Content area
Full Text
Challenges to Political Parties: The Case of Norway. Edited by Kaare Strom and Lars Svasand. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 408p. $49.50.
Hanne Marthe Narud, Institute for Social Research, Oslo
The central questions of this interesting and rather extensive book relate to the challenges facing political parties in a new society: Are political parties still the most important political organizations in modern politics? Or are they, at the end of the twentieth century, powerless or intellectually bankrupt? The questions are analyzed in the context of a small European nation, Norway. Through 15 chapters, written by scholars who have dedicated much of their previous work to Norwegian politics, the issue of party decline is analyzed from a number of different angles.
The analytical framework adopted by the editors is drawn from the rational choice tradition and the literature on neoinstitutional economics. The central thesis is that parties form and survive because some set of political actors (MPs, party activists, candidates, or voters) finds them useful for its own purposes; when parties can no longer fulfill these purposes, they will decline. This general assumption is narrowed down to three aspects of party life: The legislative party (in government), the extraparliamentary party (as an organization designed to contest elections), and the electoral party (as a collection of voters, members, and activists). The question is then how well the party performs in these three...