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Party Decline and the Madisonian Turn in Scandinavia

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Party Decline and the Madisonian Turn in Scandinavia PARTY DECLINE AND THE MADISONIAN TURN IN SCANDINAVIA Kaare Wallace Strøm Distinguished Professor Department of Political Science University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0521 USA Prepared for presentation at the conference on “Polarization, institutional design and the future of representative democracy,” in Berlin, October 7-9, 2017. I am grateful to Torbjörn Bergman, Wolfgang C. Müller, Knut Heidar, Jan Erik Grindheim, and the late Hanne Marthe Narud for their contributions to the research on which this paper is based. 1 Scandinavians: The Almost Nearly Perfect People On the surface, there seems to be little reason to worry about the fate of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region.1 On the basis of its socio-cultural characteristics, Denmark has been designated as the “happiest country in the world,” and Norway has repeatedly scored tops in the United Nation’s index of human development. Sweden has been characterized as the most peaceful country in the world. None of the other Nordic countries is far behind on any of these measures. And the Scandinavian countries are commonly praised for their “kinder and gentler” features such as relative income equality and the virtual elimination of extreme poverty. Politically, this has been manifested as a system of strong executives, based on a pragmatic form of parliamentary democracy, and cohesive mass parties. Constitutionally, the Nordic countries are parliamentary democracies, which rely on extensive delegation of power from the legislative to the cabinet and the rest of the executive branch. Political parties facilitate such delegation by securing stable parliamentary support. In order for parliaments to delegate successfully to the political executive, political parties thus have to be cohesive and effective. One of the payoffs to politicians willing to submit to party discipline is a high “partyness” in the executive branch. Top executive offices are controlled and filled by partisan politicians. And the parties strictly control ballot access in parliamentary elections. Under such conditions, strong parties sustain orderly parliaments and stable executives. Parties often protect their electoral stability by acting on the interests of broad and well-defined social constituencies, and this has certainly traditionally been the case in the Nordic countries. In 1884, Norway became the first Scandinavian country to embrace parliamentary democracy. Sustained by a two-party system that first emerged in the 1880s and subsequently expanded, the cabinet increasingly came to dominate national policy-making. This was especially true after World War II, when the parliamentary majority appeared willing to delegate itself into oblivion. Thus in 1959, at the height of his party’s predominance, the Labor Party’s parliamentary leader Nils Hønsvald proclaimed that parliamentary control of the executive had 1 Scandinavia derives its name from the Scandian peninsula (as represented by the Swedish province of Skåne) and refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Technically, the Nordic region also includes Finland, Iceland, and the Danish dependencies in the North Atlantic. My analysis here will refer mainly to the Scandinavian countries but will use the two terms somewhat more freely and interchangeably. 2 effectively been transferred from the floor of Parliament to the internal organs of his party. Party government had eclipsed parliamentary deliberation. Around 1960 Norway had thus reached a constitutional form that, apart from some party fragmentation on the centre-right caused by proportional representation, looked much like a Westminster system. Much the same could be said of the other Scandinavian countries. Even in such entrenched and secure parliamentary democracies as the Nordics, citizens and observers have increasingly voiced concerns about the future of their democratic institutions. And even established parliamentary systems are not inoculated against popular protest and disenchantment. When parties are not able to perform the functions that have traditionally been expected of them, parliamentary government may mean “surviving without governing” (Di Palma 1977). Occasionally, such systems do not even survive, as evidenced by the French Fourth Republic in the 1950s or Italy in the 1990s. There are many possible indicators that parties may be struggling to perform the functions expected of them in parliamentary systems. One is a rise of parties that resist or reject such roles. Thus, the rise of populist protest parties is one such sign that has been no less dramatic in Scandinavia than in other European democracies. Moreover, established parties have atrophied as mass membership organizations and in their ability to mobilize voters. New parties have emerged which have a weaker social base and a much more tenuous commitment to the political order and especially its informal rules. This erosion of party strength has consequences for the performance of parliamentary institutions. The (perceived) distance of the political class from ordinary citizens has increased, as the mechanisms of political recruitment and accountability have withered. The response to these challenges in Scandinavia has been a Madisonian Turn. In macro- institutional terms, these countries have moved from relatively unconstrained and highly party- dominated Westminster democracies with proportional features towards a more Madisonian parliamentary model with more checks and balances and constitutional and non-partisan constraints on elected public officials. Yet, there is no challenge to parliamentary democracy as a regime type. In this paper, I shall discuss these changes and their consequences for the Scandinavian countries, with a particular focus on Norway. 3 Party Representation in Scandinavia The Nordic party systems were remarkably stable for much of the period from the 1930s to 1970s and in some countries well beyond that. Berglund and Lindström (1978) characterize these countries as having a five-party model, a pattern that long fit Sweden to a tee and most of the other countries relatively well (though Iceland least so). These party systems were dominated by a strong Social Democratic (or Labor) party, with a smaller and more doctrinaire socialist party to its left, and a bloc of three non-socialist parties to its right: a Conservative party, a Liberal party, and an Agrarian party.2 Only in Iceland did Liberals and Conservatives join to form the Independence Party. Over the years, several smaller types of parties have joined these “families,” such as Christian parties generally on the right-of-center side, and Green parties generally left-of-center. These parties generally and predictably formed two parliamentary blocs, known as socialists vs. non-socialists, or simply left vs. right. The socialist bloc was dominated by a large Social Democratic party, with a significantly smaller Communist or Left Socialist party on its left flank. The non-socialist bloc was in Norway and Sweden led by a Conservative Party (in Denmark since the 1990s by the Liberals), but this party’s dominance on the right was never as strong as that of the Social Democrats (in Norway, Labor) on the left. The two blocs were in turn quite evenly matched, though with the socialists slightly favored in most elections in the early postwar decades. Between the 1960s and the late 1990s, however, the blocs became more evenly balanced, and the parliamentary majority shifted back and forth between them. Party Decline: The Voters This picture has in recent years changed in two ways. One is the emergence of new parties, most notably populist right-of-center parties representing anti-immigration and often anti- establishment sentiments. The second and related development is the organizational and electoral decline of most of the parties that have dominated Scandinavian party politics, and especially the Social Democrats. There are clear indications that ordinary Scandinavian citizens are becoming less deferential toward parliamentarians and other politicians, even though levels 2 In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the Agrarian parties have since the 1950s been known as Center parties. 4 of system support remain high. Fewer voters identify with any political party, and this trend is most noticeable among younger and more educated voters. Concomitantly, electoral volatility has increased, and more voters make up their minds late in the election campaign or simply fail to vote at all. There are thus growing numbers of signs that voters are not well pleased. Hence, concerns have emerged about the decline of the entire system of cohesive mass parties that has supported Nordic parliamentary democracy. Turnout The first piece of this picture is the fact that parties have grown less successful in bringing the voters to the polls. Electoral turnout has been falling in the Nordic region since about the 1980s. This drop-off has been particularly dramatic in Finland and Norway, with Sweden not far behind. In the early 2000s, this decline seemed to level off (at least temporarily), but there has been no return to the high participation levels that used to characterize these countries. Turnout in Iceland has been more stable, though a modest downward trend was noticeable in the 1990s. Denmark is the only country in which electoral participation has remained relatively stable, but even here there has been some decline since the high point of the 1970s. These declines have happened even as Scandinavian electorates have grown more
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