After the optimism following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world
has seen more of a democratic backlash. But despite the backlashes,
in some societies the stability of democracy does not seem to be
threatened. Why is this so? One common answer points to civic
culture, a shared feeling of responsibility for the common fate of
citizens. An alternative, to be explored in this volume, is that
the stability of democratic rule is anchored in its integration in
the large set of social institutions with both direct and indirect
relationship to politics. These are linked to, give input to and
are affected by democratic processes. Where these relations are
ubiquitous and strong, democracy is stable. At the same time,
institutions are slowly but constantly changing. Hence, in order to
understand changes in the functioning of democracy at the level of
the state, it is necessary to explore the changes in surrounding
institutions and the way they shape a democratic society. The
empirical focus of the book is institutional change in the Nordic
model, with special emphasis on Norway. There are many reasons to
pay closer attention to the Nordic, and Norwegian, case when it
comes to analyses of changes in the functioning of democracy. On a
par with the other Scandinavian countries, Norway is in the
forefront in the world in the quality of democratic governance, as
well as social trust and quality of life. As an extreme case, the
most corporatist society within the family of the "Nordic Model",
Norwegian society offers an opportunity both for intriguing case
studies and for challenging and refining existing theory on
processes of institutional change. From a theoretical perspective
this invites reflections which, to some extent, are at odds with
the dominant conceptions of institutional change. Neither models of
path dependency nor models of aggregate, incremental change focus
on the continuous social bargaining over institutional change.
Despite recent processes of differentiation and liberalization,
common to the Western world as a whole, corporatism implies a close
connection between state, economy, public sphere, cultural life,
and knowledge production. This also means that institutions are
intimately bundled, in a stronger, subtler and more wide-reaching
way than typically assumed in the literature on varieties of
capitalism. The volume draws on, but transcends, two prominent
theoretical strands: the civil society perspective (a locus
classicus being Cohen and Arato 1992), and the more recent work on
well-functioning civil service as a precondition for good
governance (Rothstein 2011) pointing out the "road to Denmark",
(Fukuyama 2014). By embracing more social fields than these two
approaches, the institutional approach opens a broader space for
democratic reflection. Moreover, institutional-historical case
studies situated within Nordic societies as a specific social
structural framework, demonstrate the diversity of links between
democracy and social life outside of politics in a narrow sense,
such as: * Policies of citizenship as a limitation to democracy *
Democracy in working life * Democracy and policies of gender
relations * Expertise and democratic governance * Social elites - a
threat to democracy? * Welfare state institutions as core elements
in modern democracy * Institutional perspectives on the emergence
of capitalism and democracy A detailed outline of contents and
contributors is attached. The book rests on and further develops
the former two volumes on institutional change. The first volume is
centered on corporatist institutions, with emphasis on negotiations
by civil society actors in interplay with the state. Concentrated
on the public sphere, the second volume sought to locate processes
of social deliberation within the contexts of a public sphere that
embraces not only the media, but also fields such as voluntary
associations, the arts, and religion. This third volume synthesizes
these contributions by bringing them explicitly into the realm of
democracy, without mainly focusing on the political institutions as
such, but on the surrounding infrastructure.
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