Decision‐Making Involvement and Socioeconomic Resources in Norway: A Normative‐Empirical Analysis*

The relationship between socioeconomic resources and political participation has been the subject of considerable normative‐empirical debate. The present article addresses the problem on the basis of Norwegian survey data (N = 1,170) with the intent of testing both the resource‐involvement relationship and the possible consequences of value over‐representation among the most active citizens. The analysis of resource‐involvement dependency in relation to Robert Dahl's norm‐set for ‘non‐cumulative resource distributions' shows only two resources to be of potential difficulty for pluralist expectations: education and gender. Other expectations as to resource‐involvement inequality prove to be nonfounded for Norway. A further test of the consequences of pedagarchal and patriarchal over‐representation shows the former to imply a general ‘progressive’ bias in political values, while the latter has no clear‐cut ideological implications.