areas of the world.

This energetic thrust toward world coverage boomeranged during the late sixties as more and more scholars rejected the notion of global modernization and found the proposed paradigms inherently ethnocentric. But this rejection of global paradigms did not push the movement back to square one. The sixties and seventies saw a great surge of interest in region-specific comparisons: comparisons within culturally distinctive areas of the world. Stein Rokkan termed this a

strategy of 'reculer pour mieux sauter¹ (Rokkan, Sælen, Warmbrunn, A 4, 1971). The movement should promote detailed, contextually grounded comparisons region by region before proceeding to develop paradigms for global analysis. In fact, the seventies was to see a distinctive upsurge of Europe-centred comparative research, in some cases covering all of Europe, in others Western Europe only or even smaller areas such as the Nordic countries. The European Consortium for Political Research contributed decisively to this upsurge, encouraging more and more younger scholars to become interested in comparing findings across neighbouring countries and to reflect on possible models for the explanation of similarities or contrasts.

Norwegian political sociologists and political scientists took an active part both in the early and in the later phases of this movement. Johan Galtung and his colleagues at the Institute of Peace Research were enthustiastic 'globalizers' and brought together information on the entire range of territories across the world. Nils-Petter Gleditsch in fact produced a Norwegian equivalent of the World Handbook (A 4, 1970). The group was heavily involved in comparative survey research and took a lead in the organization of a co-operative project across Eastern and Western Europe under the auspices of the ISSC Centre in Vienna.⁴⁰

The group of election analysts in Oslo and Bergen also did their best to advance comparative analysis, not only at the concrete level of survey findings (Campbell & Valen, D 20, 1961; Rokkan & Campbell, D 340, 1960) but also at the level of model development and theory construction (Lipset & Rokkan, D 20, 1967; Rokkan, Verba, Viet, Almasy, A2, 1969: Rokkan, D 10, 1970). The Michelsen Institute in Bergen played an important role in this movement. The economist Just Faaland was among the leaders in the organization of a comparative study of the formation of economic policy in nine countries of the West and enlisted the co-operation of political scientists in this enterprise (C 51, 1964). The Institute also served as the secretariat of the International Committee on Political Sociology (Allardt & Rokkan, D 30, 1970) and in 1971 became the headquarters of one of the agencies of the European Consortium for Political Research: the Data Information Service. This Service has not only served as a clearing house for information about research activities in the different countries of Western Europe but has also taken direct steps toward organizing data files for comparative analysis. The Service has been particularly active in the promotion of teaching packages for training in cross-national analysis. One of the current projects calls for the production of a workbook and a corresponding data set for 'comparative analyses of centre-periphery structures' in Europe. The Service has also taken a lead in co-ordinating efforts to establish files of time series data for Western Europe. In this field the Bergen group has worked closely with the HIWED project directed by Peter Flora at Mannheim (now at Cologne).41 The Bergen group has also been active in developing a facility for computer cartography of regional variations within Europe⁴² and hopes to build up, on this basis, a network of contributors to a joint data bank for studies of centre-periphery contrasts in Europe.

Comparative research at the Nordic level has been heavily influenced by the model

proposed by Erik Allardt in launching his four-country survey of dimensions of welfare (B 20, 1975). Norwegian political scientists have been less active at this level of synchronic analysis but have concentrated on diachronic inquiries, on the macro-sociology of developments over longer spans of time. In this field a number of significant contributions have been made over the last fifteen years. Stein Rokkan has developed a series of models for the explanation of historical contrasts in the structuring of political systems in Western Europe (C 22, 1971, 1975; Al, 1973). Derek Urwin⁴³ and Øyvind Østerud⁴⁴ have done extensive work on agrarian structures and their consequences for political developments, whereas William Lafferty has carried out corresponding research on comparative industrial developments. Stein Kuhnle has not only collected a variety of time series statistics for indicators of inequality in the Nordic countries but has also collaborated with Peter Flora and his group on the comparative analysis of conditions making for early or late adoption of different types of welfare legislation.⁴⁵ Kjell Eliassen and Lars Svåsand are actively engaged in comparative research on the formation of different types of popular movements and political parties in Western Europe (D 10, 1975), Torodd Strand has compared regional policy outputs in Norway vs. Sweden,⁴⁶ and-the entire Bergen group is currently about to throw itself into yet another cross-national venture: a study of territorial tensions and ethnic contrasts within the nation-states of Western Europe. Whatever the quality of these multifarious ventures, there can be little doubt about the vitality of the comparative politics movement in Norway. There is no turning back to a strictly 'national' political science. The discipline can no longer be kept within the bounds of the one nation-state.

