Introduction

Electoral politics in Norway has changed. In the heyday of the Rokkan-Valen model of electoral behavior Norway was pictured as a country of cleavage-based politics and strong parties building on these cleavages (e.g. Rokkan and Valen 1964). In contrast to Sweden, which was dominated by class politics and left-right conflicts, cleavages in Norway were more varied and included class, religion, language, attitudes toward alcohol, and geography. In the latter category Stein Rokkan and Henry Valen (Rokkan 1970; Valen 1981) included both the main regions of Norway and center-periphery, often conceptualized as geographical distance to the capital and the dominant urban areas around Oslo. Center-periphery took on an additional significance in the two EU referendums of 1972 and 1994 as Norway became the only country to reject EU membership in a referendum – and did this twice. A broad interpretation is that Norway was not quite ready for Europe. The country is in the periphery of the continent, adding to and magnifying the effects of center-periphery conflicts within the country ( Jenssen et al. 1998). Moreover, one can also argue that the country historically is closer to Atlantic powers – Britain (also populated by EU skeptics) and the United States – than to the main countries on the continent.

It is possible to see the two referendums – and more the first than the second – as a revival of the traditional cleavage dynamics in Norwegian politics, bolstering the view that Norway is a peculiar case in Europe (Østerud 2005) which in this respect can be compared only to Switzerland (Sciarini and Listhaug 1997). However, with the partial exception of the EU referendums, the consensus of empirical scholarship points to a decline of the importance of center-periphery structures and traditional cleavages. Class structure is transformed and has lost much of its political potency (Ringdal and Hines 1995; Listhaug 1997) as workers, farmers, and fishermen have declined in numbers. Likewise, urbanization and population movements from north to south have denuded the periphery of political power. And the cultural cleavages are almost obsolete: Religion is declining as is Lutheran fundamentalism associated with the Christian People’s party. Language is no longer an important political conflict and the minority form of Norwegian language - ‘nynorsk’ - is on the losing end. Much the same, and even more strongly, can be said of the temperance movement.