The nomination process has been called "the secret garden of politics"-- and for good reasons. The process by which candidates for election are being screened and selected is among the least understood and researched political phenomena, even though this process is so closely linked to the power structure within political parties. Nominations are mechanisms for selecting candidates, but also for holding the incumbent delegates responsible. In this book, nomination processes in four Nordic countries - Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway -- are analysed and evaluated as instruments of democracy. The authors compare institutions, procedures and unwritten norms. The book in particular addresses questions about the citizens' ability to influence the nomination processes. The process is not only modelled in traditional terms of representation, but also as a principal-agent relationship. Despite great institutional similarities, the nomination processes and their outcomes vary considerably across the four countries. In particular, significant differences are found with regard to the extent of citizen control. The book provides a first mapping of this central feature of Nordic politics and thus also serves the comparative purpose of differentiating between otherwise similar political systems.

Until the last quarter of the 20th Century, Western party systems appeared to be frozen and stability was generally taken to be the central characteristic of individual-level party choice. But during the 1970s and 1980s, in a spasm of change that appeared to occur in all countries, this ceased to be true. Voters in Western countries suddenly demonstrated an unexpected and increasing unpredictability in their choices between parties, often to the extent of voting for parties that are quite new to the political scene. Understanding these fundamental changes became a pressing concern for political scientists and commentators alike, and a matter of extensive controversy and debate. In the middle 1980s, an international team of leading scholars set out to explore the reasons for these shifts in voting patterns in sixteen western countries: all those of the (then) European Community (except for Luxembourg and Portugal), together with Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and the United States. In this book they report their findings regarding the connections between social divisions and party choice, and the manner in which these links had changed since the mid-1960s. The authors based their country studies on a common research design. By doing so, they were able to focus on the characteristics that the sixteen countries had in common so as to evaluate the extent to which the changes had a common source. The passage of time has not dated this book, and in this edition the original text is augmented by a new Preface that describes the ways in which the book's findings retain their relevance for contemporary scholarship, and by an Epilogue in which the main analyses reported in the book are brought up to date.