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NOTES

1. Accounts of Nordic research on international relations has regularly been given in the bi-annual journal Co-operation and Conflict. An early review of Norwegian studies was given by Nils Ørvik in Vol. I, No. 1, pp. 79-84. This was later expanded into a booklength bibliography of the literature on foreign policy from 1905 to 1965 (Ørvik, A2, 1968). The activities of the Nordic institutions active in international relations through 1965 were described by two official committees: Nordisk Udvalg vedr. forskning af international politik. Forskning af international politik. Stockholm, April 1965, 99 pp. (Nordisk udredningsserie 1965:4); Fredsforskningsutredningen. Internationellt fredsforskningsinstitut l Sverige, Stockholm, Norstedt och Soner, 1966, 61 pp. (Statens off. utredningar, 1966:5). The Nordic Cooperation Committee on International Politics, a body set up by the Nordic Council to promote co-operation in the fields of international relations and peace research, issues a quarterly Newsletter which provides details of a variety of research projects in the five countries. The activities of the Oslo Institute for Peace Research are reflected in its quarterly Journal of Peace Research.

2. Stein Rokkan and Henry Valen, 'Parties, Elections and Political Behaviour in the Northern Countries: A Review of Research', and Jan-Magnus Jansson, 'Der Staatsapparat als Gegenstand der politischen Wissenschaft in den nordischen Låndern', respectively pp. 103-136 and 137-151, with a bibliography pp. 237-249 in O. Stammer (ed.), Politische Forschung (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1960).

3. For details on this organization see S. Rokkan and B. Henrichsen, 'Building Infrastructures for Social Science Research', Research in Norway 1976, pp. 11-15

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4. See Kjell A. Eliassen with Jarle Brosveet, Politikerarkivet (Bergen: NSD, 1977).

5. For further developments, see the recent volume by James March and Johan P. Olsen, Ambiguity and Choice in Organizations (Bergen & Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976).

6. Of particular importance in this context was the project on Historical Indicators of Western European Democracies organized by the German sociologist Peter Flora. See European Political Data, No. 19, June 1976.

7. The parallels between this model-building effort and those of such 'macro-historians' as Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein were discussed in some detail in October, 1976, at a Seminar at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio. Stein Rokkan's paper for this Seminar, 'A Geoeconomic-Geopolitical Model of Sources of Variations Across the Territories of Western Europe', will have to go through several further stages of revision before it is published.

8. Øyvind Østerud, Agrarian Structure and Peasant Politics in Scandinavia (London: Ph.D. diss. LSE, 1974) Universitetsforlaget, Oslo 1978; cf. also Østerud D13, 1976.

9. See especially Nytt syn på økonomisk historie (Oslo: Pax 1971).

10. G. Hernes, 'The Logic of Functional Analysis', Bergen, Institute of Sociology 1971, mimeo; 'Structural Change in Social Processes', Arner. J. Social. 82(3) Nov. 1976: 513-547.

11. Andreas M. Hansen, Norsk folkepsykologi (Kristiania: Dybwad, 1899). This early study of regional contrasts in political culture was followed up in the 1950s by the historian Gabriel Øidne: 'Litt om motsetninga mellom Austlandet og Vestlandet' ('On the Contrast between the East and the West in Norway'), Syn og Segn, 63(3) 1957: 97-114.

12. See S. Cowart, Gallup Data. Codebook to Repeated Questions 1964-73. (Oslo: NSD 1974); a summary will be found in Eur. Pol. Data 13, Dec. 1974. A more extensive codebook with the text of original questions in Norwegian will be issued by the NSD during 1978.

13. A good example of this type of analysis is Sverre Brua-Gulbrandsen 'Hjemmebrenning i Norge', Tss. for Samfunnsforskning 6 (1), 1965: 1-30.

14. Frank H. Aarebrot, Political Mobilization in Norway 1876-1897 (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, 1976).

15. Sten Sparre Nilson, Politisk avstand ved folkeavstemninger (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1972).

16. Terje Sande, A Decade of Local Government Boom: Norway 1913-1923 (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, 1976).

17. S. Rokkan and P. Torsvik, 'Der Wåhler, der Leser and die Parteipresse' Kdlner Zeitschr. f fir Soziol. (2) 1960, 278-301; English version in Citizens, Elections, Parties (D 10, 1970). For further details see Per Torsvik, 'Massemedia', Det norske samfunnet (Ramsøy and Ramsøy & Vaa, C2l, 1968 and 1975).

18. Leiv Mjeldheim, Organisasjon, nominasjon og interesseaggregering: Ein studie av Venstre i landskrinsane, 1906-1918 (Bergen: Institute of History, mimeo, 1973).

19. Tertit Aasland, Fra Landmannsorganisasjon til Bondeparti (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974).

20. Jan Petter Myklebust, Hvem var de norske nazistene? Sammenheng mellom sosial, konomisk og politisk bakgrunn og medlemskap i Nasjonal Samling (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, 1974). Stein Ugelvik Larsen is currently collaborating with Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust in the editing of a major collective volume on the recruitment of members and leaders of Nazi movements in Europe.

21. Arnold J. Heidenheimer and Frank C. Langdon, Business Associations and the Financing of Political Parties (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968).

