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10. The Nordics: Demanding Citizens, Complex Polities
- University of Michigan Press
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356 10 ✦ The Nordics Demanding Citizens, Complex Polities T O R B J Ö R N B E R G M A N A N D K A A R E S T R Ø M On the surface, there seems to be little reason to worry about the fate of parliamentary democracy in Northern Europe or indeed anywhere else. Parliamentary government is the most common of all democratic regime types, at least in the sense that more people live under this form than under any other. Since World War II, parliamentary democracies have been remarkably stable, and they have won praise from many political scientists. By many accounts , parliamentary systems also constitute the most stable democratic regime type, and they are commonly praised for their “kinder and gentler” features such as relative income equality and the virtual elimination of extreme poverty under such regimes in Western Europe (Lijphart 1999; Linz 1994). Moreover, parliamentary systems seem less susceptible than other democracies to executive abuses of power. Thus, in Europe the most democratically deficient states (such as Belarus and Russia) tend to be among those whose constitutions deviate most from the parliamentary norm. Yet, even for parliamentary democracies, there are potential trouble spots to consider, and the skeptics are not necessarily confined to the paranoid and the perennial wolf-criers. One such curious and disconcerting fact is that, especially outside Europe, few of the new democracies that have emerged over the past 30 or 40 years have chosen the parliamentary model. As a proportion of all states, the share of parliamentary democracies has remained remarkably flat at just under 30 percent. In fact, there were proportionally more parliamentary democracies in the world in the 1950s (largely because most of Africa had not yet been decolonized) than there are today. Yet, the low rate at which parliamentary systems have since then been introduced and taken root is reflected most dramatically in the fact The Nordics ✦ 357 that as a proportion of all democracies, parliamentary regimes have fallen from about 70 percent in the 1970s to 45 percent in 2002 (Cheibub 2007). And in some ways, even established parliamentary systems do not seem to be inoculated against popular protest and disenchantment. Thus, the rise of radical populist protest parties has been especially dramatic in parliamentary systems, and such parties have taken a far larger share of the vote in some such regimes, such as Austria, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, than they have in most presidential regimes. Also, as we have seen, even in the most entrenched and secure parliamentary democracies, such as the Nordic countries, citizens and observers harbor concerns about the future of their democratic institutions. A cold wind—a Nordic chill—has swept over the region, manifest as a simultaneous decline of its particular mix of “working” (strong) parliaments and cohesive mass parties. In macroinstitutional terms, most of these countries have moved from relatively unconstrained Westminster democracies with proportional features toward a more Madisonian model of parliamentary democracy, with more checks and balances and constitutional constraints on elected public officials. Yet, there is no challenge to parliamentary democracy as a basic constitutional choice. And within these new parameters, the elected parliaments continue to function well. The downside, however, is to be found in the state of political parties, which have atrophied as mass membership organizations and in their ability to mobilize voters. This erosion of party strength has consequences for the status of parliamentary institutions as well. The distance of the political class from ordinary citizens has increased, as the mechanisms of political recruitment and accountability have withered. This picture becomes even more complex as we consider the intraregional differences, as the fate of parties and parliaments looks more diverse across the region than the conventional picture of Nordic homogeneity would suggest. In this chapter, we bring together the various pieces of the puzzle that the Nordic countries thus constitute. We begin by analyzing the effectiveness of parliamentary governance in contemporary Nordic politics. Next we turn to the evidence on the functions and health of Nordic political parties . And by bringing together these two critical aspects of representative democracy, we can then more fully capture the contemporary state of popular governance in the Nordic region. Three Transformations Before we can flesh out this picture, however, let us recall the societal transformations that parliamentary democracies face today (see chapter 1). We [18.232.88.17] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:52 GMT) 358 ✦ T H E M A...