The Mobilization of the Periphery: Data on Turnout, Party Membership and Candidate Recruitment in Norway

We shall present and discuss in this paper a set of data on turnout, party membership and candidate recruitment in Norwey. Our approach is essentially ecological: we shall present our statistics by local administrative units and will be particularly concerned to highlight differences between the central, urbanized districts and the peripheral, sparsely populated districts. Our data were assembled within a programme of research on elections after World War II: the bulk of them came from the punched-card archives of commune data and candidate data set up jointly by the Chr. Michelsen Institute and the Institute for Social Research.1) Our perspective on these data is not limited to the post-war period, however. Our analysis experience soon prompted us to look back over a longer period of time and to interpret our findings in a developmental perspective. We chose as our points of departure the first elections after the introduction of universal suffrage: for elections for the Storting this was in 1900 for the men and in 1915 for the women, for local elections the crucial years were 1901 and 1910. These were indeed decisive events in the history of the nation: large sections of the adult population were for the first time given formal rights to take part in political decision-making and allowed to make their preferences count in moulding local and national policiy. Our concern is to gain insight into the implications for the polity of the entry of these new masses of citizens ihto the electoral contests. The first prerequisite in any such study is detailed information on the reactions of the last enfranchised: how much difference did suffrage make to them? how easily could they be persuaded to make use of their rights, to mobilize for joint action, to take a direct part in organizational work?