22. Rokkan's model of the two 'tiers' has provided the basis for an interesting critique of his scheme for the explanation of variations in the structure of party systems: Robert R. Alford & Roger Friedland, 'Nations, Parties and Participation: a Critique of Political Sociology', Theory and Society 1, Fall 1975: 307-28; cf. Robert R. Alford, 'Paradigms of Relations Between State and Society', pp. 145-160 in Leon Lindberg et al. (eds.), Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, Mass.: Heath & Co., 1975).

23. J. Moren (ed.), Den kollegiale forvaltning (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974).

24. See Johan P. Olsen, 'Organizational Participation in Government', Institute of Sociology, University of Bergen, 1976, draft, mimeo.

25. See preliminary report Ole Berrefjord and Gudmund Hernes, 'Markedsforvitring og statsbygging. Synspunkter på storforetaksundersøkelsen', Sosialøkonomen 1975(7): 3-16.

26. For a discussion of the tensions between historians and model-building social scientists, see the contributions by Jens Arup Seip and Stein Rokkan to the collection Periferi og sentrum i historieforskningen (DlO, 1975).

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27. J. A. Seip, Utsikt over Norges historie (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1974).

28. Bo Bjurulf, A Dynamic Analysis of Scandinavian Roll-Call Behavior (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1974); also Bo Bjurulf and Ingemar Glans, Från tvåblocksystem til fraktionalisering. Partigruppers og ledamoters rostningsmonster i norska Stortinget 1969-74 (Lund: Institute of Political Science, 1976).

29. Kjell A. Eliassen with Jarle Brosveet, Politikerarkivet 1814-1976. Problemstillinger og analyseforslag (Bergen: NSD, 1977).

30. Interest, Influence and Cooperation. A Study of the Norwegian Parliament (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Ph.D. diss. 1971), cf. C321, 1973 and D3O, 1974.

31. Norway figures prominently in such analyses as Eric Browne's Coalition Theories (London: Sage, 1973), Abraham de Swaan's Coalition Theories and Cabinet Formation (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1973), and Lawrence C. Dodd's Coalitions in Parliamentary Government (Princeton University Press, 1976). For an explicit discussion by an American political scientist, see Sven Groennings (D2l, 1962) and 'Patterns, Strategies and Payoffs in Norwegian Coalition Formation' in S. Groennings, E. W. Kelley and M. Leiserson, The Study of Coalition Behavior (New York: Holt, 1970).

32. Morten Egeberg, Johan P. Olsen and Harald Sætren, 'Organisasjonssamfunnet og den segmenterte stat', Kirke og Kultur Del I, 1975 (5): 257-272. Del 11, 1975 (6): 368-378.

33. Eldrid Nordbø, Kommitnenes ytelser i sosialsektoren, Institute of Political Science, Oslo, 1967, mimeo.

34. See Andrew Cowart, Tore Hansen, and Karl-Erik Brofoss 'Budgetary Strategies and Success at Multiple Decision Levels in the Norwegian Urban Setting', Amer. Pol. Sci. Rev. 69 (2) June, 1975: 543-558, Francesco Kjellberg and Tore Hansen, 'Municipal Expenditures in Norway: Autonomy and Constraints in Local Government Activity', Policy and Politics 4, 1976: 25-50.

35. See the reference in footnote 16 above, and Richard Hofferbert et. al., Financing Education in Federal Systems, Project Papers, Center for Social Analysis, State University of New York at Binghampton, 1977, mimeo.

36. Torodd Strand, Geographic Policies: A Comparative Study of Norway and Sweden (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, 1976).

37. Cf. also his contribution to the series of reports on the 'Conditions of Living' survey: J. E. Kolberg, N. Kildal and A. Viken, Uførepensjon og samfunnsstruktur (Disability Pensioning and Social Structure) (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1977) (NOU 1977:2).

38. P. A. Pettersen, Næringer, arbeidsmarked og sysselsettingspolitikk: sosial og geografisk omfordeling av arbeidskraft (Economic Sectors, Labour Market and Employment Policy: Social and Geographic Redeployment of labour) (Oslo: Institute for Social Research, 1975).

39. Odd Handegaard, Administrasjon og klienter, unpublished thesis, University of Oslo 1967.

40. H. Ornauer, H. Wiberg, A. Sicinski and Johan Galtung (eds.), Images of the World in the Year 2000 (The Hague: Mouton, 1976); cf. also the contributions to A. Szalai, R. Petrella, S. Rokkan and E. K. Scheuch (eds.), Cross-National Comparative Survey Research (London: Pergamon, 1977).

41. See Stein Kuhnle, Social Inequality in the Nordic Countries 1859-1970. A Data Report (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, Sept. 1976).

42. See the report by Jens Lorentzen and Stein Rokkan in Eur. Pol. Data 19, 1976.

43. Derek W. Urwin, From Ploughshare to Ballot Box: The Politics of Agrarian Defence in Europe (Bergen: Institute of Sociology, 1973).

44. See note 8 above.

45. See Stein Kuhnle, 'Political and socio-economic conditions for the early development of social policy legislation: a comparison of Denmark, Norway and Sweden', Paper, IPSA World Congress, Edinburgh, 1976.

46. See note 36 above.